Graham Dunning - Quern

 Released: April 2

In a world of overly-perfect techno and house music, Graham Dunning’s latest album Quern marks something intentionally deviant from this expectation. What we are presented with is the heavily influences of techno and house, in all its serene quantization, that has been injected with a feeling of “drift” or even “fiddliness.” Nothing is perfect here by design. It’s the audible equivalent of looking at ostensibly straight lines and slowly noticing the small deviations that form a theoretical intersection far down the road. Not to math nerd out too much on this, but suffice to say that these intentional imperfections define much of what we get here in its various manifestations, giving everything that slightly unstable vibe.

Each track either leans more or less heavily into this aesthetic and it tends to change within the tracks themselves. Taking “Tentacle Motion Study” as an example, for much of the track it feels like a rather straightforward acid tech track. But for the moments when everything comes together into something cohesive, there are the breakdowns that create the scene of the structure failing apart almost completely and keeping only the faintest assemblage of the structure together. Tracks like “Graveturner” on the other hand, show a lack of need to keep things cohesive except in the broadest of senses as seemingly haphazard drum patterns keep a awkward rhythm going as weird synths play around it sporadically. 

Quern is a rather enigmatic album in its approach. It intentionally seeks to upset the common dynamic of pristine beats and heavy synthesizer riffs in favor of something more “alive.” It utilizes the small variations in the manual setup used to create the compositions to its advantage, producing a sound that is odd and uncanny but also feels genuine and imperfect.