With his debut album as DJ Sports, Milán Zaks was the first in Aarhus, Denmark’s Regelbau collective to make a splash beyond the crew’s homegrown network of DIY labels. But his brother Natal Zaks, best known as DJ Central, is right behind him. Together, the two producers have smudged Regelbau’s odd footprint while teasing out the intricacies of their 1990s house fixation, and on his own, Natal has been even more active than his brother. In addition to three EPs on Amsterdam’s influential Dekmantel label, he’s also been responsible for three of the best records to come from the collective to date, including the dreamy Basil EP for Help Recordings and the ambient breakbeats of “Drive,” with the Danish singer Erika Casier, on Regelbau itself—and that’s just a smattering of what he’s been up to.
With a new record for Jonny Nash’s Melody as Truth label, this time under his Palta alias, Natal Zaks reveals yet another side to his sound. Until now, his music has tended to be rooted in ’90s dance dialects like West Coast deep house or flickering electro/freestyle hybrids, but here he moves away from the dancefloor entirely, putting pulse over rhythm and atmosphere over melody. Just five tracks and 31 minutes long, Universel is essentially a mini-LP (a favorite format of Melody as Truth’s founder), but it’s still immersive and enveloping despite its brevity.
Universel’s opener is as far out as Zaks has ventured yet. With his synth tuned to an organ-like patch, a fistful of chords provides the watery backdrop to free-flowing drumming on deep, boomy toms; raindrop-like synth blips and the flicker of a ticking sprinkler lend to the misty air. There’s no discernible meter or tempo, just a wide arc of glistening pitter-patter scattered through the track. The freeform approach calls to mind the New York group Georgia’s “Ama Yes Uzume”; shorn of context, it would be easy to imagine it as something off a no-name new-age cassette thrifted from some remote town in the California redwoods.
With “Tabt Optagelse” (“Lost Recording”), Zaks locks into a steady, mid-tempo groove, loosely weaving shakers and hand percussion into a rippling approximation of a barefoot drum circle. This is as driving as the record will get, yet it still feels ambient: The synths are drifting and diffuse, and there’s no real separation between foreground and background. The percussion stretches out across the stereo field in such a way that it feels like you’re standing in the middle of a forest clearing, ringed by crickets and birdsong and gentle rainfall.
“På Gensyn” (“See You Again”) veers off piste once again, with brushed cymbals and bubbling arpeggios churning away while gravelly bass tones dive almost too low to register as actual notes. There’s no evidence of MIDI clock or any other kind of electronic timekeeping; in its accidental rumbling, it sounds like the collision of a weather system and a drum closet. “At Ville,” a gelatinous moiré of pulse and ping, is more rhythmic but similarly abstract; it sounds a little like a dubbed-out take on the ambient house Zaks records as Olo, with all the beats muted and the analog delay unit submerged in a bucket of soap bubbles. Only with the closing “Optagelse 16A” does Zaks return to the land of groove. It doesn’t take long for it to say pretty much everything it has to say, yet it keeps on rolling for nine and a half minutes, dubby and deeply tranquil; it’s less a song than an invitation to dissolve into Zaks’ fantasy world-building. He’s made other records that are more complex, more tuneful, and even more immediately satisfying, but when it comes to blissed-out, absent-minded reverie, Universel marks the sweet spot.
