Audiopile Review: Detroit techno has always had a mildly odd obsession with all things Germanic. This presumably helped Berlin’s Basic Channel make their Motor City connections back in the early ‘90s. Moritz von Oswald has kept these connections tight ever since. Memorably, he collaborated with Carl Craig on an album of remixed classical music. His collabs with Model 500’s Juan Atkins have stayed closer to the source. Their 2016 album, ‘Transport’, is an exquisitely crafted collection of minimal techno gliders. Rather than recombining sounds from classic Basic Channel and Model 500, it’s a distinctly 21st-century collection. These tracks are ornately sculptured right down to the essentials. But they have enough organic boom to feel soulfully human. ‘Transport’ is the sound of two people with nothing to prove, proving it effortlessly anyway. But it never seems like they were doing it just because they could. They did it because they still had something beautiful to offer. And they still do. There’s an excellent new 12” (‘Angles’) out this week, as well as this reissue.

2024 repress. Double LP version. Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald — the two indispensable protagonists of the “Electric Garden” — plug back into the wilderness. Transport brings together a set of studio-refined sequences aimed at colonizing some of the dark energy that pulsates through those areas that are thoroughly electrified, even if not on the grid. The Detroit-Berlin axis triangulates to a third point that, like the atomic particle that lives in two places at once, flickers between a form of techno-charged ambience and a futuristic club-jazz that cannot be broken down into constitutive parts. Borderland remains caught in a state of enraptured stillness, invisibly moving between every imagined future for electronic sound making. The result: a font from which springs serene and exhilarating musical ideas that vibrate with refined energy for 60 seconds in every minute.