Sluta Leta — Drift Dekoder

Swedish electronic project Sluta Leta started in the late 90s and has gone through a series of lineup changes, resulting in all of the founding members being replaced. The current lineup of producers Andi Pieper and Ramon Bauer, with vocalist Gerhard Potuznik, has been consistent since their debut full-length in 2003. After a long hiatus, they've returned in the 2020s. Their 2nd album this decade, Drift Decoder, is a collection of charmingly analogue, acid-inflected electro, funky breaks, and synth pop, a short forty-one-minute album of two-to-five-minute songs.

Fat, grainy snares that sound as if playing from a boombox, slap bass, and pulsing, filtered saws with squelching modulations cement the vintage electro sound. Intelligent, but never gratuitous, groove-oriented compositions (as per Luke Vibert) are the order of the day. The tone is colourful, upbeat and melodic with sparkling nu disco chord stabs and warbling arpeggiated walking basses.

The vocals are harder to classify, not usually tuneful or in key, but varied in style and expressive, from the political spoken word of "First Order" to the Sisters of Mercy-esque gothic crooning of "Moment Eternal" or the grungey drawl of "Past In Reverse". The vocals are apparently handled by a rotating lineup of individuals, including a couple of cameos from the long-gone founding members. They're certainly an unexpected humanising element of what otherwise feels like an album of nerd electronica I might expect from labels like Rephlex and Warp.

This album is quite focused on production and sound design, and there aren't vocals on every tune, but it never quite fully unwinds into instrumental flights of fancy either, like its creators clearly could. They generally keep concise song structures and some sort of basic 4/4 groove going at all times, save for the incredible avant-garde braindance strangeness of the thirty-three-second intro track "Prélude Gas" (which I honestly wish there was more of).

This is a lovely recording, full of color, groove and tape-saturated texture. If you're into stuff like Clark, Luke Vibert or Aphex Twin's Analord series (or on the poppier side, MGMT or Daft Punk), this is likely to satisfy you. This release brings the funk and expressively busy basslines, and I'd be first in line to check it out if they ever decided to experiment with something weirder, too. To find out more