Struggle & Emerge is billed as a soundtrack to the 20th century machine age.

Irish techno duo Lakker will follow up last year’s Tundra album with a maxi-EP built from field recordings related to the Dutch relationship with water.

An esoteric topic on which to pin eight tracks of techno, you’d think, but the record is a response to a commission from The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative, which asked artists to create a work about “the Dutch and water” using field recordings, TV and radio broadcasts.

Lakker went on a tour around the Netherlands to find out about the low-lying country’s complex relationship with water, and sampled historic broadcasts dating back to Nazi occupation and the devastating Zeeland flood of 1953.

The resulting eight-track EP is “a tense soundtrack to the machine driven mid-20th century that captures the complex relationship between the Dutch and the water that surrounds them – unyielding, colossal, industrial,” says the label. Struggle & Emerge is out on May 13 via the duo’s regular home of R&S, and you can stream the vicious ‘Maeslantskering Gating’ below.

Last year FACT spoke to Lakker’s Ian McDonnall and Dara Smith about making noise and resisting the internet.

Tracklist:

A1. ‘Reclamation’
A2. ‘Maeslantskering Gating’
A3. ‘Emergo’
A4. ‘Broken Clouds’

B1. ‘Ever Rising’
B2. ‘Fierljeppen’
B3. ‘5000 People’
B4. ‘Open Clouds’