Silent Servant - In Memoriam [Tresor]

Format: 12" with download card.

Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, is a figure in the history of techno who needs little introduction. As a member of the Sandwell District collective and the label’s art director, he collaborated on works responsible for a global shift in focus within the genre, by adapting and challenging the minimal techno paradigm, incorporating influences from other sources such as dub, post-punk, and even classical minimalism.

But Mendez’s relationship with music goes back much further than these seminal releases. With In Memoriam, Silent Servant’s latest work on Tresor Records, Mendez writes a deeply personal memoir of over 30 years dedicated to exploring and absorbing the darker side of music; a carefully constructed elegy to past people, places, and times, and the lasting effect they have on the present.

Across four tracks, Mendez pays homage to early Detroit techno and electro, the Belgian EBM movement and the wave that followed, the monumental sound of Berlin dub techno, and the harsher, more abrasive sound of the UK at the end of the last millennium; exploring and referencing the genres that shaped his later work. Each track title offers a clue to the temporal period it revisits and recontextualizes, as the EP reappropriates the styles that influenced him.

This EP represents a pure distillation of Mendez’s memories, while solidifying his place in the current and future sound of 21st-century techno; aware of where we come from, but focused on where we are going.