Triple J host Robbie Buck once said that everyone should make a point of discovering a new artist or album every year. It’s advice that I try to follow with the artists I listen ,to and the styles of music they create. This desire for variety has led to an increasing interest in techno, amongst other things, and this genre of music is growing on me the more I immerse myself in it.

While this album might be referred to as techno, there is a far wider range of sounds represented on Abe Duque’s Don’t Be So Mean, including deep house, techno and ambient. For the most part, Abe explores these highly effectively, but once or twice his attempts to experiment appear to be a little clumsy; but more of that later!

The album opens with the strangely optimistic track Life Is So Good To Me, a deep, throbbing, chugging dancefloor oriented number that is deliciously juicy and unnerving at the same time. The title sentence is repeated by a singer, for want of a better word, who sounds anything but happy about his good life. I would hate to hear how he felt if things were so-so! Don’t spend too much time dwelling on it though or you might let the brilliant fusion of minimal tech and tribal house that arrives with Tonight Is Your Answer pass you by.

Passing you by is something that Wake Up is unlikely to do. In fact after Following My Heart has lulled you into a hypnotic trance, this next track is perfectly placed to make the listener sit up and take notice. I’m not sure if this is a true “dancefloor” oriented track, because its quite stop-start and quite frankly at times pedestrian pace would be frustrating to dance to, but the sirens and vocals certainly do break the hypnotic spell!

It’s at this point in the album that Abe really starts to experiment. The strangely titled Forever Untitled is a mind-blowing piece of music that manages to be ambient yet extremely powerful, highly evocative and completely disturbing all at the same time. It’s like a dark, haunting soundtrack to a nightmare from which you wake wanting more. I would love for this to be used in a film. If David Lynch heard this, he’d start writing a film for it straight away!

Sinister: adjective, meaning threatening or evil especially in a mysterious way. I have tried and tried and tried to come up with a way to describe Why They Need Us, but I can’t come up with a better way of describing it other than “sinister”. I was walking down a quiet street in Sydney’s North Shore the other day listening to this track when I started looking around. I had a sense of foreboding that I haven’t felt since I walked down a darkened back alley of a London Council Estate in the dead of night. Talk about a journey!

But as mentioned, Abe’s experimenting is clumsy at times and we see this here with Salute the Dawn. It starts with a 1930’s Parisian café style jazz piano piece that lasts for about two minutes. When this stops, a voice cuts in followed by a throbbing, shuddering bass line that is quite brilliant and then for reasons I am unable to fathom, the bassline degenerates into an acid house break beat which then tries to fuse back with the piano piece and both of them play simultaneously. Does that sound clumsy and messy to you? Trust me: my description isn’t anywhere near as messy as the end result. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Luckily this aberration is more than made up for by the deep groove of Let’s Take It Back. A sultry yet funk-filled song that fills the body with the deep seated urge to sway and move around the room as the drum beat entices and seduces you. It is here that Abe poses the question “Do you remember when techno had a groove”? Personally, I think that time is right about now, and the time has also arrived for you to discover this gem of an album.