John Tejada — Vienna-born, Los Angeles-based, and one of Kompakt’s most dependable purveyors of immaculate machine music since 2014’s Parabolas — returns to the Cologne institution this week with Abbot of Burton, the second single to be drawn from his fifth album for the label, Year Of The Living Dead, due later this month. It’s a relationship that has run through The Predicting Machine and beyond, records that have always sounded as good in the headphones as on a big rig, and this latest offering continues that lineage in typically understated fashion.
On paper the single is a simple proposition — one track, four and a half minutes, nowhere to hide — and Tejada uses the space wisely. Abbot of Burton is minimal techno stripped to its alien essentials: a dry, precise kick, hats that click rather than hiss, and a rubbery bassline that slinks around the groove as if testing its boundaries. The melody never quite arrives, or rather it arrives in fragments — short, disembodied synth phrases that hover at the edges of the mix like signals from somewhere far off, occasionally locking into a motif before dissolving back into the textures. It’s a characteristically lean production, every element pulling its weight, and the restraint is precisely what makes it so effective: on a club system, the space between the drums does the heavy lifting.
Abbot of Burton leads into John Tejada's album Year Of The Living Dead, due later this month on Kompakt.
That airless, faintly paranoid character makes the title of the parent album feel apt: Year Of The Living Dead nods to Romero’s horror classic, and on this evidence Tejada is channelling something of its unease into his machine music. If Abbot of Burton is a fair sample of what’s to come, the album — out later this month — promises to be one of his most brooding for the label, the kind of record that rewards a darkened room and a good pair of speakers.
Abbot of Burton is exactly the kind of release that has kept Tejada at the top of the minimal game for two decades: precise, unhurried and quietly otherworldly. As a single it works beautifully — lean enough to slip into any set, strange enough to make you listen twice — and as a promise of what is coming later this month, it’s an enticing one.
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