GPU Panic's Get Physical Debut Puts The Piano Away

Vanessa Nguyen · 26 September 2021

GPU Panic's first release for Get Physical Music arrives without the piano. The Lisbon producer built his live reputation on playing keys and synth together, in real time, at festivals like Neopop, one of Portugal's biggest stages for techno's harder end. Wrong Club, out September 17, doesn't lean on any of that. Three tracks. Fifteen minutes and four seconds, total. Every one of them is built for a sound system rather than a stage with a keyboard on it, and closer Getting Time is where that bet pays off hardest.

It's the right label to make that case on. Get Physical started in Berlin in 2002, founded by M.A.N.D.Y., DJ T and Booka Shade, and it built its name on the back of a single 2005 track, M.A.N.D.Y. vs Booka Shade's "Body Language," which went on to give its name to the label's long-running compilation series. That same year, Get Physical took Label of the Year from both DJ Mag and Mixmag, the best-selling label on Beatport across every genre on the platform. Two decades on, it's still built on the harder, housier end of German electronic music, closer to the classic M.A.N.D.Y. tech-house lineage than to the newer, more atmospheric melodic techno coming out of labels like Afterlife. Wrong Club sits exactly there and doesn't soften it.

Oh Really opens hard. Drums up front, electronics wound tight around them, synths that stay sleek instead of swallowing the low end — and it's the playful one of the three, built around a percussive hook that keeps recurring without wearing out its welcome. By the two-minute mark the vocal chops have mangled into something robotic and almost childish, built up rather than dropped in all at once. Closer keeps the same tempo and swaps the texture. The drums step back a notch and the synth stacking does the work instead. Several lines run at once rather than one melody carrying the track. Getting Time closes it at 5:35, the longest cut here, and it earns the extra minute. The drum programming speeds up. The bass stops sitting under the track and starts grinding through it, which is a different job than the one it had on the first two tracks.

Wrong Club is also the last of the label's Detroit Gets Physical teaser EPs, ahead of the full compilation next month. Get Physical's run this kind of series before, Africa Gets Physical and Berlin Gets Physical among them, and closing one out means the last preview has to hit harder than what came before it. This one does, and it does it without borrowing Detroit's own sound the way a lesser closer might have — no obvious homage, no reference track wearing another city's name.

Ribeiro's own catalogue backs the read up. He's a 2016 graduate of Red Bull Music Academy's Montreal session, he's released through Discotexas before this, and he's half of MXGPU, the duo he's run with Moullinex since 2016, built on the same live piano-and-synth instincts Wrong Club sets aside for three tracks. None of that shows up here, and that's the point of the record: an artist known for one register spending an EP proving he has another. It's a bigger swing than a first release on a new label usually takes.

Getting Time is the one to play out. It's the hardest and the longest, which is the right order for a closer, and it works at the point in a set where the piano-and-synth version of this artist would never get booked. Oh Really and Closer hold their own too, at 4:48 and 4:41, long enough to build properly and short enough to sit inside somebody else's set instead of demanding the whole hour. That's three tracks doing three different jobs on one EP, which is more than most three-track releases manage. It reads less like an introduction and more like a producer picking his register and committing to it for fifteen minutes straight.