Here's some opinions that are surely worth reading. Ph1l1p Sh3rburn3's review for Pitchrok (8.5 rating):
If you bought Porter Ricks' Biokinetics on CD in the 1990s and the disc is still intact, consider yourself lucky: The original edition is currently trading for $65 and up on Discogs. The price has something to do with the album's place in history: Biokinetics, a touchstone of experimental techno, was the first album released on Berlin's widely worshipped Chain Reaction label. But scarcity is a bigger factor: Biokinetics, like all of Chain Reaction's CDs from that era, came packaged in an aluminum tin that tended to crack the CD it was supposed to be protecting. (As a comment on Discogs notes, "Another Chain Reaction release, another metal box that eats up CDs.")Fortunately, 16 years later, John Twells' Massachusetts-based Type label has stepped up with a reissue of the landmark album, not just on CD (this time in a standard jewel case) but also, for the first time, on 2xLP and digital download. It's a welcome reissue, and long overdue. It comes as certain ideas from techno's fertile, experimental, mid-1990s period are being picked up by a range of underground musicians. Many of these ideas have permeated so deeply into the culture that it's hard to remember a time without them, but we wouldn't have Burial, to name just one of the duo's distant descendants, without Porter Ricks' seafloor crackle and mottled-granite color scale.
Porter Ricks were the duo of Thomas Köner, a sound artist and ambient composer, and Andy Mellwig, a techno producer who also recorded as Continuous Mode and, with former Monolake member and future Ableton founder Gerhard Behles, as Async Sense. Released in 1996, Biokinetics was Porter Ricks' debut album, gathering tracks from three vinyl EPs released that year along with three songs exclusive to the album. It had been years since I last listened to it, and the Type reissue surprised me first by reminding me how diverse the album is. "Chain Reaction" has long since become shorthand for a certain fusion of buoyant dub, hazy ambience, and coiled techno, but on Biokinetics, none of these has quite settled into place; it's a dynamic, unpredictable mixture of pulse and hiss.
The opening "Port Gentil", a precursor to the template Wolfgang Voigt would adopt under his Gas alias, pairs soft, monochromatic tones with a muted 4/4 pulse. On the surface, it couldn't be simpler, but as it pulls you in, you become aware of shifting contours and unusual dimensions, the interplay of light and shadow; it sounds like a string section tuning up atop a freight train trundling through a deep canyon.
"Nautical Dub" hews closer to textbook techno, with muscular bass pushing relentlessly forward, but it's hardly conventional. There are no sharp edges, for one thing: Percussive accents have been buffed to a dull gleam, and the upper register of the track, normally reserved for crisp, cutting hi-hats, is diffused into a fine-gauge spray that sweeps back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. Only "Port of Call" assumes dancefloor techno's chiseled boom-tick profile, but this time it's the low end that's fizzed to near nothingness. A few years later, Pole would famously construct an entire aesthetic around the vagaries of a broken Waldorf filter, but Biokinetics was first: Everything sounds broken here, all frayed cables and dusty contacts, and every gesture toward techno clarity feels like a trade-off made at the expense of another element that's left to crumble.
Dub techno has since become one of electronic music's most mannered styles, but here, Porter Ricks' tracks feel not so much like compositions, much less stylistic exercises, than answers to very specific, fairly arcane questions-- what happens when we route this LFO through that filter? How many divisions can we parse between the downbeats? How can chaos be turned into rhythm, and how far can a repetition be stretched before it's rendered senseless? Where is the boundary between tone and white noise?
On "Biokinetics 1", a heaving, wheezing synthesizer struggles to stick to a regular pulse as it's fed through disorienting delay and looped back upon itself, stumbling and confused. As an experiment in stretching a groove to the breaking point, it's as exhilarating as anything in the history of techno. "Port of Nuba" and "Nautical Nuba" submit drum machines to a similar warping process, resulting in rhythms that gallop like teams of horses. Here, you can hear the origin of Thomas Brinkmann's tumbling cadences of a year or two later, as he used a double-armed turntable to draw elliptical rhythms out of the grooves of records by Wolfgang Voigt and Richie Hawtin. And while we're talking about precedents, the leaden dirge of "Biokinetics 2" lays the groundwork for the bleak, trudging techno of Andy Stott and his Modern Love labelmates.
That Biokinetics is an album about currents is reflected in its seafaring titles, such as "Nautical Dub", "Nautical Zone", "Port of Call", etc., and also in the way that the record's energies feed back into itself. What Porter Ricks learned from dub was less about particular rhythms or stylistic tropes than about the path that a sound travels as it wends its way through the mixing desk, and how it comes out transformed on the other side. Dub's hall-of-mirrors approach to versioning, meanwhile, informs the way that many tracks here are variations upon one another: "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" bookend the album with nearly identical chords, while "Nautical Nuba" and "Port of Nuba" recycle the same drum patterns, using filters and delays to achieve very different results. Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.
Like Detroit's Drexciya, Porter Ricks (who took their name from a character from Flipper, the 1960s film and television series) used aquatic metaphors to get at larger ideas, both musical and otherwise. Ocean currents, electrical currents, sound waves, feedback; dub, techno, minimalism, noise; exchange as a fluid back-and-forth but also, as Drexciya pointed out, as a loaded dynamic, fraught, unequal-- they all swirl together, rippling in time and veering out of sync, as though pulled by complicated gravitational forces. Biokinetics is above all a music of tides, suggesting rhythm as both celestial stroke and as a vibration deep in the body, bubbling at the molecular level.
Between 1990 and 1993 Thomas Köner composed a trio of astonishing albums that represented the peak of ambient exploration alongside fellow travellers and collaborators like Paul Schütze and David Toop. Sonically traveling though arctic landscapes that were inaccessible to most life, the music that was birthed on Nunatak Gongamur, Teimo and Permafrost was created through a radical reinvention. Mic’ing up the not-so-humble gong and then treating to it a range of experiments like scraping, brushing, recording underwater and then heavily treating with effects, Köner developed a completely unique sonic language that could only be appreciated through focussed deep-listening. These epic wraith-like hallucination-inducing drones may have laid the benchmark for dark ambient but that is something of a misnomer, with Köner developing an emotional state of wide-eyed astonishment upon glancing upon terrain that was as beautiful as it was forbidding. This was by no means music of doom though. The triptych was later gathered together by Deleuzian-inspired German label Mille Plateau only to drift straight out of print before last year receiving a full and proper reissue treatment by Type, the same label who now bring us this essential tablet from the skies. Or should that be seas?1996 saw Köner unexpectedly shift this singular aesthetic towards the dancefloor in partnership with Andy Mellwig as Porter Ricks (named after the dad from 60’s dolphin soap-opera Flipper). Mellwig has released occasional work but is primarily associated with – and still very much present at – the legendary Dubplates Mastering studios in Berlin. Biokinetics was released in 1996 and compiles Porter Ricks first three 12″s for Chain Reaction with three new tunes, housed in that label’s signature metal tin, and has since become the stuff of legend. Deservedly so: Biokinetics may have been assessed on dub-techno terms, which is perfectly reasonable given its relationship to Basic Channel, and in a sense this was the template with which the duo chose to work, but the Porter Ricks project is a lot more versatile than this one genre and really represents the peak of a period of experimentation in underground music where such classifications had become extremely fluid and the boundaries between producer, musician and engineer were at a non-existent high.
Bookends ‘Port Gentil’ and ‘Nautical Zone’ both push the 12 minute mark and perhaps fit closest to the Basic Channel template whilst simultaneously pushing that mode to its most illogical and gorgeous end. Both tracks are monolithically huge, ocean-expansive meditations on sound, surreally submerged and completely relentless 4/4 buried under the subtlest of melodic flourishes with entirely vague whispers of noise and texture enveloping you in some kind of underwater, universal womb. There is something strangely loving about this music, with tension tempered by a very occasional chord at the slowest of repetitions, a benevolent hand leading you through this weird wilderness. In the thawing of ice to water (possibly aided by the drugs du jour), Köner and Mellwig seem to have located the urge to move from godforsaken to guide. ‘Biokinetics 2’ pushes this to the absolute limit, a complete reduction of texture to nothing but a sinister whisper of breath, an unrealised threat of melody and a distant cavernous machinic heartbeat. ‘Nautical Dub’ is slightly more forbidding and faster, with clapping chugging rhythms and gloopy gamelan rapidly encroaching from a distance. Over its six minute course, a menacing bassline that locks you properly in to a zombie groove slowly synthesises to become a truly evil hook. I once heard this lost in some warehouse at 3am many years ago and all semblance of normal existence seemed to vanish in a micro-minimal second. It still has that effect today.
Things get truly weird at points. ‘Biokinetics 1’ is, quite frankly, fucking nuts, taking what sounds like a vociferous sequenced sealion and watching it shimmy out of time to a muted gong. ‘Port of Nuba’ and ‘Nautical Nuba’ take this chattering out-of control abstraction and incorporate the beat around it, making for some of the most paradoxically strange dance music you are ever likely to hear – the accelerated pulse rate playing havoc with your internal rhythm as blocks of noise get pushed round the edges of your senses.
Biokinetics was the start of a truly fertile period of experimentation for the duo and maybe the last truly great experimental period for techno; perhaps even a watershed moment for whatever post-rock actually was. The combination of Köner’s avant-garde background and Mellwig’s studio and techno-savvy ended up mirroring an approach to sound comparable to My Bloody Valentine on Loveless (which dropped between Köner’s first two albums); the long-term impact of ecstasy having an inverse effect on music production and removing all its physical edges. Köner and Mellwig actually went on to complete a truly stunning collaboration with Sonic Boom’s E.A.R. project, which at the time included MBV’s Kevin Shields as well as luminaries like Kevin ‘The Bug” Martin and legendary improv percussionist Eddie Prévost, as well as an equally brilliant and bizarre follow-up Porter Ricks album for Mille Plateau and a full-blown collaboration with the aforementioned Martin and Justin Broadrick (in Techno Animal mode) on Symbiotics.
16 years down the line and the passing of time has done absolutely nothing to diminish the radical and immersive power of this record or any of Porter Ricks’ later forays. Combined with Köner’s solo work, Biokinetics is a pivotal moment in electronic music and a decisive moment in one of the most important and brilliant oeuvres in contemporary music.