markant has followed up the excellent infam with his first honest-to-god full length cd, and we find the distance between carsten endraß and autechre growing with successive releases by each act. this may be because æ have redefined themselves with every album and ep while markant has been using envane as a stable reference since, like, 1997, but whatever. it's still pretty good, if a bit familiar, when taken in measured doses.
endraß's sound is specific enough to sound almost monotonous over time, making the ideal markant/lautwandel release a four-song 12" or ep. while any seventy minute cd can be an arduous affair, vice versa, a collection of decent, long, very similar tracks, is downright ponderous at times. played in a random mix with other artists, it's obvious that markant's got a lot more going for him than the host of other acts doing the crunchy, melancholic idm thing, but you can only coast on being better than the competition in a genre of diminishing returns for so long. with some ambition and the will to mix things up a bit, markant could jump to the head of the intelligent techno pack. with vice versa, he appears to be content to run in place. again.
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