Soft Waahls EP

Since his earliest releases on Hessle Audio — the label he co-founded alongside Ben UFO and Pearson Sound — Blawan has been one of UK techno’s most important producers. Soft Waahls EP is his ninth release on Ternesc, the Berlin imprint he launched to put out his own material, and it arrives as a self-released double EP following the acclaimed Woke Up Right Handed and Make A Goose from 2020. Where those records were studied and strange, this one feels looser, rawer and, for six tracks straight, resolutely floor-bound.

The record’s defining feature is the voice — Blawan’s own, recorded and mangled beyond recognition. Across the EP his treated vocals are chopped into wordless, guttural “wah” sounds, pitched up and down, spliced into micro-rhythms and sent through heavy delays until they function less as vocals and more as a percussive instrument in their own right. The title winks at exactly this: the soft, questioning sounds that give the record its character are turned into its lead.

Everything underneath is built for the floor. The kicks are blunt and forceful, the hats and claps dry and tightly packed, and the basslines dig deep without ever smothering the rhythm. Reverb is used sparingly, saved for the moments when it can open the sound up rather than decorate it — the work of a producer who plays his own records out and treats each track as a tool rather than a statement. Functional, but never anonymous.

Opener Justa sets the tone with a swinging, off-kilter groove and clipped vocal stabs that lock in around the four-to-the-floor pulse. The Sithe is the EP’s most spectral moment, its hazy, reverberant atmosphere giving the voice room to breathe, whilst Fizz City lives up to its name with carbonated, bubbling percussion and a bassline that flexes with real menace. Silver and Fourth Dimensional keep the pressure up with leaner arrangements, and closer Micro 8’s is the pick of the bunch — a raw, hypnotic loop in which the scrambled voice finally dissolves into pure texture.

With Soft Waahls, Blawan continues the most consistently interesting run of his career. It’s not a reinvention — the ingredients will be familiar to anyone who has followed Ternesc since the beginning — but the execution is so assured, so playful and so locked into the dancefloor that it hardly matters. Raw, vocal-scrambled and utterly direct, it’s a record that will do serious damage in the right room, and there’s real joy in that.