May: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Shed 'The Final Experiment' (Monkeytown)

There’s been a lot of rave-revival stuff in the world of Berlin techno recently – breaks, bleeps, sub-bass, warm ‘n’ nice inside the place – but few can do it as convincingly as René Pawlowitz, aka Shed. His productions have always had a strong thread of UK bass running through them, but on ‘The Final Experiment’ he’s gone through a wormhole and ended up at that magic moment in 1993, where the separations of genres still hadn’t quite happened. You can hear the influence of Detroit techno, hip hop and soundsystem culture. You can hear the beginnings of jungle, not quite yet separated off into its own space. And more than anything, you can hear the experimentalisits who first melted all this together into expressions of pure pleasure for both raves and home listening: Global Communication, Future Sound Of The Left, The Black Dog, Luke Slater’s 7th Plain. Yet it’s not just some purely retro trip. It’s an album that’s been realised through a dubwise Berlin filter, soaking up every sonic lesson of a lineage that runs from Basic Channel through Marcel Dettman, and honed on soundsystems such as Berghain. Each of its tunes have been constructed for maximum impact on the senses, not just the nostalgia circuits of your brain. The silvery breakbeats of ‘Call 32075!’, the Aphex Twin-ish acid gurgle of ‘Taken Effekt’ and the levitating robot choirs of ‘Outgoing Society’ all work because they’re brilliant, not because they’re telling you something you’ve heard before or are nodding to some past experience. Blissful.

8/10