The Capsule's Pride (Bikes) - Bwana

Techno has always been more of a Tech-no thanks for me. I lived in Berlin for six months and you can't escape the stuff. The constant thud emanates from grimy corners of the city at all hours of the day. It's so sobering when you're off on a midday stroll in the sun and come across a dingy, thudding warehouse with the techno crew still raving away from last night. It's even worse being in there. I once arrived at the doors of a club as the sun came up, only to be plunged into deep darkness inside some abandoned building, the only light being the occasional flaring of someone's cigarette or the bright, early morning summer sun bursting through when anyone opened the door, the light flooding in to mock my misfortune before the big warehouse door swung shut again and plunged me back into the continuous beat of the dull techno. What made it worse was how seriously all the Berlin club crew took it. Standing in static rows facing the DJ, doing the "techno-shuffle" from one foot to the other and whistling at the slightest predictable drop or dodgy DJ effect. Techno really is one of the least fun music forms ever. Not what I want at 7am.*

So a techno producer called Bwana based in Berlin has all the hallmarks for me to pass this one by. Even the name Bwana is enough to get on my nerves. But am I glad that I checked this out. 

The Capsule's Pride (Bikes) was originally floating around on the Dark Web through Tor but is now available for free download through a pretty cool website (link below). The whole album is a tribute to the 1988 anime film, Akira. For some reason I've never seen Akira, but I had heard some of the soundtrack and know that it's a bit of something special. Bwana's album is made exclusively from samples of the soundtrack and has so much more mood and emotion in it than the usual techno thud. 

There are many of the usual techno tropes; repetition, ping-ponging beats, deep electro rhythms. But there's so much more going on than that. On the track The Colonel's Mistake, The Scientist's Regret, the beat is a sample of someone saying "Akira" chopped into three bits, A-ki-ra. There's a lot of vocal samples which gives everything more character, makes it interesting, no longer just a cold beat. What's really great is how Bwana uses the traditional Japanese musical sounds from the soundtrack and morphs them into some great techno. This is techno with some soul, something to make you move and, dare I say it, it's really fun.          

Check out the full album in this Youtube playlist  and download the album in full at the pretty cool website made for the album. 

*Despite how it sounds, Berlin is great for a party and I loved it.

Bwana
Capsule's Pride (Bikes)
LuckyMe
Vinyl LP out: 15/07/2016 at Norman Records