As a tie-in to a series of April club dates in Japan, Sven Väth’s Cocoon Recordings released a special Japan-only compilation CD in celebration of the event. Now available worldwide due to popular demand, six of the seven CD tracks are also being released on vinyl as a special three-part single to celebrate Cocoon’s 50th single release. The line-up showcases the cream of the Cocoon canon, with Schneider and Galluzzi, Tiefschwarz, Gerber and Kalata, and Pig & Dan participating across the first two parts. Part III, however, pulls out the big guns, with Väth butting heads with Anthony Rother and Ricardo Villalobos each contributing a track.
Väth and Rother unleash “S’kränkt,” a punishing big room beast built on the back of a crunching bass attack and some expertly deployed stops and starts. There isn’t much of a tune present, just plenty of noisy and random analog synth bursts, but the vaguely verse-chorus format is genius — simply flit back and forth between the giant grunt-and-handclap-punctuated break and the bass-driven synth parts and voila! Instant dancefloor mayhem.
Villalobos checks in with a track to tide us over between the two parts of his “Vasco EP” for Perlon that fits the rave-tastic Cocoon mood nicely. Dropping the long, slowly unwinding, moody mode of his recent work in favor of a pounding bass groove, “Akklää” is the most straightforward, four-to-the-floor techno that ol’ Ricky has given us for some time, but that isn’t to say that its without thrills. Tweaking the fathoms-deep bass line into distortion, and finally, near disintegration over the track’s first section, a pan-pipe loop arrives just in the nick at the three-minute mark to lighten the tone. Later, some pots-and-pans percussion loops and a couple of secondary tubular-bell-like riffs are added, but from there on out, it’s basically Ricardo Does Acid, tweaking, tumbling, and twisting the parts as only he can. “Akklää” is certainly not the most cerebral or revelatory thing that Villalobos has ever released, but it is an absolute monster of a track (did someone say Godzilla?) and serves as a timely reminder that at the end of the day, even our most highly revered composers sometimes just want to make asses quiver.
villalobos most danceable tune in ages and I’m loving it.
Don’t sleep on the Vath v Rother cut. It’s a lot of fun with a great bunch of breakdown sections.
I just listened to the above track (twice!). Could it be that:
1). The Emperor definitely has some new clothes on.
2). “Akklää†sounds like your little brother learning to use Reason on his laptop PC at 4 in the morning.
3). The funk has left the building.
4). Being from South America can lend one some instant cred when sorely needed.
5). I’m getting old – and just don’t get “it†anymore.
6). All of the above.
Not sure – but #5 seems like a distinct possibility…
the funk is in the drum pattern, here, to my ears, but who knows…
it could be the presence of too much context, but i’ll always think of RV as the brilliant dude doing whatever he wants, and i think he deserves many more mulligans than some of the other mnmml wndrknd out there.
getting back to this track specifically, i’d rather hear something like this (which your (Sam) point #2 made me go “lol,” forreal) than another boring track with either a Rhodes VST churning out anonymous “deep” chords and/or the ever-obnoxious percussed woodblock loop endlessly fapping into the ether. i guess fine lines exist all over the place, and when someone like RC comes out of left field (yet again) with something just plain weird (and possibly worthless!) i’ll be more interested in that than the umpteenth promo-driven facsimile of the present quarter’s flavor.
er RV, again, not RC, eh
Wow, really? To me the funk is in the sick, distorted bassline.
But yeah, I’m with James — RV is nothing if not interesting, and he’s more than earned the right to a few missteps, which, for the record, I don’t think this is.
I can’t get into this I like the tubular-bell-like riffs but the rest just seems like a whole heap of distortion.I reckon hearing it in a club would be the best way to hear it but at home its just not working for me. Give me a Perlon influenced Villalobos anyday over the Cocoon influenced Ricardo. I really do like those tubular bells though. hypnotic.
I can’t get into this I like the tubular-bell-like riffs but the rest just seems like a whole heap of distortion.I reckon hearing it in a club would be the best way to hear it but at home its just not working for me. Give me a Perlon influenced Villalobos anyday over the Cocoon influenced Ricardo. I really do like those tubular bells though and the second half of the track with less of the distorted bass. hypnotic.
What we see here is the “Villalobos Effect”.
It’s parallel to the act of Christians seeing the Virgin Mary in the grime of a highway underpass or Jesus’s face in a potato chip.
If you’re a devout believer in the man (Villalobos), you will hear divine inspiration (i.e. a very good track) not because it’s actually there but because you have faith that it is there.
I agree with Sam though, this sounds like a throwaway track to me, something that should have stayed on the back-burner until further inspiration.
I just don’t think it’s a failure because it’s in a different style than what we’ve all become used to with his Perlon-style stuff. It’s a straightforward club cut, and it’s a pretty good one. It aims lower than he normally does, yes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hit the target.
MDMA & Bosch are also straightforward as hell, and people didn’t complain about it back then…
and please people turn the bass open on this one, it might just change your opinion..
It’s not the most mind blowing thing he’s ever done, but I still get completely lost in it and I think that means mission accomplished.
[…] remix) [~scape] 04. Petar Dundov, “Rain” (Ecshospace Reduction) [Music Man Records] 05. Väth vs. Rother, “S’kränkt” [Cocoon Records] 06. Donnacha Costello, “It Simply Is” [Minimise] 07. Fuck Buttons, […]