Between ethereal textures and organic sculptures rises ex_libris, the new project by Dave Huismans, the Dutch producer behind A Made Up Sound and 2562: two aliases that helped define experimental dub and techno throughout the 2010s. Moving freely between dubstep, future garage, dub techno and abstract electronics, Huismans keeps tracing the less-travelled paths, blending cyber-aquatic echoes and futuristic cityscapes into bionic organisms.
001 opens a new chapter in his sonic exploration: #13-20 (Wetlands) is a ten-minute monolith of stereo fluctuations, tech-jazz chords and a relentless bassline shaping a vast, magnetic theme. The rest of the record channels dancefloor unease into an intelligent, sentient rhythm, as if an ensemble of empathic robots were improvising with human emotion. Balancing eerie tension and futurism, the three tracks move through every form of dub: from techno variations to ambient and downtempo drifts.
Crackles cover the surface, sounding like the static of a quantum ecosystem (#26 (Chapel)). Huismans moves across a wide, ever-shifting range of tones and moods: from soft blue-note accents to the wonky shadow of Actress dissolving somewhere between Wolfgang Voigt and Rod Modell (#25 (Below Surface)). Listeners familiar with A Made Up Sound or 2562 will immediately recognize that same sense of tension: a control of the medium untouched by fatigue, even after decades of releases.
Nostalgic yet clear-minded, 001 plays like the diary of a psychonaut lost among the chips of a bionic world, where the border between machine and human blurs away. The release distills the haze of Basic Channel into the digital organic feel of J. Albert. The lo-fi feel, never gratuitous, acts as a conscious texture: shaped through the IDM code of the 2010s, a grain that frames nocturnal impulses and their solitude. Each track rewrites the coordinates of the previous one, forming a whole in constant motion.
