Indio ‎– Indio

Excellent ambient techno from John Beltran. I'm not sure what Seth Taylor and Sam McQueen had to do with this but they do say thanks in the booklet. Anyways, the music is quite sublime. It's quite different from his famous 'Ten Days of Blue' because this record features a lot more drum programming. Not the downtempo stuff I expected but excellent, dense production and proper techno and drum and bass rhythms throughout. I read somewhere that Beltran got bored with detroit techno but I really can't hear it in this music.

Considering how Detroitian John Beltran’s early albums were, it’s no surprise then that his Indio project appears on perhaps the definitive Detroit label, Transmat. Beltran here returns to the smooth, complex arrangements that marked his work on Peacefrog. “I Need You in the Fall” is a fragile number, complemented by a melancholy piano line and some light bleeps. “A Thousand Storms,” instead of being all thunder and lightning, is more a light rain falling from an overcast sky. And the final track, “Snowdrifts,” does exactly that: drift along with some icy synth sweeps. Transmat, though not prolific, nonetheless delivers the goods.