Echoes October CD of the Month: Bluetech

Let's Go To the Hop with Bluetech's Spacehop Chronicles 2 - Echoes October CD of the Month

by John Diliberto 9/27/2025

Bluetech is an artist who emerged fully formed in the early 2000s with his first two albums, Prima Materia in 2003 and Sines and Singularities in 2005. And while signposts and signatures from those releases are still part of his work, he’s continued to evolve with some of the most emotionally propulsive electronic music out there.

Bluetech is Evan Bartholomew. He grew up studying classical piano into his teens, but made the switch to electronic sounds when he explored the 90s rave and trance scenes. He started out as a laptop composer on his first several records, but over the last decade or so, he’s been moving into analog hardware and modular synthesizers. He brings it all together on Spacehop Chronicles 2, his follow-up to volume one released in 2014.

There’s a story behind the Spacehop Chronicles which is the legend of Laika, the stray dog who became a Russian cosmonaut on one of their first experimental flights in 1957. The dog wound up dying in orbit. There is a heroic side to this story, but Bluetech looks at the other side of a poor stray dog, cast unknowingly into space. He writes, “I was struck by the hubris of man—the ultimate betrayal of a street dog rescued by her handlers and then sent on a one-way journey alone.”

That sounds like the brief for a downer album, and knowing that story I can hear an element of anger and dismay, or at least project it. But if I didn’t know that story, this album has the electronic exuberance of many Bluetech releases. Even a track with a title like “Artemis Program (Laika’s Lament),” is far from a dirge. It sounds more like a soulful journey with a singer who sounds like Cold Specks.

The album flows as a 40-minute seamless journey, each track consciously composed as a merging into the following composition. It results in a rollercoaster that you don’t want to end. It opens with its inspiration, “Kudryavka,” another name given to Laika. It’s a slowly bouncing track with sequencers added on top of each other in synchro lock, before Bluetech unleashes a tremolo-dappled synth line that suddenly launches into the next track, “Restless.” There’s a variation on the synth line of “Kudryavka,” but it’s a longer, more colorful track with gurgling synths, random sound effects, cascading Rhodes piano-like chimes, and an ethereal uncredited female vocal singing about time and restlessness.

That track marches, almost literally, into “Echoes of Orion,” a inexorable trek through glistening electric keyboard cascades and funky wah-wah synth solos and an ethereal voice from the heavens. The groove reminds me of Massive Attack’s “Pray for Rain” from Heligoland and has melodies and effects coming at you from all directions.

“The Black Sky” has a filtered voice positing an inner existential conversation that Laika might have had. A wailing sustained synth solo wraps around the voice, then dissolves into alien squiggles and mechanical breakdowns against a menacing drum groove while Bluetech slowly bends and twists synth glissandos in a mournful lament.

“Limonchik,” another nickname for Laika, is an electro-lounge track with singer BISHØP intoning a song of universal love, while Bluetech howls on mutated trumpet-like tones as well as Fender Rhodes fusion runs. It’s a different sound for Bluetech, but still has the same elements of kinetic movement, hocketing notes and free-form joy.

That segues into “Amorphous Crystals of Cassiopeia,” which sounds as trippy as that name implies, with contrapuntal melodies and interlocking, revolving sequences, like one of those perpetual motion desk mobiles of interlaced rings.

“Chronos Empire of Rust” ends the album with Bluetech joined by multi-instrumentalist and, in this particular case, modular synth maven, Lisa Belladonna. She may be one of the best soloists in electronic music right now. I mean, actual solos, as she deploys a flute-like timbre for a wild, but pensive keyboard run, definitely loving those glissando bends. Even though it’s the last track, put the album on loop and you’ll have a perfect transition back to the beginning. And you’ll want to do that.

With Spacehop Chronicles 2,  Bluetech has created an album for the ages with inspirations from the past. Although he’s been informed by house, techno, electronica, downtempo, EDM and all of their variations, he consistently transcends those genre tags to create definitive head-trip music for the 21st century. What he takes from dance is a music of movement, but not just your body, it’s your entire mental being given both a massage and a trajectory into new patterns.