Atlantis

The third ‘X’ project from Jeff Mills and Robert Hood (with no Mike Banks who’d been a part of the first two) was a techno album based around an Atlantean concept, made up of unrelenting, minimalist future-percussion and looping, pulsing electronics, interspersed with spacey abstract interludes and diamond-hard mechanical tracks. There are occasional moments of tranquillity in between all the flexing of synthetic muscles, but overall there’s an intensity to the production, a sense almost that the machines were being squeezed, stretched, pushed right up to their limits and that they were operating at their maximum settings.