I’ve had a lot of fun with my friends this year trying to read Picture’s track titles aloud. Uuuuuuuu is Dane Natal Zaks’ second double-12″ release for Short Span this year, and maintains the odd naming conventions from Eeeeeee in February. How do you pronounce something like “Quuuuuuu”? Some people opt for a hard, consonantal attack and let the vowel trail off at an arbitrary length; others don’t bother with the durational exercise and just clip it to one word, like “queue”; I typically spell each letter in sequence, pausing to make sure I’ve counted correctly (and usually giggling by the end). It’s a good way to boil down the unique tendencies of a person’s speech, what linguists would call an idiolect—the invisible, manipulable set of rules animating the journey from the brain to the mouth to the ear canal.
In a way, the Picture project is all about this kind of study, as applied to the tools of techno. Via careful filter sweeps, unconventional sample arrangements, and canny operation of the left-right stereo image, Zaks messes with the proprioception you’d expect from a tracky club record, as if turning dials inside your skull. Each track uses minimalist gestures to suggest cavernous inner dimensions. “Quuuuuuu” bolts shakers and white noise to a high-stepping kick pattern, pulls a stuttering synth taut across them, plays catch-and-release with reversed snares in empty air, and sends ping-ponging percussion to reel off in the distance. Rarely does a techno record generate so many action verbs so elegantly.
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If you’re familiar with Zaks’ pedigree, his turn toward a more clinical, dub techno-adjacent project might surprise you. As DJ Central, he’s been one of the most sought-after house producers of the past decade, helping run Aarhus’ Regelbau collective alongside his sibling DJ Sports and applying a feathery, sunlit touch to various ’90s dance idioms; he was also Erika de Casier’s go-to producer for much of her early career. Across styles, he harnesses technical expertise and the purgatorial airs of cultural memory to make sounds feel as textured and as alive as they were when you might’ve first naively encountered them. Those beats on Sensational don’t sound exactly like Y2K trendsetters like Darkchild or MJ Cole; they sound like how contemporaneous listeners might remember them sounding as a kid, before their digital palettes ossified into a specific mode. Similarly, the looping pads and insectoid crackle on “Miiiiii” emulate something on Kompakt or Mille Plateaux 20 years ago—but Zaks’ twitchy, hands-on unraveling of different samples in the foreground constantly reminds you of the vast distance between then and now.
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The album daisy-chains different ideas together across seven tracks with the kind of freedom that Zaks can only achieve with sufficient haze to guard his process. Familiar elements focus your attention so that unfamiliar ones can refract around them into new shapes without breaking the spell. Follow the bass plucks on “Leeeeee” and watch the track around them multiply its drums into stereophonic clouds that dissolve into grains like a sand painting, as Zaks uses filters to whip-pan between different sample strata for a few bars at a time before sealing them off. The consistent, swung bounce on “Woooo” is the closest Uuuuuuu gets to something purpose-built for a dancefloor; Zaks uses the driving energy of different shades of techno to anchor the bizarre flights of fancy he undertakes with the tracks’ actual components as they diffuse throughout the mix.
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