My Supernova by Wata Igarashi

For his first album on Dekmantel, Wata Igarashi draws from within to deliver a lightning bolt of immediate, immersive and impactful techno energy.

13 years since he first started making an impression on the deeper end of contemporary techno, Igarashi's new album finds him maximising the trademark tenets of his sound — tunnelling rhythms and psychoactive arpeggio sequences — with stunning results. He describes the album like an "explosion" in his head that demanded to be manifested as distinct tracks, plotted out with intention to make a cohesive front-to-back listening experience.

The dancefloor is more than present in the restless propulsion tracking through the album, and Igarashi road tested many of My Supernova's nine tracks throughout his full tilt gigging schedule over the past couple of years. But for all the physical thrust of the music, it's also crafted with the refined, subtle quality that marks Igarashi's work out in the bustling thrum of the modern techno scene.

It would have been easy to expect a mellower affair after 2023's Agartha on Kompakt — a wide-ranging LP that took in rock, jazz and ambient influences. Much of Igarashi's club output has equally been tipped towards dreamy strains of techno for labels like Midgar, The Bunker New York and Delsin, but here he channels that meditative sensibility into the wide-eyed, invigorating rush of 'Shockwave's lead synth buzz, 'Meltzone's nagging acid frenzy and 'Unleashed's delirious, pitch-bent peaks.

For Igarashi, it's a highly personal album — "a self-portrait of me in 2025," he says — that marks a distinct chapter since he moved to Amsterdam two years ago. The shift in his environment and lifestyle, not to mention the sharp uptick in his gigging schedule, all fed into his psyche as he was shaping out the direction My Supernova would take. It's his sincere response to his situation, quite different from the album he would have made if he still lived in Japan.

Precision honed and revelling in the hypnotic abandon of the loop, My Supernova is a techno album through and through, but it's also overflowing with the kind of head-melting creativity that Wata Igarashi has made his own. Just lose yourself in the giddy arps of 'Supernova' and marvel at the delicate madness of the melee he whips up — a joyous whirlpool of synths upon synths upon synths reaching fever pitch without even a hint of brute force.

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