Russian producer Gesloten Cirkel’s debut album, Submit X, was last year’s most important long player. This is because it was the first album to connect a wide audience to the dark and grimy acid-techno-electro fusion that has been simmering away for over twenty years on labels like Guy Tavares’ Bunker, its sister Panzerkreuz and Murder Capital. Submit X was not by any stretch of the imagination a polished record, but it did distill much of the raw form energy from and provide some focus to the rough, distorted sound of those labels’ catalogues.
The expectations surrounding Gesloten Cirkel’s debut album Submit X prove that this artist has defied every accepted rule and approach. For starters, no one really knows who Gesloten Cirkel is apart from the fact that he apparently comes from Russia. Sure, a lot of electronic music producers like to keep their identity a secret for a variety of reasons, but this one has only put out three records in the space of five years and doesn’t have a be-masked anti-image to cling to.