On Repeat: Unspecified Enemies and Romance In The Age of Adaptive Feedback

On Repeat: Harold Heath looks back at some of the best electronic music albums of 2025 in this special series for 5 Mag.

Between 1999 and 2003, collectively as Unspecified Enemies, Louis Moreno (aka Louis Digital) and Simon Walley (aka CiM) created a series of highly rated, idiosyncratic techno and electro tracks. Now Moreno has returned to the forgotten samples and MIDI info the pair worked on back then, and used them as the basis for a new seven-track Unspecified Enemies album of distinctive, multi-layered, and warmly inviting techno. I’m hesitating to say melodic techno because of the current usage of the term to describe a very specific part of the dance music spectrum, which wouldn’t actually describe the music on this album, but to be clear, this techno is melodic.

The tracks “Glass Skin” and “Yield Compressor” have something of the past about them, something in the rhythms, the arrangements, or the production, it’s hard to nail down exactly what, but they possess a kind of almost naive charm that compares very favorably to the contemporary black-clad metallic misery of the more formulaic end of European dystopian techno.

Elsewhere, the sound is less easy to place, chronologically speaking, with whatever original data or audio info having been transmogrified into dense, richly textured and timbre-ed contemporary tracks. But throughout the album — as demonstrated by the glimmering layers of crystaline synth pads on “Her Husband Is A Lawyer,” or “Mathematics Parc”’s enveloping, soft sonics, or the bittersweet chords on the title track, there’s a similarly extremely welcome musical optimism.

⚪️ Romance In The Age of Adaptive Feedback Tracklisting

Unspecified Enemies: Romance In The Age of Adaptive Feedback (Numbers / 12" Vinyl + Digital)
1. Mathematics Parc (07:47)
2. Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback (06:03)
3. Glass Skin (07:41)
4. Nixon/Volcker (Mezzanine Level) (01:26)
5. Yield Compressor (06:44)
6. Her Husband is a Lawyer (09:29)
7. Bonaventure Effect (05:57)

⚪️ Disclosure Statement

This record was not submitted as a promo.

✳ On Repeat: Harold Heath’s 2025 In Albums /

❇   On Repeat: Unspecified Enemies and Romance In The Age of Adaptive Feedback
❇   On Repeat: DJ Bone and The End of Never
❇   On Repeat: Futuristic Sonics for the Soul on rRoxymore’s “Juggling Dualities”
❇   On Repeat: Maurice Fulton’s sparkling house album “Night Blooming Cereus”
❇   On Repeat: A decade of Ron Trent tracks come together on “Lift Off”

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