Rebirth of Wonky

Cristian Vogel has spent the best part of three decades refusing to sit still. Rebirth of Wonky is the Chilean-British producer’s 25th album and his first new music in four years, released on his own Endless Process imprint with mastering from Helmut Erler at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering. Across nine tracks and sixty-six minutes, it’s a record that claims techno’s lineage whilst cheerfully walking away from its club—experimental, IDM-leaning and gloriously strange.

The lockdown-era concept is worn on its sleeve. Opening track When You Can’t Go Clubbing Anymore and Have to Dance With Oaks is a thesis statement in its title alone: when the dancefloor closes, you improvise. Its eight and a half minutes unfold as a slow, patient immersion rather than a peak-time statement, deep widescreen pads hanging in space as percussion clicks and stutters around them. It sets the tone for an album that finds its momentum in atmosphere and surprise rather than four-to-the-floor propulsion.

And the textures are where Rebirth of Wonky lives. Vogel’s synthesisers sound warped, detuned and alive—notes bend, drones wobble and rhythms lurch in ways that recall his more outré nineties work. Pendula swings between near-ambient drift and clattering rhythmic bursts, whilst Acido Amigo wears its heritage proudly, a squelchy, off-kilter groove that feels like a love letter to the 303. Thuja, named for the tree, layers organ-like chords over granular shuffles—beautiful and unsettling in equal measure.

Elsewhere, The All Clear builds from a single hypnotic loop into something vast, and Ici le Fantôme C’est Moi (“here the ghost is me”) is the album’s most haunting moment, its spooked, decaying tones pointing back towards Vogel’s darker outings of old. What Goes Around Comes Around (2020) updates its original with a weary, cyclical tension, while closer New Born Wise ends the record in cautiously optimistic territory, light slowly breaking through the murk.

It’s little wonder Bandcamp Daily called this the year’s strangest and best techno album. Rebirth of Wonky isn’t an easy listen, and it isn’t trying to be—but for anyone who has spent a year away from the dancefloor, its restless, off-centre energy feels like exactly the right kind of homecoming. Vogel’s wonkiest record in years is also his most human.