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Music Reviews | Cris Lange Blogspot

[cristianlange]

PantyTec - Pony Slaystation ///

Label: Perlon

Cat#  PEARL28

Year: 2002

Style: Microhouse / Techno / Minimal

As said, the year 2000 found in Germany the "Meca" of house/minimal electronic producers. Zip and Sammy Dee, Pantytec (as very well did Akufen in these years) shows how to produce micro sampling tunes with excellent bass-lines. It is not making only funny noises sampled from cartoons, or tv-shows, is about adding layers of sound with great groove, and also flirt with the dance-floor and ride it deep, disturbed and then devastating.

I find harder for the people to dig the micro-genre today than those years. And I wonder why... perhaps because the underground scene is being displaced for mainstream? Or because the dark minimal cadency in slow 4/4 motion has killed the creativity with the same stoned loop for hours? Maybe yes, maybe not. Many would say that this is a good after-hour album. I partially agree. But when you really want to dance, when you want music that shake the floor on, it is not necessary to run for goa, is just necessary groove, and is groove the best part in this production.

[cristianlange]

Laurent Garnier - Coloured City ///

Label: F Communications

Cat#  F086

Year: 1998

Style: Techno

When you've been around long enough into styles over 20 years cycle, you know the pearls. With that in mind, Laurent Garnier has constructed in this track a fantastic bass-line. The weird rantings about making love in the coloured city remind me of some Green Velvet tracks.

Laurent Garnier cut his teeth by DJing at the Haçienda club in Manchester in the late 80's, before returning to his native France to run the Wake Up Club in Paris. He also founded F Communications with Eric Morand, an innovative electronic music label based out of Paris.

[cristianlange]

Ronin - Chockodile EP ///

Label: Primary Recordings

Cat# MARY017

Year: 2001

Style: Tech-house, Progressive

/// Many things you can say about a lots of good records, but when you feel that there's one and only one that completely transforms the atmosphere exactly at the instant it starts, giving a feeling that you are going to take a nice trip with the sound and dance, that just happens with so few ones.

That was happening at earlies 2000 with this record.

Jonathan Axelsson, aka Ronin, have a long production list and Chockodile EP is a very clear example of the british tech-house of those times, with progression, deepness, melody, and what is most important: something to tell.

[cristianlange]

Minilogue - Animals. ///

Label: Cocoon Recordings

Cat# COR CD 016

Year: 2008

Style: Minimal, House, Tech-house, Ambient

During Sonar Festival 2008 at Barcelona, before going in, I’d taken the time to buy records at my favorites vinyl shops around and then meeting one of my old and best musician soul mates to have lunch somewhere. I just found some interesting records, but I was feeling a bit tier of that boring minimal in 122 BPM sounding as a darky same loop of a 4/4 compass all the time. I was missing the groove, yeah, and the melody in between rhythm. "It seems that the electronic music only stayed in the rhythm", I thought.

Once in his car he was listening something that sounds as minimal but fresh, with house passages, techno and some click’n cuts elements. Of course I asked about that sound, and of course it was Animals, from Minilogue, released on Cocoon Recordings.

Animals is a double album divided into two categories: Dance and Ambient. Is like a DJ mix sequence. The song that touched me was “Hitchhiker’s Choice” but was not released in the vinyl version of the album, only in CD. Frustration.  I bought the CD version nonetheless not for my DJ sets but just to listen about I was looking for.

The second disc offers fresh minimalistic chill-out vibes. The first disc is an excellent tech-house example of what should be music that 'light the way' of who is in a permanent sound research: modern minimal, deep bass, “33000 Honeybees”.  With “Jamaica” was clear that those swedish pals had opened up an appropriate door to follow.

[cristianlange]

Dub Taylor ‎– I Can't (Fall In Love With Another One)

Label: Forcetracks

Cat# FT21

Year: 2000

Style: Dub, Deep House, Tech House

The year 2000 found Germany to be a gold mine of dub-inflected deep house producers, Dub Taylor being one of the more prominent producers alongside Luomo and Mathias Schaffhauser. As Dub Taylor, Berlin producer Alex Krüger scored a sizable dancefloor hit with "I Can't (Fall in Love With Another One)" in 2000, his second 12" for Forcetracks; the track employed a huge, throbbing 4/4 rhythm endrenched heavily in an ambient dub sheen topped off with some sappy New York garage-style, heavily accented male diva vocals courtesy of Per Fourier. The track put Krüger's Dub Taylor moniker on the map (in addition to his host of aliases) and set the stage for his debut album, Forms and Figures, on the esteemed Raum-Musik label in early 2001. Like the I Can't 12", Forms and Figures made waves, Krüger's deep, minimal style of house and its occasional forays into vocal territory certainly proved itself in demand.

[cristianlange]

Swayzak - Dirty Dancing

Label: !K7

Cat# !K7128LP

Year: 2002

Style: House, Jazz-House, Electro-pop, Microhouse

Blending together electro, deep house and techno, the UK tech-house Swayzak's third album goes out of its way to obscure with more than just nice rhythm programming. By using different vocalists, the tracks have a unique style that pushes Dirty Dancing closer to being a pop record than something purely dance-oriented. Electro-jams like "Mysterons" and "State of Grace", included traces of this sound before it become a phenomenon and "In The Car Crash," a dark, brooding bit of electro-clash that features the work of Canadian producers Headgear. The instrumental "Celsius" returns to Chicago house for inspiration, and glossies the groove with some nods to Orbital, while "I Dance Alone", a duet between Adult's Nicola Kuperus and Carl Finlow, shows another great and pulsing bit of deep-techno with deadpan vocals and old-school synth melodies. By combining different styles, Dirty Dancing is a great showcase of the different tastes of electronic artists who make music in the 21st century, yet aren't afraid to tip the hat to the pioneers of the 1980s.

[cristianlange]

Theorem - Fallout

Label: Minus Canada

Cat# TH 4

Year: 1999

Style: Techno, Minimal

When still electronic music was intelligent, from the sort of dub-techno that had emerged from the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction or Maurizio camps in years prior, the ambling bass-lines and lingering ambience of Theorem's Fallout EP are certainly a beautiful sound to behold. Music to close your eyes and dance, not immerse in hysteria of posing or being watched. In these years (1998) Producer Dale Lawrence does here what he'd done on previous releases, Ambient-Minimal-Techno tales, for the most part, and stays closely in line with what M-nus label-mate Richie Hawin had done to near perfection as Plastikman on Consumed (1998). On one side you get the epic "Fallout" and on the flip side you get two similarly dark tracks: "Swarm" and "Chernobyl." The fourth in a series of similarly excellent EPs.

[cristianlange]

Isolée  -Rest

Label: Playhouse

Cat# PLAYCD001

Year: 2000

Style: (IDM) House, Techno, Electro, Minimal

'Rest' album is an exception. An exception as it is the record 'Bodily Functions' by Matthew Herbert. And, certainly, it deserves a place with our classics. This album has open up a new territory of contemporary electronic music, and that’s why I do not speak only of a different record, such as Herbert, but a record that would be endless imitated, subsequently.

It was published in the end of the century by the emerging label of that time: Playhouse, 'Rest' came up as the fusion of different styles, with so different tags and genres and sometimes as antagonistic as Minimal, Ambient, Down-Tempo or even House. A new tag was born, IDM, that would influence many of the productions that would be launched to the market since then, until today. Micro House was born. Previous works could likely be classified under this style but, in my opinion, was this and no other, which ultimately defines the sound and set the tone to follow.

The artist, Isolée , German-born but half his life lived in Algiers until he decided to return to his native Germany to make music, Isolée is near Carl Craig (his jazzy house approach in, say,1998 12-inch 'Beau Mot Plage') but also Aphex Twin and the sonic abstraction or deconstruction of Richie Hawtin's techno ('Closer').

But most surprising of 'Rest Album' is how it blend all these elements together with some inner warmth and quality that anyone start to think how no one had done this before?

The album starts with 'Logiciel' and leads us to the beginning of our history, the great Kraftwerk, where the influence of Dusseldorf is more than clear. Next the influences already mentioned, perfectly noticeable in tracks like the above mentioned "Beau Mot Plage", "Tout it simple" or "Keep on dancin '."

His next, 'We Are Monster', published 5 years later was at the same league of his predecessor, but then 5 years has passed and the IDM tag was starting to burn ... 'Rest Album' was an exception, an exception that became rule.

[cristianlange]

Efdemin - Efdemin

Label: Dial Records

Cat# dialCD 10

Year: 2007

Style: Techno, Deep House, Minimal

It slots quite comfortably between albums from Dial labelmates Lawrence and Pantha Du Prince, but Efdemin’s red-eyed, late-night take on deeper techno and house (and occasionally, trance) is less about emotion and more about groove. A sophisticated and fluid debut, the Berliner is a self-assured producer who knows what he wants to do. His structures and builds are quite linear, but never too much: the attention to detail and subtle use of contrasts – key changes, unexpected drops, ambient fades – put flesh on the bones. Some opposites are key: the fluid, half-tempo, neo-Detroit stabs versus perky beats on ‘Further Back’; the flowing euphoric strings versus chopped, ringing synth on both wonderful former single ‘Bergwein’ and ‘Salix Alba’, the latter of which begins as Prescription-sounding padded deep house and ends up twisting into tangled trance. Opposite is the uniform ‘Back To School’: amid the hypnotic stabs, the slow-rising deep chords match the submerged old-school bassline and delayed drums. It’s one of the trackier outings, but stick around for the ambient coda. ‘Stately Yes’ turns that template inside out: a stripped groove, comprised of dry, spitting drums, odd, prodded bass, a daft vocal sample and one solitary tapped triangle note. The hypno-house of former single ‘Lohn Und Brot’ still shines, while ‘Acid Bells’ is the album’s dark middle: the ringing bell refrain building into something marvelously menacing. If this sounds a bit too much, you can find solace in the deep strings and bright drums of ‘La Ratafia’ or the hallucinatory warmth of ‘April Fools’. Efdemin’s debut and Pantha Du Prince’s ‘This Bliss’ have two things in common: both are tailor-made for that lovely place between dancing and dreaming, and both are two of 2007’s best.

[cristianlange]

Extrawelt - Deine Beine

Label: Traum Schallplatten

Cat#   TRAUM V113

Year:   2009

Traum do dubstep! On "Deine Beine," label faithfuls Extrawelt (Arne Schaffhausen and Wayan Rabe) shift gears into a gloomy broken lurch, departing—albeit briefly—from the puffy proggy tech-house that has made their name. The shift is more of a step-by-step stumble, as rhythms become increasingly fragmented, track-by-track, landing in a jumbled, confused heap. The destination ain't so special, then, so the journey's where it's at, particularly when we're on familiar turf. Neatly programmed on clear, spacious grids, drawn in weepy hues and powered by a gentle soda-pop fizz, "Mit Liese Auf Der Wiese" has all the trance-tinged hallmarks of prime Neue Schone Extrawelt-era Extrawelt. There's a heady momentum which develops ever-so-subtly—like Minilogue's more patient moments—and it delivers plenty of heated, anxious expectancy. "Clap's Cally" packs a more immediate punch, stark electro drums set amidst a shimmering western backdrop akin to Und's cowpoke hit "Rodeo," but staggers at the break. Rhythms slip and slide, dazed and untethered, and the track never recovers. By "Was Uebrig Beibt" this stutter has become a full-blown speech impediment, with Schaffhausen and Rabe somewhat unintelligible in downtown Croydon, faint Hamburg stripes still visible through the odd breakbeats. While this move seems hasty, and I wouldn't recommend it to other Traum acts, Extrawelt house still delivers.