The sixth volume of hfn’s Sisters & Brothers series comes from Modular Project, a duo of Italian producers Alberto Iovine and Alessandro Fumagalli. With a title referencing a pivotal year for the development of electronic pop, and wrapped in a sleeve praising the keep fit fads of yesteryear, it probably comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody that Iovine and Fumagalli are fans of 80s synth music.

And so it is that the three tracks here nod firmly in that direction. The title track, a brief, 90-second , beatless progression through stalking bass synths and winter-crisp melodies is like an abandoned demo from a particularly meditative Kling Klang studio session.

‘Past Present Future’ finds the duo offering a steady, immovable web of quiet tones, fuzzy guitar samples and vocoders, hitching all of that to early drum machine rhythms. Taken together, it makes for a hypothetical imagining of how techno minimalism might have sounded had it been created forty years ago. ‘Freshback’ takes a similar approach but from a firmer starting position, with heavier beats, a nagging bass line and a squelchy, elastic pattern that flutters and gyrates around and through the whole track like the blades of Stringfellow Hawke’s Airwolf.

1981 – Sisters & Brothers Vol. 6 by Modular Project will be released by hfn music on February 22 1981, sorry, 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.