Ardent / Swallows

Rrose is Seth Horvitz performing as a composite of Marcel Duchamp’s drag alter ego — Rrose Sélavy was Duchamp’s female persona, first appearing in 1921 in photographs by Man Ray. Horvitz uses the character as a filter: the music is not personal expression in the conventional sense, it is the output of a constructed figure with its own rules and constraints. The conceptual underpinning is serious, not decorative.

Stroboscopic Artefacts is Luca Mortellaro’s (Lucy’s) Berlin label, committed to what the label calls “deconstructed techno” — tracks that are made from techno’s components but assembled in ways that resist the genre’s usual resolutions. Ardent / Swallows (2016) sits in that territory: technically a techno record, but one that seems more interested in the space between sounds than in what the sounds do.