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The Italian techno duo mix a few dozen shades of black.

"Techno" has been an extremely open-ended concept for Stroboscopic Artefacts, the Berlin-based imprint responsible for some of the genre's most wide-ranging excursions of late. Dadub, the duo who masters each of the label's releases and have contributed a handful of their own since 2011, truly embody the label's commitment to doing things differently. So while Daniele Antezza and Giovanni Conti have released on a handful of experimental internet labels over the years, Dadub have found their calling among the shifting rhythms and ambient excursions of Stroboscopic Artefacts. Pounding and hard-edged, Dadub's recently released debut LP, You Are Eternity, is unquestionably a techno record. But as its beats and textures tangle in the darkness, you're left wondering if the word really nails what they've about.



There's certainly some four-to-the-floor on RA.356, but it's not all Dadub have up their sleeves. Not surprisingly, a blacker-than-black thread runs through the 40-plus tracks the duo have spliced, mashed and molded into an hour-and-a-half statement of purpose.



What have you been up to recently?



What we do always: mastering, postproduction and experiments on sound.



How and where was the mix recorded?



We recorded it at home. We made separately some parts of the mix and after we put them together in our studio. It has also been dubbed and overdubbed using the same effect processing built for our live performances and during our productions.



Can you tell us about the idea behind the mix?



We tried, by one hand, to experiment different "flavours" of groove, from the middle orient-inspired Muslimgauze to our personal view of beat and pulsation, passing through the straight techno and through the more experimental approaches (like Grün's "Danza Linfatica"). By the other hand, we wanted to create a journey also in the "beatless domain," layering and mixing the ambient/drone/noise music that inspires us. At the end we tried to create a deep and ritualistic journey through these two dimensions of sound, to celebrate the union of body and mind.



How much was your live show linked to the process of writing your album?



Our live performances played a key role during the album composition, mostly because it helped us to create and communicate a precise tension during the listening. For us, the unidirectional chain "studio > live" does not exist, for us it's more like a circle: both dimensions reciprocally influence themselves.



What are you up to next?



We're going to release some remixes in the next months, and we're currently at work on new ways to think and conceive our sounds, to avoid the trap of repeating ourselves after the album. Of course we have our strong identity and our particular touch, and our approach has not changed, but we usually like to be surprised by the things we do, so…let's see in the future where these new sound textures will bring us.