In his LWE interview with Will Lynch, Seth Troxler let this morsel slip about Berlin’s famed club scene: “…it feels like people are going through the motions sometimes, you know?” When he comes to America, he goes on to say, “it’s a lot easier to blow people’s minds.” I haven’t partied in Berlin since the fall of 2006, so I can’t weigh in personally. But I got to thinking again about Troxler’s bittersweet observation while listening to the latest Ostgut Ton mix, Tama Sumo’s Panorama Bar 02. Unlike Cassy’s epochal Panorama Bar 01, mixed at the height of Berlin’s mythical status among underground club music heads, or Marcel Dettmann’s techno masterclass Berghain 02, Tama Sumo’s mix feels less like a codification of a local sound than a nudge towards getting a legendary dance floor excited again.
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Andy Stott, Night Jewel
Modern Love have made a huge impact in 2009; the past few months alone have seen crucial releases by Claro Intelecto, MLZ and Demdike Stare. Now it’s label staple Andy Stott’s turn as he returns with only his second release this year, and it’s one that’s been well worth waiting for. Where Stott’s “Brief Encounter/Drippin” twelve he dropped earlier in the year pandered to his late night deep techno and dubstep sides, the single sided “Night Jewel” finds Stott in a much more lively state of mind, ready for some serious sneaker squeaking.
Leron Carson, The Red Lightbulb Theory
Though “Red Lightbulb Theory” has been charted by, among others, Lawrence and Tama Sumo, and comes “highly recommended” at nearly every vinyl outlet, one wonders if anyone besides Theo Parrish, whose Sound Signature label put the record out, and Omar-S, who is credited with engineering and editing work, knows just who the hell Leron Carson is. Dude has the sparsest Discogs entry I’ve ever seen, with only one previous release listed: the B-side of SS012, “The 1987 EP,” which featured his (almost literally) hypnotic “China Trax” along with Parrish’s “Insane Asylum.” Apparently, the five tracks on this two-record set come from the same sessions as ““China Trax” — recorded when Carson was fifteen years old. In Parrish’s own words, this music was “hand made, meaning no sequencing was used for the keys on any of the songs featured, using cassette tape overdubs — a lost science.”
Fabrice Lig & Titonton Duvante, That Connection EP
When it comes to artist collaborations, there are some that pique interest and others that positively get mouths watering. For me a Fabrice Lig and Titonton Duvante pairing falls closer to the latter category. Both bring a defined perspective to each project they tackle, usually resulting in something interesting if not down right essential. For Lig, his productions have used Detroit and Chicago as a touchstone for inspiration, focusing on potent melodic themes that guide his techno and house creations into vibrant areas of musicality that can put a collective smile on whole dance floors. His recent Evolutionism album as Soul Designer took that approach in full, yielding salient references to jazz and funk seen through a white European lens. While not as prolific, Duvante’s output has been ripe with genre stretching creativity from day one. His aptly titled “Embryonic” EP melded moody strings with time stretched electro breaks, foreshadowing the broken beat movement by several years. Since then Duvante’s attacked techno from several angles but always with a firm attention to complex rhythm structures and frequently eyebrow-raising explicit song titles.
Joshua Iz, Flower Sparks
There is a long tradition in aesthetics presupposing that art should aspire to resemble nature. Art’s artifice, all the craft and design, should disappear from view, leaving behind only a surface on which elements seem to move with natural necessity. The enjoyment of art stems in part from experiencing something that seems almost like nature, while all along still knowing somehow that it’s artificial, shaped by the hands of man. The chance of enjoying the four tracks offered up by Joshua Iz for his second release on his own Vizual Records thus seems summed up by the title. “Flower Sparks” reflects how these numbers seem to unfold organically, yet also use a distinctly synthetic sound palette that reminds you of the electrical energy whirring through machines that makes it possible. What’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Flower Sparks” was the name of the VST plug-in Joshua used to generate the synth lines that take center stage throughout — buzzing with electric warmth, they wind through twisting melodies in fluid undulation.
Tristen/Edward, Along These Strings/Calm
More than any other label I know, the Berlin-based White is the antithesis of the white label culture that’s bubbled up over the last few years. Where white label producers obscure their identity, ostensibly to keep the focus on the music, White brings audiences literally face to face with its artists, care of record sleeves adorned with their pictures. Considering their manifesto of “foster[ing] an environment for young artists to play and work, create and destroy,” I suspect their aesthetic is not the result of runaway egos but rather an attempt to reconnect in an era rife with music lacking personality and labels that do little to stand out. The label’s eighth release features the mug of Tristan, a long time member of the White crew who makes his vinyl debut, and Edward, the imprint’s most prolific producer.
Shackleton, Three EPs
Despite his dubstep pedigree, Sam Shackleton’s association with Perlon really hasn’t raised many eyebrows. “Blood On My Hands,” his seminal 9/11 anti-anthem caned by Cassy and eventually remixed to mindblowing effect by Ricardo Villalobos, introduced the minimal scarf-wearing set to the British producer’s tribal, ethereal take on bass music. By the time Shackleton returned Villalobos’s favor with his labyrinthine, original-besting take on “Minimoonstar” for Perlon in 2008, the technoid wing of dubstep — thanks in no small part to the Shack’s beefed-up Muslimgauze breaks — had already burrowed itself so deeply into techno that Shackleton actually felt like a logical and hardly controversial addition to Zip’s and Markus Nikolai’s fabled roster.
Alex Cortex/DJ Stingray 313, Soliton/Null Physics
Alex Cortex has recently announced his exit from techno music, citing (among other reasons) a lack of gigs and cool label interest. Don’t blame Dan Lodig or Art Vega, though. Three of the last five releases for their Pomelo imprint have showcased the diverse Cortex stylings. The latest of these finds Cortex working alongside kindred spirit Sherard Ingram, here assuming his DJ Stingray 313 handle.
Download: Stimming, Silver Surfer
When I first heard Stimming’s debut album, Reflections, in early 2009, his organic, cobblestone house tracks plucked and pulled themselves in a very different direction than his house peers. Of course now 2009 seems like a year besotted in hand drums and organic textures, yet Stimming’s sound still crackles with a unique energy and pluck that’s far more compelling. Take “Silver Surfer” from Reflections, a spidery crawl through Stimming’s string section with melodies that sting like a snapped rubberband. Seriously, take it:
Traversable Wormhole, Traversable Wormhole Vol. 4
In Physics, the idea of a traversable wormhole is an exciting one. As valid solutions of Einstein’s General Relativity, wormholes allow travel between two points in spacetime, leading to the possibility of time travel as well as travel to far corners of our universe in timescales we’re familiar with. They can also, however, act as bridges to neighboring universes, which is primarily where Traversable Wormhole, the mysterious producer and label, derives their inspiration.
Cassy, Simply Devotion
When Cassy Britton released the inaugural Panorama Bar mix back in 2006, her selection preempted attempts to blur the boundaries between deep house and minimalism. However, as her sets so fluently attest, the devil really is in the detail. The prevailing flavour on Panorama Bar 01, after all, was a tendency to fuse timeless reduced techno — Ø, DBX, Baby Ford — with the warm tones of Rick Wade, D5 and Redshape, not a convoluted combination of one-dimensional tinny mnml and coldly rigid interpretations of deep house. Given her previous form, it’s no surprise that she employs a judiciously sharp approach to track selection for Simply Devotion, her mix CD for Cocoon Recordings. This time however, it seems Cassy has been caught in the house headwinds.
Newworldaquarium, The Force (Âme Remixes)
A fellow LWE contributor, writing for a rival website, admitted to initially questioning the wisdom of tasking Âme to remix Newworldaquarium. Dismissing much of their output as merely “a number of decent house records”, the charge leveled at Messrs Kristian Beyer and Frank Wiedemann was that they lacked the caliber to add any new perspective to NWAQ’s singular vision. While most impartial observers may not share that particular view, the match up did seem a little curious at first glance. The German duo’s work is frequently characterized by its almost fussy nature; every element is finely tuned, layer upon layer, until the track resembles a bespoke, intricately designed coat in which every pocket, flap and button is immaculately detailed. NWAQ’s pieces are no less luxuriously made, but its more about the cut than the material; endlessly looping soft-as-cashmere grooves that you’re happy to listen to, well, endlessly. Certainly conflicting approaches, and to stretch the clothing analogy to fraying point, as head-scratching a collaboration as the recent A.P.C. x Supreme hook-up.
BBH: Pelon, No Stunts
When Basic Channel ceased its transmissions and gave way to Chain Reaction, the label’s fans were introduced to further faceless techno by a new wave of producers. While Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald used the former label as a breeding ground for their own Basic Channel tracks, Chain Reaction was set up for other artists as the pair digressed towards their own new projects. Chain Reaction threw up a fresh wave of unknown dub techno producers, and while some of those went on to become rather prolific, one of the best releases on the label marked the only release for its author. Henner Dondorf, better known as Pelon has since gone on to master a number of releases for Stephan Mathieu, but “No Stunts” on Chain Reaction is his only contribution to the canon of dub techno we have so far.
Matias Aguayo, Ay Ay Ay
Out of practically every contemporary dance music producer I can think of, Matias Aguayo appears to be wringing his hands the least over his genre’s digital future. His BumBumBox mini-events in major South American metropolises — wherein a few daisychained boom boxes, an iPod full of DJ mixes, and a random urban location stand in for a Funktion One, a vinyl-wielding selector in an expensive t-shirt, and a dance floor — take the most terrifying possible outcome of the mp3’s rise to dominance and spin a nifty little party out of the formula. His excellent Comeme label, home to some of the strangest and crunchiest house nuggets of the year, was never even intended to make it beyond a MySpace page. And he recorded his Resident Advisor mix, one of my favorite entries in the venerable series this year, on his computer while in transit. Producers and DJs have spent the latter portion of this decade burrowing into classicism, a fine security blanket for when techno’s hi-tech future finally arrives and feels cooler to the touch than many enthusiasts imagined. Regardless of your stance on the megabytes now driving our parties and singles, you’ve got to respect an industry veteran giving his blessing to the automated, compressed direction we may be ceaselessly barreling towards.
Robert Hood, Superman/Range
While Detroit producer Robert Hood has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years on the back of his exhilarating Fabric mix, the inspired Hoodmusic series and quite possibly a realisation in some quarters that what he has been doing for the best part of 20 years makes the mnml explosion look like a minor ripple in his vast creative depths, it was almost inevitable that at some stage he’d fall foul of a backlash.
Fever Ray, Seven Remixes
There’s a certain beauty to more commercially viable artists putting their songs up for remixes, especially when the artists are already teetering on the outer edges of said commercialism and the remixers in question are firmly ensconced in decidedly more underground musical pursuits. A house producer, for example, will largely stick to calling in similar artists to re-rub their tracks, while a slightly more mainstream act will generally gather together a more diverse range of producers to reinterpret their original compositions. Fever Ray haven’t necessarily traveled through every genre of dance music to assign remix duties for “Seven,” but they have chosen an interesting ensemble of talent to perform these duties.
Demdike Stare, Symbiosis
Brrr, did anyone else just feel the temperature drop a few degrees? Autumn is on the way and the days are getting shorter, but there’s no doubt Symbiosis adds to the gloomier atmosphere. A collaboration between Miles Whittaker (aka MLZ and one half of Pendle Coven) and Sean Canty, Demdike Stare draws on a range of influences to create a subdued yet menacing collection of mood music. There’s an underlying sense of dread audible here, with Whittaker’s love of sampling obscure music — something Canty probably enjoys too — giving Symbiosis a familiar yet eerie feeling. The fact that the project’s name, like Pendle Coven, references witchcraft and the supernatural, and is accompanied by album artwork featuring skulls, white roses and a lone eye suspended under a woman’s wig while an arm holds what looks like either a small wand or a big needle, only adds to the occultish theme.
Horizontal Ground, Horizontal Ground 02
Horizontal Ground, the companion label to Frozen Border, which itself has been responsible for three quick bursts of fearless techno, is now up to its second release of tracky tool time techno, the latest edition being even more bare and desolate than the first. Its incognito producer will keep the guessing game going and while some may argue that the anonymity of the minimal info tactic is geared toward building hype, the reality is that it manufactures a lot more focus on the music itself.
Darkstar, Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer
For those keeping close tabs on Darkstar, Hyperdub, or the broader “dubstep etc.” community, there’s a sense of “it’s about time” in the ship date of “Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer.” Landing in shops this month both on Hyperdub’s fifth anniversary compilation and as the advance single of an eventual Darkstar album, the track’s been floating around on Internet and radio for some time. If you’ve not heard it already, count on more of the bouncy bass lines, spare percussion, 8-bit keyboards and digitized vox that made the duo’s woozy, chilly “Need You” a crossover hit last year. Brace yourself, though, for a sweeter and much more melancholy pop song this time around — albeit a cool, depersonalized one.
Hunch, Travel The Earth
If you missed out on Hunee’s debut 12″, the “Tour de Force EP,” and judged his output solely on this release you may not fully believe what I am about to tell you: this man is an artist to be reckoned with. Those three tracks of stunning house screamed quality, from the stutter-scat deep house jack of “Rare Silk” to the Jus-Ed-sampling monologue featured on “Cut Down Trees,” they confirmed he had something new to bring to the table. Nothing could be closer to the truth when you look at his recent 12″ under the Hunch moniker for John Daly’s Feel Music imprint. “Travel The Earth” may not be contain the same enviable balance of DJ-ready rhythms and melodic fulfillment, but does reach for a mysterious blend of organic and electronic abstraction.