This is the seventh installment in my series tearing down the sounds of my biggest musical influences. So far, we have looked heavily at the pioneers of the late 90s and early 2000s—the architects of minimal, tech-house, and dub techno.
But inspiration doesn’t just live in the past. There is a new wave of modern hypnotic techno that has completely captured my attention recently, spearheaded by producers like Chlär and Yanamaste.
If you want a masterclass in this specific sound, go to YouTube and watch their recent F2F (Face to Face) set. It absolutely blew me away, both from a production standpoint and as a pure DJing spectacle. It is a relentless, methodical, and almost purely mechanical display of tension.
It also forced me to look at my own studio habits, and realize why I consistently struggle to emulate this incredibly driving, sparse aesthetic.
The F2F Dynamic vs. The Filterbrats
The concept of the F2F setup immediately intrigued me. In a standard club, the DJ booth faces the crowd. In a B2B (Back to Back) set, two DJs stand side-by-side, taking turns on the same mixer.
Chlär and Yanamaste’s F2F setup completely alters the geometry of the performance. They face each other, with their gear set up on opposing tables.
This directly mirrors a philosophy I wrote about recently regarding the lost art of the “inward dancefloor”—where the crowd turns their backs on the DJ and dances with each other. The F2F setup achieves a similar psychological shift for the performers. They are no longer performing at the crowd; they are locked into a direct, visual, and musical conversation with each other. The crowd is simply invited to witness the crossfire. I am still trying to wrap my head around exactly how they route and share the master clock and audio between the two stations, but the resulting energy is undeniable.
I was trying to wrap my head around exactly how they route and share the master clock and audio between the two stations, but it turns out the solution is brilliantly old-school. They aren’t relying on a master digital clock to perfectly sync everything. Instead, they run the ‘record out’ of one mixer directly into a spare channel on the other mixer. This allows each DJ to cue up what the other person is doing in their headphones and manually beatmatch by ear, exactly as if they were mixing vinyl. It introduces a highly human element into a very rigid sound.
It made me highly nostalgic for the days when Clayton and I were gigging together as The Filterbrats. We used to run a highly chaotic version of a B2B set. In practice, it meant we had a ‘standard’ DJ setup that we alternated on, but we also dragged a completely separate secondary setup into the booth—another mixer and a turntable dedicated entirely to scratching and manipulating acapellas over the main mix. Add in a pair of live congas, and it was a deeply interactive, physically demanding way to play records.
When you share a booth with someone and you are actually interacting with the audio simultaneously, the energy changes. You aren’t just queuing tracks; you are pushing back against what the other person is doing.
The Jeff Mills Philosophy and the “Third Track”
What I love most about the Chlär and Yanamaste set is how it honors the foundational philosophy of Detroit techno mixing, specifically the style pioneered by Jeff Mills.
In modern EDM, the DJ’s presence is usually visual. It is characterized by massive, silent breakdowns where the DJ stops the music, grabs a microphone, and waves their hands in the air, screaming at the crowd to jump. It is an ego-driven, “look at me” spectacle.
The Jeff Mills approach is the exact opposite. The DJ’s presence isn’t visual; it is entirely auditory.
In this school of hypnotic techno, you don’t play one track, let it finish, and play the next. You are constantly in the mix, riding three or four decks at once. By locking multiple looping, sparse elements together, you create the mythical “third track”—a completely new piece of music that only exists in that exact moment, created by the sum of the interacting parts.
The mix itself becomes the presentation. It is a subtle, but vitally important distinction. You don’t need a massive breakdown to prove you are there. The crowd is experiencing a unique, highly technical, fleeting piece of art that will likely never be recreated that exact way again. It is “listen to what is happening,” not “look at me.”
The 140 BPM Cerebral Space
I don’t usually produce at 140 BPM. It is significantly faster than the deep house or rolling tech-house I usually write.
But when I am left to my own devices behind a set of decks, and I really get fired up, I almost always find myself winding the pitch faders up and settling into this exact 140 BPM techno range.
I can’t stay there forever—it requires a massive amount of focus to maintain that kind of relentless, mechanical energy—but while I am in that pocket, it is a profoundly cerebral experience. The music moves so fast that you stop hearing individual drum hits and start hearing the macro-rhythm. It becomes a wall of driving, industrial trance.
In a lot of ways, it scratches the exact same itch for me as the dark tech-step and neuro drum & bass I also love. My heart doesn’t like to sit too long in this high-octane pocket these days, but it is an incredibly fun place to visit.
The Trap of the Soundscape
The Trap of the Soundscape
This brings me to my current studio struggle.
I love the sparse, minimal, utterly ruthless production style of Chlär and Yanamaste. But whenever I sit down at the Oxi One and try to write a track in this vein, I inevitably sabotage myself.
Hypnotic techno requires you to be incredibly disciplined. The groove has to carry the entire weight of the track. If you dig into how these two artists operate, you find two very distinct approaches to creating that weight. Yanamaste comes from a heavy background of classical piano and traditional Georgian folk percussion (djembe, congas), and he applies that deep understanding of complex, long-form sequencing to his electronic tracks. Chlär, on the other hand, is notorious for heavily utilizing the Elektron Octatrack to completely mangle and destroy recorded audio samples, often driving them through harsh, multi-tap digital delays like the D16 Sigmund plugin to create his gritty textures.
Because I have spent so many years analyzing and writing dub techno, my instinct is always to fill the empty space. I will get a great, driving 140 BPM percussion loop going, and then I will drop a massive, lush synth pad over the top. Or I will route a synth stab through a slow, feedback-heavy tape delay.
The second I do that, the momentum dies. The dub elements act like a parachute, dragging the perceived tempo of the track backward.
Writing this kind of techno requires you to separate the concept of a “Song” from a “DJ Tool.” Chlär and Yanamaste are masters of the DJ Tool. They are writing highly optimized, mechanical parts designed specifically to be layered and manipulated on a mixer, not emotional soundscapes designed to be listened to on a pair of headphones.
My goal for the next few studio sessions is to embrace that mechanical discipline. No massive reverbs. No emotional chord progressions. Just pure, driving tools, built for the third track.