With production partner Roly Porter, Jamie Vex’d released a respectable number of sides for the likes of Planet Mu and Subtext, though for the past year or so he has been going solo. Under his own steam he has also been moving away from the DMZ-styled low end rumblers and in to more experimental territory, highlighted by last year’s In System Travel EP and this new work under the name Kuedo.
Author Archive: Per Bojsen-Moller
Hell ft. Bryan Ferry, U Can Dance
January 28, 2010 – 11:16 AM
Taken from Hell’s ambitious double album Teufelswerk, “U Can Dance” unapologetically looks back at electroclash with rose tinted glasses, Bryan Ferry lacing the track with his languid, lounge lizard tones. Hell’s original (with help from Peter Kruder and Christian Prommer from Trüby Trio on programming) starts off strong, merging icy cool, arpeggiated synths with Ferry’s equally frosty serenade to a club nymph. Though clocking in at nearly ten minutes, it is in danger of overstaying its welcome after two thirds of the way through. The keyboards start getting a little cheesy and Ferry has long since left the vocal booth, presumably in search for a cigarette or a martini; in any case the magic is over by the six minute mark or so.
BBH: Various Artists, Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave
January 27, 2010 – 11:01 AM
There have been plenty of Detroit techno compilations over the years; True People would probably rate as my favorite for its sheer comprehensiveness and myriad pieces of vinyl, though its spot at number one has often been contested in my mind by this compilation on Astralwerks which came out the same year in 1996. Packed with ten tracks of exclusive material from the creme of Detroit’s third wave of techno producers, it showcases their many different sides, from deep and hypnotic through to raw, jacking soul and clinical, electro funk. Though many of the producers on the album were familiar to me already, there were others like Ectomorph, Will Web, and Mode Selector I was discovering for the first time. Throughout it all can be heard strains from their mentors mixed in with the new directions in which these younger guns were taking the music.
Anton Zap, Take It As It Comes EP
January 21, 2010 – 11:01 PM
Within a few short years Anton Zap has made himself an indispensable part of deep house and has displayed a growing talent for mining late night emotion from his productions. The aquatic feel of his Take It As It Comes EP sounds like a nocturnal journey to the briny depths to preach the word to all manner of sea floor dwellers. Spread over four tracks, Zap washes layers of dreamy pads and chords over waves of rolling bass and textured rhythms. It’s an approach he uses for every track here, which may lead to some seeing the EP as samey and uninteresting, but I feel that what Zap is aiming for here is creating moods and vibes with these tracks, which he does and does incredibly well.
The Mole Presents Guilty Pleasures, Family/Rotation
January 20, 2010 – 11:01 PM
With a veritable glut of disco-tinged tracks raining down on 2009 like The Weather Girls’ beefy protagonists, it would have been easy to pass much of it off as sound-alike twaddle, and of course within any popular music trend it would be fair to do so. The Mole’s scant few releases last year showed he was in no trouble of falling into that camp though, as is the case with this collaboration of sorts with Guilty Pleasures. It’s hard to say how much of a hand the producers behind Guilty Pleasures (including Tyger Dhula and Danuel Tate of Cobblestone Jazz) played a part in these two tracks, sounding as they do like vintage works from The Mole, though their credits are listed so we can only assume that input was shared.
Curator’s Cuts 04: Per Bojsen-Moller
January 18, 2010 – 1:01 AM
LWE’s Curator’s Cuts podcast series features our reviewing staff mixing together recent favorites and providing explanations for their selections. Staff writer Per Bojsen-Moller was charged with mixing together Curator’s Cuts 04. We will post the tracklist later in the week, as each curator discloses and describes the tracklist as part of the podcast.
LWE Interviews Martyn
January 15, 2010 – 11:01 AM
Dutchman Martijn Deykers has made a sizable impression on electronic music over the past two years with a striking run of singles and remixes under the moniker Martyn that helped to shed light on the burgeoning disparities within dubstep. This was crowned by his debut full length album which dropped at the start of 2009; Great Lengths had instant classic stamped all over it and this was reflected by its high placed status in end of year lists and polls. A DJ for many years, his music production career started out with drum & bass releases for Marcus Intalex’s Revole:r label, before side-winding into dubstep after the release of his “Broken/Shadowcasting” 12″ in 2007. Ever exploring new territory, Great Lengths also hinted at an affinity for house and techno, a penchant which is also mirrored in his DJ sets. LWE spoke to Martyn while he was on tour in Canada about his new Fabric mix, the inspiration of environment, and the development of his harder side.
Various Artists, Prime Numbers 11
January 12, 2010 – 11:01 AM
Trus’me’s Prime Numbers label may only have notched a handful of releases in 2009, but counting Linkwood’s System and Trus’me’s own In The Red albums among them, it was a successful year for the Mancunian independent. Barely into the new year and Prime Numbers 11 hits us with three further reasons to count the imprint as one of the most exciting purveyors of house music around right now.
BBH: Silent Phase, The Theory of Silent Phase
January 6, 2010 – 11:01 AM
Coming through at the end of the second wave of Detroit producers, Stacey Pullen fell under the direct tutelage of Derrick May, who not only mentored the young producer in capturing the essence of his sound but also gave him a taste of life as a traveling DJ. In the early 90’s, Pullen decamped with May to Amsterdam and ended up staying a year with the Detroit maverick, playing their native techno to hordes of appreciative Europeans. May had previously signed Pullen’s “Ritual Beating System” under the Bango alias to his Transmat offshoot, Fragile. Buoyed by the critical acclaim it met, he was offered a deal by R&S records while in Belgium to record a full length album which would become The Theory of Silent Phase under the Silent Phase sobriquet. With publishing duties falling between R&S and Transmat, Pullen claims that he never got the album to sound quite as he wanted it to due to analogue copies being shuttled back and forth across the globe for mastering, though there is no denying that contained within is the music of a truly inspired and gifted musician.
Valmay, Radiated Future
December 2, 2009 – 10:01 PM
The mnml explosion wasn’t particularly kind to hard techno. As the cleaner, reduced ethos of the music proved more popular the harder geared sound fell out of favor for a while, prompting certain labels to go into hibernation or dissolve completely. The pendulum has certainly swung back the other way of late and one of the stalwart labels of hard techno, James Ruskin’s Blueprint re-emerged this year after a good five years of dormancy. Paul Mac, a vanguard of techno for nearly fifteen years, didn’t suffer the same fate as some of the record labels, but for the past couple of years his releases have almost exclusively been limited to digital format. His latest excursion under the new moniker of Valmay on Blueprint strikes another win for the label this year and finds Paul Mac in top form.
Jens Zimmermann, A/B
November 27, 2009 – 10:20 AM
You’d never guess by listening to his raw, tripped out, minimal take on techno but Jens Zimmermann’s start in electronic music came via the ultra cheesy Euro-dance hit-makers Culture Beat. The keyboardist and programmer’s tastes obviously evolved somewhere along the line and he began concentrating his abilities on the more subtle rudiments of techno. Zimmermann’s latest for Snork Enterprises finds the producer at his most inspired with two abstract cuts that are — while modern in their detailing — suffused with a raw edge that harks back to analogue banks of gear and real time knob-foolery.
Clara Moto, Silently Remixes
November 19, 2009 – 10:01 PM
The original of Clara Moto’s “Silently” was not exactly slept on upon it’s release, but then it didn’t quite receive the praise it was rightfully due. The producer, aided by the vocal talents of Austrian singer Mumi, created an unforgettable techno pop song near the end of last year that weaved bitter and sweet into a filigree of danceable moment. The groove of the backing track would be enough to sway a steadfast, stock-still trainspotter on its own but the vocal exemplifies it further with it’s lilting emotional candour. The original EP offered three further tracks and three different sides of the little known producer, ranging from trippy, emotional house on “Hiding In the Bottom Drawer” to the raw, clipped, poker faced groove of “Sancy Cat” and the achingly beautiful “Hazel,” sounding for all the world like a lost Peter Kersten record. I imagine the remix release a good year after the original serves to remind listeners of what a startling record they missed out on first time around.
Pattern Repeat, Gauge Tension EP
November 9, 2009 – 10:01 PM
The latest Echocord Colour release sees a meeting of minds between two of Copenhagen’s better established names in techno. Resoe aka Dennis Bøg, head of Baum Records teams up with Echocord boss Kenneth Christiansen to form Pattern Repeat, their sound effortlessly resplendent in the deep and dubby techno their respective labels espouse.
LWE Podcast 35: Margaret Dygas
November 9, 2009 – 12:01 AM
Margaret Dygas’ position as an avant garde techno producer has been achieved with only three proper releases to her name but backed up by years of formidable DJ sets around the world. Born in Poland, she spent her formative teenage years growing up in America and now, like so many other dance music producers, lives in Berlin. Her exquisitely executed tracks have been released on Contexterrior, Non Standard Productions and Perlon, each showing a progression in her abilities and slowly revealing a distinctive type of sound. LWE hoped to learn much more about the budding artist in our interview but it turns out that Miss Dygas prefers to let her music do the majority of her talking. Read on for the words we managed to glean out of her and check the stunning podcast after the interview for a more revealing glimpse into the world of Margaret Dygas.
Andy Stott, Night Jewel
November 5, 2009 – 10:01 PM
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.
BBH: Pelon, No Stunts
October 28, 2009 – 10:01 AM
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.
Fever Ray, Seven Remixes
October 26, 2009 – 10:01 PM
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.
Horizontal Ground, Horizontal Ground 02
October 22, 2009 – 10:01 PM
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.
Scuba, Aesaunic EP
October 21, 2009 – 10:01 AM
With its irreproachable roster of talent, Hotflush has become over the last couple of years a buy on sight label. Scuba himself has already provided one of the standout moments in dubstep this year with his “Klinik/Hundreds and Thousands” release, while Mount Kimbie’s “Sketch On Glass” emerged to leave critics slack jawed and saliva mawed at its recondite rhythms. Scuba’s new EP, lovingly spread over two slabs of vinyl will further fluster bass heads, encapsulating the breadth of his sound over five tracks ranging from blunt, fathomless ambient through to shimmering half steppers and steely, chrome-plated house.