Polegroup Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Exium continue to strengthen their working relationship with Pole Recordings, gracing Oscar Mulero's label with A Sensible Alternative To Emotion, their second studio album. Having spent over a decade refining their own vision of hard edged techno, Exium use this platform of a second album to expand on their established sound, at times easing down the tempos and intensity for a more balanced listen across the 10 tracks. Productions such as the granite heavy "Massless Particle" or tunnelling abstraction of "Absolute Magnitude" demonstrate this is no drastic departure from the Exium sound but there's an equal consideration for melodic arrangements and more subdued moments.

Review: Spanish techno stalwart Oscar Mulero trailed this fourth album in as many years with Dualistic Concept, a set of typically dark, hypnotic and ghostly remixes. That can be found on the second slab, and ties in neatly with the robust, forthright and atmospheric sound of the album itself. Muscle & Mind has moments of beauty, of course - see the blissful ambience of "Mental Causation" and enveloping chords and found sounds of "Unconscious" - but for the most part it's concerned with the power of rhythm. Few are better at wringing maximum intensity from loop-heavy jams, and Mulero's love of dusty white noise, trippy melodies and skittering percussion guarantees variety in the grooves throughout.

Review: Christian Wunsch is becoming as much of a formidable force as his fellow Spanish and Pole Group patriarch Oscar Mulero and close cohort Developer. Last year Pole Group released the debut album of Spanish duo Exium and now they move the spotlight over to Wunsch, who shines brightly from the first track onwards. The album is of course full of huge club productions like "Auger Electrons", "Ionized", "Graphene" and "Radioactive Decay" - but Wunsch delivers the type of techno in productions like "When The Process Is Expected", "Nuclear Transition" and "Fixed Fraction" that makes Internal Conversion more than just a heavy weight slab of booming DJ tools. One of the best releases to come from Pole Group yet.