“Life moves pretty fast,” were the worldly words of wisdom from Ferris Bueller. In terms of electronic music, trends move pretty fast and depending on the style they are crafted in it’s easy for tracks to sound dated after a period of time. Martin Landsky is putting his tracks to this test with a forthcoming LP aptly titled Werkschau (retrospective). As a teaser we have the Werkschau EP featuring two early tracks from the Naked EP from 2000, and a reworking of one of his most popular tracks “1000 Miles” from more recent years, updated here under the name “2000 Miles.”
Choosing to remake a track he released only three and half years ago is an odd choice. It would have made more sense in terms of updating an older track to choose something from the beginning of his career. The paint job Landsky gives “2000 Miles” does add some gloss to the original but that feels more from a slight advancement in sound quality and processing than anything else. The rotund bass and air of cool horror that gave the original its big room feel is traded in for a much more compressed bottom end and layers of extraneous sounds that clutter where once there was space to breathe. On certain levels “Naked” doesn’t show too many signs of age; the deep pulse of the organ chords lays out a good base for the track, though there are weaknesses. Percussion-wise the backward clap sounds cheap and clunky and the vocal snippet feels very dated. “Monitor One” aims for the boompty house vibe that Classic Recordings were championing around the turn of the millennium, but that was a sound belonging very much to that time which, save for some of the label’s stand-out releases, doesn’t carry much weight now. As a teaser for his full length look at his past, the Werkschau EP comes across as a time capsule piece rather than a collection of timeless classics.
