JETZT

Berlin, Germany · based in Reykjavík since 23 · b. 2000 · FARA Records

JETZT (Tobias Reuss, b. 28 July 2000, Berlin, based in Reykjavík since twenty-three) grew up in the most written-about techno city in the world, which makes it a difficult place to be interesting in. He grew up inside all of it — the clubs, the mythology, the queue — and by twenty-three had concluded that the scene he loved had become a tourism product, a fairly ordinary Berlin conclusion and not a complaint he makes loudly. What's less ordinary is what he did about it: he moved to Reykjavík, a city of a hundred and forty thousand people with four hours of daylight in December, on the theory that it's easier to hear something when there's less of it. He's been there three years and hasn't gone back. He found his way in through the usual Berlin route and then a swerve — he was making functional club techno from seventeen and was good enough at it to see exactly where that road went. What changed was moving somewhere with real darkness and real quiet: the records got slower, longer and more melodic, and the voice arrived because Icelandic winter gives a person a great deal of time to think, and eventually some of it has to be said out loud.

He doesn't sing. He speaks, in German, low and calm and completely unhurried, with none of the theatrical menace that spoken male vocals in this genre usually reach for — the effect he's after is somebody thinking rather than somebody pronouncing. Short lines, long gaps, and never more than eight words at a time. Underneath he builds the whole record: deep four-on-the-floor, rolling bassline, wide pads, and the long patient builds this genre lives or dies on. His signature is restraint before the drop; he'll hold a build considerably past the point of comfort. His influences run the melodic and cinematic strand of European techno rather than the functional one; film score for the pad writing; and, since moving, the specific Icelandic tradition of records that take their time and aren't embarrassed about being beautiful.

Almost nothing as a public persona, and not as a pose. He plays long, talks little, and has a Berliner's complete immunity to being impressed by a lineup. He's warmer in private than the records suggest and considerably funnier in German than in English, which he says is true of everybody. The artist name is his own line from this record: “you call it the future, I call it now.” He never delivers more than eight words at a time and leaves very long gaps — two producers have tried to fill them and been overruled. Calm, deliberate, unimpressed.