John Beltran is Detroit techno’s foremost daydreamer. His first albums under his own name, 1995’s Earth & Nightfall and 1996’s cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers. By 1997’s The Cry, the first album released under his Placid Angles moniker, Beltran had drifted even further into new-age sounds, the beats dislodging themselves and seemingly hanging in mid-air.
As the next generation of electronic musicians, including Four Tet and Skee Mask, absorbed…

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