Back To Mine With Fernando Lagreca

Uruguayan-born and Barcelona-based since the early 2000s, Fernando Lagreca has spent the better part of the last two decades developing a singular presence within Europe’s electronic underground. A dedicated hardware practitioner, his work sits at the intersection of hypnotic and groovy techno, analog experimentation and live performance, eschewing laptops in favour of a tactile, machine-driven approach that foregrounds spontaneity and sonic imperfection. As a producer, Fernando has built a substantial catalogue of EPs, singles and full-length releases that move fluidly across Techno’s deeper and more hypnotic territories. He has appeared at Sónar, Amsterdam Dance Event and BIME, alongside club performances at Tanzhaus West, Ritter Butzke, Birgit & Bier, Fundbureau, Club NL and Razzmatazz, among others. As he releases his brilliant brand new Techno album, ’Motion Tactic’, DMCWorld goes Back to Mine with the innovative Fernando Lagreca.

Roni Size + Reprazent – Brown Paper Bag (Mercury)
Part of the New Forms project, this track is a real classic, defining a moment in drum & bass’ crossover into wider electronic consciousness: jazz-inflected double bass, razor-sharp breakbeats and Bristol’s soundsystem sensibility. Equal parts futurist club music and live-band experimentation, and totally inspiring to me at that time. Always present in my home sessions.

Goldie – Inner City Life (London Records)
Inner City Life is a masterpiece — a track that encapsulates an entire era’s emotional weight and sonic imagination with rare elegance. It remains a towering ode to jungle’s most human and cinematic impulses, and one that never disappears from my home listening rotation. Love it.

Aphex Twin – Flim (Warp)
If there’s one track that still overwhelms me every time I hear it, it’s this extraordinary piece by Aphex Twin. Simultaneously fragile and intricate, minimal yet emotionally immense, it carries a kind of untouchable sublimity — the sort of music that triggers full Stendhal syndrome with every listen.

Adam F – Circles (Section 5 Records, 181 Recordings)
Another mid-’90s jungle/drum & bass masterpiece — a track whose energy and emotional pull never seem to fade with time. Every listen still sends me back to the clandestine parties of 1995–1996 in my home-town Montevideo, where this sound felt less like club music and more like a glimpse into another future.

Boards Of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy (Warp)
No top 10 of mine would feel complete without a track by Boards of Canada. Their music has that rare ability to momentarily dissolve the weight of the world — melancholic yet strangely comforting, like faded memories glowing through analogue haze. Maybe nothing truly gets fixed in the end, but few sounds offer such a beautiful and deeply human kind of escapism.

Plaid – Dancers (Warp)
Warp has always been one of those labels that naturally ends up shaping a Sunday afternoon listening session. If you come over, you’ll probably hear a lot of it at home, along with Plaid. There’s a very distinct sense of elegance in their sound, with harmonies that feel like they lift you up and let your mind drift. It’s simply immense.

Duran Duran – Rio (Capitol / EMI)
This is where my pop side comes in, and it’s very real. This track is a proper blast. I still remember it was the first album I ever bought on my own, walking into a record store at 12 years old and choosing it myself. That moment basically marked the beginning of listening as an act of personal identity, rather than just absorbing what was playing at home – which wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t mine. And this record, as the lyrics of the track suggest, carries that same feeling: “You know you’re something special and you look like you’re the best.” Pure magic from Duran Duran.

New Order – The Perfect Kiss (Factory)
Another set of absolute masters – genuinely one of the projects I’ve admired the most over the years. Their catalogue is full of essential, standout tracks, but this one almost feels like a condensation of all their sonic “tics” and obsessions. You’ve got those distinctive keyboard lines from Gillian Gilbert, the sequencer-driven architecture, those slightly off-tune vocal deliveries from Sumner, and that unmistakable melodic bass approach associated with Peter Hook, squeezing the chorus pedal. On top of that, the relentless drum programming and percussion layers from Stephen Morris push everything into that wired, kinetic tension they’ve always done so well.

Kraftwerk – Neon Lights (Kling Klang Musik / Capitol)
Neon Lights has always carried a very specific kind of sadness for me — something I was drawn to from a very young age. There’s a hypnotic cadence and a sonic palette that feels both distant and intimate, almost like it’s illuminating memories you never fully lived, yet still somehow belong to you. It has that unmistakable retro-futurist aura of Kraftwerk. Choosing just one track from them is almost impossible, but this one, in particular, seems to contain an entire emotional architecture within its simplicity.

Fennesz  – Endless Summer (Editions Mego / Morr Music)
It takes me back to my first summer in Barcelona more than twenty years ago — that specific Mediterranean stillness, where everything feels suspended between calm and a future that hadn’t quite taken shape yet, but already carried a quiet sense of defiance. The album itself works like a recurring emotional checkpoint: evocative, romantic, intense, and somehow resolute all at once. I return to it every so often as a grounding mechanism, almost like a storm pilot bringing everything back into focus when the horizon starts to blur.

Fernando Lagreca ‘Motion Tactics’ Album is out now.