“Biokinetics”: behind a title that seems to suggest biological references, a world of scientific references applied to music, lies one of the most intriguing albums of European electronic music of the nineties, and even before that one of the most singular creative collaborations of the time. Behind such an impactful choice we can appreciate a project that combines mother Jamaica with the United States and a finally unified Germany, marine flows with human mechanics, the rigor of rhythm with atmospheric escape. Above all, thirty years after its first publication, one can find one of the fundamental moments of all dub-techno, a record that still today continues to reveal all the potential of one of the most popular and in-depth genres in the entire club universe. It is therefore necessary to return to 1996, to try to absorb those moods that permeated the development of one of the cornerstones of Chain Reaction.
Following the fall of the Wall in November 1989, the situation in Berlin evolved rapidly. Week after week, month after month, the once again reunited capital becomes a privileged laboratory for the most varied and unexpected electronic explorations. If it is true that already in July of the same year the first Love Parade was held in West Berlin to celebrate electronic music and its extraordinary potential, the post-fall scenario opens up to an infinite number of possibilities, encouraged as it is by a state of semi-anarchy which makes it very easy to occupy abandoned buildings and organize rave illegal. A forge that burns metals relentlessly, in search of the most unusual alloys to propose: it is in this fervent climate, in this feverish techno-utopia, that a meeting takes place destined to write fundamental chapters of the German nineties.
Fruit of the meeting between Moritz Von Oswald, who had moved to Berlin for some time and was involved as a producer for the label of the same name associated with the nightclub Tresor, and Mark Ernestus, owner of the Hard Wax record shop, the Basic Channel project was born in 1993, and with it the label of the same name. In the space of a few years, and with the use of several monikerthe duo conceives an authentic revolution within the techno world, forging a risky but highly effective fusion between the slowed down tempos of Jamaican dub, with its very deep reverberations and hypnotic bass, and the Detroit sound created by the award-winning trio Atkins-May-Saunderson. In giving weight to the atmosphere behind nervousness, in providing margin and possibility for obstinacy and repetition, the couple promotes a completely new language, irresistible in its rhythmic potential and strong in an evocative component that had until then been left in the background. Soon, emulators and lovers will take up the intuitions of Basic Channel and spread the word of dub-techno far and wide.
It is at this point that the flair of the Von Oswald-Esternus couple is highlighted. Conscious of stretching ad libitum theoutput of the label after the first 12″ and compilations would have only diluted the strength of its message, in 1995 it suspended publications and launched a new distribution vehicle, with which to spread the projects of like-minded minds. Launched in the same year, Chain Reaction became the preferential conduit for some of the most compelling and significant moments of all 90s dub-techno, if not entire careers (Monolake the most striking example). And it is This is where the Porter Ricks adventure begins: also the result of a meeting between two decidedly different creative minds, it links together Thomas Köner, who for some years has been dedicated to glacial ambient-drone productions, and Andy Mellwig, a sound engineer who also landed at the court of Dubplates & Mastering, founded by the same Basic Channels to obtain master up to their needs. With all the expertise in sound management, and a control over the atmospheres to definitely take into account, the two embark on a 12″ strip with which to give life to their own idea of techno music. After a few changes of season, and “Biokinetics” summarizes the vision in eight “easy” movements.
Much more than one compilation (for the occasion the duo includes three unreleased songs in the setlist together with five songs already distributed previously), the work offered by the duo, the first for Chain Reaction to be printed on CD, is the purest demonstration of the power of the image applied to sound, of the ability of timbres and rhythms to create settings and suggest spaces even without the aid of melody. In a game of mechanics, patterns and repetitions managed with surgical precision, the spacecraft led by the Porter Ricks (named after a character from the “Flipper” series) heads towards oceans of steam, streaks of smoke, to find the immensity in the elusive. Even more than in the powerful rhythmic journeys of Basic Channel, where conceptual abstraction reigns supreme, the biokinetics of the German duo vibrates on a higher quantum plane, allowing the spectrum of its intuitions to open up to a conception of atmosphere and suggestion that goes beyond pure rhythmic design. From the Berlin of the cosmic couriers of the previous two decades, the ball passes to those who take up their legacy in light of the technological updates of the nineties.
Image, sound, setting: with a few fundamentals, the expressiveness of Porter Ricks takes flight from the first bars, revealing all its suggestive character and inherent dynamism. Against all appearances, the muffled pulsations of “Port Gentil”, slightly rippled by a deep bass that marks every measure, become the experimental bench for an incessant coming and going of flows and waves, sonic waves that crash on the rocks of the imagination, before the distant echo of a train pushes the beats forward, ready to immerse us in new landscapes without borders. The subtle art of Köner and Mellwig is already explained here, the iron control over the progression, over the minimal changes that open and close segments of the piece: iron and steam become the image of a kinetic of life which is not just a witty metaphor of the movement on the dance floor, but rather the vision of opposites that conflict and finally converge, to enhance the beat as much as the space that intersperses them. In this constant game of pushing and relaxing, it's someone else patterns mechanical power to fuel the propulsion of “Nautical Dub”, but its more nervous and hallucinated cut never reaches the grandeur bombastic of so much contemporary techno, preferring rather to elicit a more filigree movement, the suitable scenario for light synthetic props, ready to immerse themselves in the bass ostinato at the bottom.
In this teeming with port and maritime references, which delimit points and routes in an ocean that knows no rest, turbulence is obviously physiological. “Port Of Call” is electronic, all gashes and knurls, almost as if to annoy the beat much more powerful than it supports them, but it is simple in the organized chaos that animates the loops on the surface glimpse a deeper restlessness, a black abyss that could crumble all the boldness above. And so the combination “Port Of Nuba” – “Nautical Nuba”, starting from the same rhythmic outline, distorts several times, like the overlapping of waves that pile up more and more, before the final crash. Yet there is never the sensation of a definitive collision, there is always manus longa of the duo that transforms, folds and finally diffracts the same base obtaining two completely opposite effects (it is difficult not to glimpse the dark blanket that emerges under the loops of “Nautical Nuba”, a spatiality that in the busier context of its port sister doesn't really emerge). And if “Nautical Zone” wanted to represent the final counterpart of “Port Gentil”, it does so by even putting forward a singular micromelodic hypothesis, which insinuates itself into the basic train, casting a diffused light on the entire journey.
Movement, no matter how convulsive or instinctive, is the basis of any project that has in mind to address club. If it is true that from the following decade onwards there would be a gradual narrowing of what was considered suitable for dance floors, nevertheless Porter Ricks' “Biokinetics” were born and grew to enhance movement, the very human drive that leads to following the rhythm. It is significant that it is the two songs of the same name, the most experimental moments in a record already far from any form of trend, that decree it in all their subversion. On the one hand, the first movement lets the cadences of the body simmer at a slow flame, twisting sinister synthetic striations in a game of asymmetries that more than twenty years later one would have had no problem defining post-club. On the other, the very slow sound waves of the second, with those dub submerged to advance inexorably, they give the idea of the great caliber of sound designer by Köner, of the relentless way of creating rhythm even among the thickest mists.
Distributed in an aluminum container that would become a sadly famous trademark (the casing was too hard for the record inside, often leading to it breaking), then reissued several times, also on vinyl, over the last fifteen years (Type in 2012 with an extraordinary cover with a Herbertianthe Mille Plateaux in 2021), “Biokinetics” gives its exceptional contribution to a simply magical decade for German electronics (Wolfgang Voigt made his debut in the same year, but it was also the period of the debuts of DJ Hell, Mouse On Mars, and labelmates Monolake), pushing the dub-techno idiom to unexpected extremes. Its waves will spread with all the necessary calm throughout the 2000s, showing the way to all those who were looking for collateral suggestions from their techno. However, it will be with the opening of the 1910s, and with the rise to prominence of Modern Love, that the lesson of the Porter Ricks will find its logical landing place, and will highlight the full strength of its impact. Beyond the banks of smoke, beyond the rolls of the sea, pulsations that smell of life, for all those who have understood them.
05/31/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
