Avvenir

Experimental techno for fans of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Coil, and Alva Noto.

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In just over three years, Chicago musician Joel Ebner has quietly built a body of work rivaling artists who've been producing since the early aughts. Starting in 2014, he's released six records under four different names—City States, Contretemps, Modal Voices, and Avvenir—offering unique takes on art-pop, noise, minimalism, and techno. Heard separately, the projects offer self-assured reinterpretations of conventional sub-genres, each demonstrating nuanced understandings of style, texture, arrangement, and mood. When taken together, however, they show an artist with a desire to build out an expanding universe of his own creation, a person whose 20-year commitment to listening has transformed, suddenly, into a full-throttle enthusiasm for making.

Comms will be Ebner's third album under the Avvenir moniker, following two LPs that have garnered high praise from PopMatters, Impose, and CMJ. By far the most immediate Avvenir work to-date, Comms strips away the orchestral flourishes and stylistic range that made Natural Language, in the words of the Beach Sloth music blog, "a beautiful, baroque take on techno." Instead, over the course of its 44-minute runtime Comms oscillates between industrial breakbeats and icy soundscapes; this sharpened aesthetic sensibility is heard in its clearest form on "Stadia I", which was recently featured on Spotify's curated Fresh Finds Basement playlist.