Alter Ego's Roman Flugel has been releasing solo music under various aliases like Acid Test, Ro70, Roman III, Roman IV, Eight Miles High, and of course Soylent Green for 12 years now (as well as his collaborative with long-time partner Jorn Elling Wuttke as Acid Jesus & Holy Garage). 'La Forza Del Destino' is positively steeped in house's primitivist heyday, less Holy Garage than Windy City waist-winding, laid out with crisply minimalist drum programming and judicious splashes of keyboard colouring, unafraid to be melodic, but without a single extra beat or note cluttering up the proceedings. Like the best electronic dance music, this could have been made at any point in the past 15 years; there's no particular technological signature to give it a time-stamp. It's acid, no doubt, but it doesn't feel studied. So much of what's currently called 'minimal' is actually stuffed to the gills with detail, piling microbeat upon microbeat. But 'La Forza del Destino' takes up the challenge of more orthodox minimalism (whether house, techno, orchestral or musique concrete) not just to do more with less, but to explore the very possibilities of reduction.
