Indepth - Zero Sum

The trend these days in clubs around the globe seem to be strongly directed towards minimal techno with its playful acid feel and minimal sound approach. In my home town it's very hard to go out clubbing without encountering the sounds of minimal techno blasting from the speakers with tokkitokk sounds following the beat, hi-hats and baseline.
Indepth has created here something very faithful to the minimal techno sound. The album has some nice trip factors scattered around, as well as more sublime stuff going on without turning all maximum. Its drive and posture all looks and feels like your average minimal techno and after listening to his art with deeper bass and clearer speakers I've realized how much work he's put into it with crisp sounds that near a surgeon’s precession without the clinical approach, and a bassline that compliments the minimal techno beats with pleasure and surprises.

Zero Sum contains some surprises at times, adding traces of trance, progressive house and hallucinogenic distortions. The production is crisp with vinyl effects to create that extra electric feeling on your pumped up body and gives you groovy themes to make the dance floor turn blissful while grinding teeth. In some tracks like the The Crack (T2) and Sum = Zero (T3) Indepth pushes, or lifts, the music to put the clubber’s head on the edge of a mental crack, and it tends to become irritating and annoying when listening. When it comes to the Gintaton (T4) he adds nice breaks and sneaks in melodies. He also adds some melodies with extra cuteness on Everyone I Know has Paws (T8), while at the same time stepping slightly away from the straightforward minimal techno feel and injecting us with some friendly emotions. The only track originally made by another artist is the 7th track by Itaitaiko, better known as Kukan Dub Lagan. This track has a super cool sample going 'Ohm', 'Bom

Recomendation:  Spiral Trax records who for the summer season of 2009 is focusing on more techno influences in their releases give us an interesting album from Indepth, but for me personally it's not interesting enough. It has all the tricks needed to turn on the party goers, plus Indepth adds some minor variations here and there with trance themes, dirty electro sounds and baseline changes. But as a whole it starts out boring, turns interesting while again changing back to become something boring and with time, forgettable. This is Spiral Trax's debut release on this field since they reopened their office in June 2007, and we can expect more music like this. I just hope they keep raising the bar. I have never heard the earlier work by Indepth, but the word around the block said that throughout the years, Shahar has experimented with different styles from progressive, breaks to techno, and it has all been with a pinch of psychedelics and a hefty dose of clubby influences in mind. I guess the key words here are techno, minimal, acid and electro.