Huren

If Dave Foster wasn’t one of the greats of techno, he could pass for a prophet of doom. He’s got a skull-like ‘the end is extremely fucking nigh’ look and a gaze full of strange, dark worlds beyond our own. That alone may be a strong claim to fame in this day and age, but what we are here to celebrate are the decades of visionary music he’s released. When Teste made their first experiments we were still stuck beyond the heavy iron curtain, and I personally had just seen the world for the first time. Since then Dave came to also be known for his solo work – first as Perceptrons, and later as Huren or MRTVI. He’s taken part in some other important collaborations outside of the legendary Teste, most notably Ontario Hospital or O/H with Richard Oddie (of Orphx). It’s tough to summarise Dave’s music in a few sentences – as someone genuinely preoccupied with constantly learning and absorbing he has created widely-ranging things. It is, however, certainly very telling that his Huren project has been instrumental in defining the cold, noisy and unforgiving industrialized sound of Zhark Recordings. We’re very happy to say that after a 25-year hiatus we’re getting new Teste material soon. The Box Man EP is out on Phase Fatale’s BITE imprint on June 18!

In the records

Dave calls STM 258 “The emotional, cosmic, and occult world of /ϟ/HUREN/ϟ/”. There’s a lot to that title – it’s not at all one of those four-to-the-floor mixes. Rather, its most striking attributes are the variety and idiosyncratic mood. Like a classic horror flick, Huren’s musical world is tongue-in-cheek at times, melancholically contemplative at others, and always riding potent emotional waves. The combination of artists looks like the formula for something horribly misshapen – Klaus Schulze into the swag goth of Salem, late ‘70s punk experiments from Fancy Rosy, dirty No Trend into the beach punk of The Magnetic Fields, a Mayhem rehearsal recording… There’s definitely a bit of glorious ADHD going on in this mix. We also can’t resist mentioning the unreleased Huren live recording from Detroit in the mid-’90s – razor-sharp old-school industrial sounds. This is definitely one for lovers of unpolished gems that can only be created through the rejection of music-making rules. Whilst listening to this mix what came to mind was Franz Stuck’s Hercules and the Hydra – its ominous dreamlike imagery seems to supplement these sounds rather beautifully.