Reeko Cryptophony

Continuing the trajectory set by last year’s EPs and experimental long-player, Reeko returns to Samurai Music to deliver an expansive album that goes further into his experimental practice at the intersection of deep techno, drum & bass and electronica.
Since the early 00s Juan Rico has been applying his exacting vision to the deeper end of dance music culture. As Reeko, he's carved out an imposing presence in the modern techno scene by building up the steely, hard-hitting sound of Mental Disorder while also contributing to scene-leading labels like Modularz, Semantica and Delsin. With a trio of releases through 2024 for Samurai Music, the Spanish producer demonstrated the wider scope of his craft as he opened up to broken rhythms, spacious arrangements and a wholly different dimension to his music-making.
On Cryptophony, Rico continues this thread of exploration and uses the concept of inaudible or encrypted sounds as an inspirational jump-off point for an incredibly detailed, nuanced body of work. When meditative minimalism and insistent repetition are key compositional tools, the sound field is opened up for subtlety in the spaces between notes, and that's precisely the experience Rico has crafted across seven extended pieces.
"Crytophony explores how sound can conceal, suggest or reveal information in a symbolic, sensory or ritualistic way," Rico explains. "I found it interesting as a first step to investigate further. There are no hidden messages in the music, but there are strange voices that, after the final process, sound transformed."
Not everything is subliminal and subversive within Rico's artistic vision on the album. Among the sparse framework of cyclical rhythms, tracks like 'El Cielo Liquido' move through vaporous atmospheric tension to find the comforting anchor of a fluid 303 line, while 'Retumbra' revels into the half-double-time interplay of arpeggios and staggered kicks as layers of ruthlessly reduced acid bubble into a potent, transcendental broth. 'Frequencias Parricidas' settles on a low, chugging 4/4 throb as a sturdy, danceable vessel for uneasy brushstrokes of sound design from the post-punk school of murky abstraction.
'Ecos De Suburbio' and the first two 'Sequencia Criptofonica' pieces share a similar line in sleek, precision engineered beats coursing through dense tonal clouds, until the final part shears away the footholds and lets pure textural design take the lead for a captivating ambient conclusion. It's the perfect closing gesture on an album where you can hear so much of the music in the spaces between the dominant, rhythmic sounds, if you allow yourself the presence of mind to listen closely.