Bruno Pronsato – Lovers Do review

Of all the electronic music forms, minimal techno is probably the least open to outside influences, which is why Bruno Bruno Pronsato’s new album is so impressive. The successor to the Villalobos style of lopsided reductionism rather than the logical progression from Hood and Mills’s unflinching repetition or Bell’s analogue house, on Lovers Do, Pronsato takes contemporary European minimalism into a new direction. Heavily influenced by the stream of consciousness approach of Can or Pink Floyd’s earliest incarnation as well as Sun Ra’s jazz odysseys, he imbues his arrangements with a psychedelic, freeform flair. “Winter Music For Summer” embodies this approach, its lithe, glitchy rhythms allowed to ebb and flow over a robust bassline.

Pronsato further teases out the concept of techno as a freeform entity on “Trio-Out”, where, featuring the vocals of Nina Leece, his intense, un-quantized drums are unleashed at a furious pace, while “Indication Of The Cause 1” becomes an outlet for him to combine the deftness of “Winter Music For Summer” with the freeform drums of “Trio”. Equally, the album sees him make a great play of his musical virtuosity. “Lovers Don’t” starts with the sound of an orchestra tuning up before it veers into a woozy, jazzy key-led workout, and the title track is a sassy groove populated by insistent piano lines. Clearly, Pronsato’s vision stretches way beyond the remit of stripped back dance floor techno, and nowhere is this more evident than on the neo-classical piano composition, “An Anne Around the Neck”.

Richard Brophy