It is sometimes difficult to say exactly what makes some techno interesting. Eat Static's U.S. debut is certainly one of those interesting techno projects, but the difficulty of explanation remains.
Eat Static started as a sideproject of two members of England's Ozric Tentacles. If you know Ozric Tentacles, a band for whose music even the term jazz odyssey would be woefully inadequate, you might be able to surmise a few things about Eat Static: they will be weird, expansive, and indifferent to general trends in their genre. And it's true.
Take the second track, "Dionysiac," for example: jungle breakbeats, mysterious Bulgarian voices, and a wildly careening string arrangement stolen from Middle Eastern chart hits. The sounds and samples on all the tracks are lovingly bent and shaped into a neo-60s-sci-fi-atmosphere even while pulsating across a 90s dance floor.
The use of outer-space imagery, occasional spoken-word samples from sci-fi films, and the implicitly spacey sonics add a deep-space hush to the album, making it listenable at home. Epsylon is not the sleepy ambient of Orb or Skylab, but the trance-ish beats are not too agitated and frenetic for non-club listening. This versatility is lacking from less interesting techno and house, and makes Eat Static's Epsylon well worth checking out.
