Barem
Never Better Than Late
- Released
- 2007
- Format
- Vinyl, 12"
- Label
- M_nus · MINUS 59
- Rating
- 8/10
minimal-technoberlinm-nus
Electronic TechnoMinimal
View on Discogs ↗ Related titles
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Plastikman Musik Plastikman is the origin point — Musik is the record Hawtin made before M_nus fully formed, and Barem is one of the first artists he signed to that label. -
Ambivalent R U OK Ambivalent and Barem were both on M_nus during the 2005–07 peak — the same dry, white-room conceptualism applied by two producers arriving from opposite ends of the Americas. -
False River Camping False and Barem were labelmates at M_nus through the same years, and sit at adjacent points on the same minimal-techno continuum.
Barem is from Buenos Aires — which is worth noting because Richie Hawtin’s M_nus roster during its peak years (2005–07) was a deliberately international selection, and an Argentine producer sitting at its centre says something about how far the minimal-techno sound had dispersed from its Windsor–Detroit–Berlin axis. Hawtin hand-picked artists whose work shared the dry, white-room conceptualism he had developed through Plastikman: no warmth added that wasn’t already in the room, no gesture that wasn’t strictly necessary.
Never Better Than Late holds to that programme. The tracks are spare enough that what you hear is mostly structure — where the elements are placed, what the spaces between them contain. It is the kind of record that sounds thin on first listen and then, when you understand what it is doing, sounds precisely calibrated. That is the M_nus aesthetic in miniature: patience as technique.