Rave Review: Exm & Roel Funcken - Cilcit

Touched Music has carved out its own strain of braindance over the years—one that favors abstraction over formula and complexity over comfort. Where some in the genre trace a lineage back to Richard D. James, this camp feels more spiritually aligned with Richard Devine: meticulous, cerebral, and unafraid to fracture rhythm into a thousand glinting pieces.

For its latest release, Cilcit, the label reunites with returning contributors exm and Roel Funcken, who curate an album that plays like an unraveling spool of circuitry—coiled tight, then slowly let loose. This is electronic music in constant mutation, its components rewiring themselves in real time.

There’s something almost defiant about the album’s scale. Each track stretches beyond eight minutes, with most hovering closer to twelve, yet the expansiveness never drags. Instead, the length becomes a canvas for escalation. Scaly rhythms slither beneath rubbery percussion; breakbeats collide with classical fragments until the whole system feels on the verge of overload. Circuits threaten to burn out, but the current keeps flowing.

From a distance, the structures can seem deceptively simple—loops circling, motifs repeating. But zoom in and the illusion collapses. Patterns splinter. Micro-edits twitch at the edges. The deeper you listen, the less stable the architecture becomes. Tracks fold in on themselves like an M.C. Escher rendering translated into sound: a tunnel with no fixed orientation, forever turning inside out.

Cilcit isn’t casual listening. It demands focus and rewards surrender. For those willing to let their minds be subsumed by its digital spellcraft, it offers a bracing, boundary-dissolving journey—braindance pushed to its most intricate and uncompromising edge.

(The Lunatic is an Austin, Texas–based raver spreading the good word through his reviews and blog—and by selling the weirdest fucking electronic vinyl around.)