Can we already talk about one of the electronic albums of the year? Eeeeeeee, Picture‘s new record, makes a strong case. The Danish producer, born Natal Zaks and known for countless aliases and parallel projects, takes a decisive turn here, reshaping his path through ambient and dub techno with the mindset of a true experimenter. It may not be a coincidence that he comes from Denmark, a country that has been particularly fertile in club music in recent years; his trajectory has been anything but linear, and for that reason he now stands as a reference point not only for Danish producers.
From the deep house of DJ Central to the cyber-fluid ambient of Palta, through key collaborations such as the warehouse-leaning outsider house of Regelbau, the cloud-like textures of Hi Mount, and the futuristic rhythmic constructions of Nl100, Zaks’ career has evolved step by step. With the introduction of the Picture alias in the early 2020s, he released in 2022 Untitled, a tape on Help Recordings, the label he co-founded with DJ Sports. A cassette driven by tech euphoria, marked by a lo-fi essentialism that shaped much of his earlier work.
In this light, Eeeeeeee lands like a jolt. The sound design becomes sharply defined, and the opener Waaaaaaaa immediately sets the tone: the warmth of magnetic tape disappears and, after a long cybernetic intro, a punchy yet fluid loop takes form, constantly reshaped through shifting filters. It sounds like hardgroove slowed down, propelled by a distinctly experimental impulse.
That may be the key to the album, bringing the form back to its exploratory roots. After all, this music has always been about sonic research, almost electroacoustic inquiry turned into rhythm. Zaks understands this instinctively. On Tyyyyyyyyy, he revisits patterns rooted in 1990s tradition and reshapes them with a bouncy yet intensely cerebral approach, as if the club were merely a hypothesis rather than a physical space.
Heeeeeeee unfolds like an ambient dub tremor. Its rhythmic pattern recalls Enforcement by Cyrus, while a meditative pad stretches above it, subtly shifting its weight. It feels like imagining a strain of deep techno conceived before the genre fully existed, yet performed with technologies more advanced than our own. On Keeeeeee, an opening loop evokes Jeff Mills’ Purpose Maker era before expanding into a dub-driven anthem reminiscent of Deepchord at his most tactile. These are not nostalgic nods but tensions reshaped within a sharper framework.
Yeeeeeee develops through gradual timbral shifts over a soft seismic undercurrent, while the closing Qeeeeeeee sketches opaque, futuristic landscapes punctuated by rhythmic fragments built on unconventional structures. Across six tracks, Zaks redraws his artistic identity, delivering to Short Span, perhaps the label of the moment, a record capable of pushing against the boundaries of an entire scene.just twelve minutes to deliver a sense of cohesion that sits outside standard club frameworks.
