Fantasy FM - Bristol

So much late-nineties techno sounds less like tracks and more like tools. But there’s a weird malevolence to it that has an elusive but lasting appeal. Basically, it cranks, even though, as a period, it’s a bit lost to history—none of the romance of the early nineties, none of the social movement of Berlin-identified minimal or the more recent fluorescence of psychedelic techno. Anyway, this 94-minute tape is exactly the kind of thing I mean. Taken from a short lived UK pirate station—it existed “weekends only between two and four weeks between spring and summer 1997,” according to The Pirate Archive—it does nothing but pummel, grimy and anonymous, as the DJ mostly stays off the microphone. I love it.