Reue’s single, Your Affect, is a seven-and-a-half-minute-long behemoth that somehow managed to keep me listening through its runtime. In focus, too… my attention never seemed to run out. I’ll try to explain it, but I think it’s best if you give it a spin on your own.
Reue is Ethan Reue Berdofe. A Texan, born and raised in Austin, he’s a techno music producer who’s been exploring the ends of these ropes since a very young age, being called a prodigy by his peers. His impressive resume is packed with work with solo artists, bands, compositional pieces, and attendances at the Berklee College of Music. With his decision to make Reue his primary focus, he’s been growing this brand of his and is already headlining festivals across Texas. Your Affect is deceptively simple on paper. An instrumental techno piece that seemingly loops to oblivion, full of dirty, throbbing basslines, airy synths, and pounding beats, it seems like your average run-of-the-mill dance techno thing, until you notice one thing… it does not loop to oblivion.
Your Affect is chock full of nuance. The repeating patterns are there, laying a solid groundwork. The fractured beats have a way of revolving around a core that’s a loop, but the percussion grows outwardly throughout the runtime, exploring different ideas and themes. The automation on the square synth bass keeps its own momentum running, along with other concurrent momentums; that of the layers of airy synths that fade in and out, grow and dissolve in a surprising, inconsistent way, and that of the actual composition. The chord changes are so severe in how they basically modulate every single running line in a way that feels like twisting the actual body of the music. The effect is neat and intriguing and gives those chord changes a quality that kept me anticipating them once the first one came around.
It’s not often that instrumental techno sounds so exciting and fresh. It’s a kind of music that’s meant to make people move their bodies on the dancefloor, not their heads as they wonder where those sounds came from. But with the ever-shifting atmospheres, the surprising twists, and the oblique chord changes, Reue has successfully managed to make something unique, entertaining, and quite musical.