Showing posts with label MINIMAL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MINIMAL. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Xpansul & Imek - El Bienestar



El Bienestar is collaboration between one of the Spanish techno pioneers, Xpansul, and Imek. Their friendship started long ago: Imek’s first DJ set was in the club where Xpansul was the resident DJ, and 10 years after that their friendship generated a common musical project. This project started some months ago, when they composed together ‘23,’ a track that was included in the second NET28 compilation. It was a powerful and engaging experience, so they decided to join forces and produce a full shared release, El Bienestar, where both could explore common areas of their musical sensibility. ‘La Salud’ was the first track they produced for this release: a classic and emotive techno piece with deep chords and driving bass, followed by ‘El Bienestar,’ a 100% playable DJ tool made with the dancefloor in mind, and ‘La Alegría,’ a super danceable track filled with Xpansul’s characteristic percussion madness.”


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Mihalis Safras - Cry For The Last Dance



Safras has a long history in the electronic music scene of Greece, becoming one of his home country's most celebrated DJs over the course of the last decade. A few years ago, however, he decided that DJing alone wasn't enough, and jumped head first into the world of music production. He's since become quite prolific, with his techno and tech house tracks making their way onto labels like Soma, Great Stuff and Kevin Gorman's Mikrowave imprint.

It's Trapez owner Riley Reinhold who has taken most to Safras' sound, commissioning five singles for his Trapez Limited sub-label, and now releasing Cry for the Last Dance, which is his first album to be released on CD. It's also a first for Reinhold, as Safras' album will be the debut long-player on Trapez Limited rather than its bigger brother. Taking in minimal, tech house and techno, the collection compiles eleven previously unreleased tracks before drawing to a close with a new edit of the trance-tinged "Here Comes the Rain."


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Sunday, May 17, 2009

Burnski - Draw Your Sword





Fine tech-house minimalism from Burnski making his debut appearance on Poker Flat. Made for larger dancefloors, 'Draw Your Sword' is maximised for impact with a crowd appeasing climax and heavyweight kicks.



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Monday, March 16, 2009

Matias Aguayo - The 99 seconds




Soul Jazz and Kompakt's Argentianian hero Matias Aguayo aka one half of Closer Musik offers up another plate of confoundingly immense and oddbal rhythm experiments for fans of his indecipherable style. '99 Seconds' is a very odd construction, built from a tumbling Latin/Villalobos debted percussion pallette, castrated horn bleats and the occassional bell hit, you never quite know where you are or where you're going on this little trip but we can assure you it's some very strange fun. 'Bondhi' on the flip drops the tempo to a sub 120bpm shuffle with rippling conga lines and a pared back approach that places the track somewhere between raw Chicago house and something from the Uwe Schmidt/Atom TM handbook, while final track 'Rita' should really spin your head full circle on a 113bpm slo-jak groove through spherical bell rubs, pop flavoured basslines and a subtle taste of avant garde new wave style from the likes of Arthur Russel or Moondog. Awesome.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Marco Carola - The Tribe



Marco Carola revisits his M_nus sublabel 2M with two warm and tribalish house cuts for the stylin' Europhiles. 'The Tribe' uses a palette of warm and analogue sounding drums with rolling bass and non-synthetic horns to work up a very crowd friendly vibe, while 'Drumming' on the flip strips back to the essentials with a minimised groove gradually developing layers of live percussion into a useful tracky house DJ tool.

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Monday, February 2, 2009

Rio Padice - Road To Alberqueque


Fine deeper tech house minimalism from Italian Rio Padice for Metroline, contributing three tracks of swirling deeper housisms with a sprightly technofied edge and a wicked remix from Ray Okpara, setting to work on the bassline and padding the subs out into spongy cyclical shapes to find your groove in.

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Rrygular - 3 Years Rregular


Tracklist:

01. From Karaoke To Stardom - Hometown Bulkk Klubb (Dapayk Remix)
02. Marek Bois - Bed Boi Pill
03. Butane - All Out Of Ice
04. Kleinschmager Audio - Audio1
05. Christian Dittmann - Dub 1 (D.Diggler Remix)
06. Lump - All In Your Mind
07. Staffan Linzatti - Steal The Medical Supplies
08. Marek Bois - Kimpton
09. Ortega & Stavstrand - Spiral
10. Marcel Knopf - Narain
11. The Suffragettes - Ukin
12. From Karaoke To Stardom - Dors-La-Pilule

part 1
part 2

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Youandme - Difference EP



Tracklist:
01. Falling 06:18
02. Between 07:15

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Guy Noir - Delusion


Very strong tracks! Will play every time. - Laurent Garnier (F Communication/the Hacienda)

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Piemont - Strange World Beyond


Saturday, January 31, 2009

Soma - Somabeta



Introducing their new offshoot label, Soma launch this compilation as a means of showcasing the new talent they're nurturing. You'll recognise the likes of Let's Go Outside from Soma's main imprint, and Sui Generis has previously emerged on Rush Hour, but all the acts assembled here are very much new on the scene, looking to make a name for themselves in some shape or other. Highlights come from the alluringly daft Mr Copy and Audiofillia who are permitted two entries: the bloopy micro-squawk of 'Easy', and 'Tu' with its bassline-driven hooks. "Soma proudly launch Somabeta, the imprint's offshoot tailored for new emerging talent. As part of Soma's continuing support of new music Somabeta will provide an avenue for fresh, upcoming producers to have their work released on Scotland's biggest exporter of electronic music, welcoming work from artists around the world"

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Gui Boratto - Take My Breath Away


From the start, it’s clear ‘Take My Breath Away’ is destined both for dancefloors and home stereos with the tracklist split roughly down the middle between Boratto’s standard (and excellent) deep techno tracks and cute electro pop numbers. Driving techno fans will lap up ‘Ballroom’ and ‘Atomic Soda’, electro aficionados might dig ‘Eggplant’, and ‘Take My Breath Away’ and ‘Opus’ will please those who like their techno to burn as slow as a candle. ‘Colors’, ‘Azzurra’ and ‘Les Enfants’ showcases Gui Boratto’s calmer and more joyful side by featuring broken beats, electric guitars and live drums. And fans of the hugely popular ‘Beautiful Life’ might get their euphoria fix from the vocals on ‘No Turning Back’.Overall ‘Take My Breath Away’ is an accomplished continuation of Gui Boratto’s colourful melodies.

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Claro Intelecto - Warehouse Sessions


This long awaited cd compilation marks the end of Mark Stewart's 'Warehouse Sessions', with all the tracks in the series re-mastered at Berlin's dubplates and mastering including a bonus, previously unreleased track, 'W6' available for the first time. The first 12" in the series was released back in early 2006, designed, honed and tweaked for the floor with a shift in focus towards more stripped-down and minimally constructed 4/4 variations with the headier end of the warehouse in mind. "New Dawn"rotates on a heavy slug of post-industrial genius taking the metallic clunk of Monolake/T++ slowed right down and married with the faint ghost of Rhythm and Sound. "X" domiated volume three and is perhaps the best known track in the series - delivering a gargantuan chug through a barely contained 4/4 spasm, underpinned by distorted stabs and a hollow line in thumping kick-drums. It's all fairly restrained until the half-way mark when things suddenly go deep under the influence - a live session of warbling dub stabs fed through a widescreen echo-chamber making for a low-end psychosis that's just devastating. "Only Yesterday" was written in homage to Mr Fingers, a slow, deep, pulsating House classic utilising a sick padded bass progression, caressed by pristine hi-hats and very little else. "Instinct" opened volume four with a percussive spine so crisp and spacious it almost threw us off our chairs the first time we heard it, while "Post" on the flipside pushed us a few hours deeper into the night with a twilight carousel of sparkling keys and another one of those endlessly cavernous basslines, venturing into a classic breakdown that brought those keys back. "Hunt You Down", meanwhile, deploys a shocking Maurizio style dub workout in 4/4 that makes use of a relentlessly sharp and deep signature, accompanied by stretched chords and metallic shards that subvert the track throughout its 11 minute duration. The final edit included on the compilation, W6, was taken from the last Warehouse sessions and is available only on this format.

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Andres Ilar - Sworn


It's been two years since Anders Ilar recorded his excellent Organza EP for Level Rec, and with Sworn he returns for a full-length outing. For this latest album, Ilar goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of music formatted around techno beats and delves into a far more involved electronica sound. Although tracks like opener 'Hillside' and the electroacoustically slanted 'Colours Of Rain' are keen to slap a kick sound on every crotchet, it could almost be an arbitrary gesture to signpost this music towards a comfortable genre classification. As with much of Vladislav Delay's more beat-driven work, there's a lot more to this than whatever's suggested by the drum programming, and some of Ilar's music shifts between adventurous abstraction and the kind of melodic elaboration most techno producers would consider to be surplus to requirements. 'September Nights' could be an old Arovane production but for its stringent 4/4 backbone. Otherwise the ornate, experimental approach to melodic development is straight out of the post-Autechre mindset. Importantly though, none of this sounds dated or out of place, instead carving out a rather unique corner of the electronic music universe that's all its own.

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John Tejada - Fabric 44


For his Fabric release, John Tejada leaves his mark indelibly on his selections, carefully and discreetly editing his way through tracks by artists such as Substance (as remixed by Shed), Donnacha Costello, Pigon, and LJ Kruzer, while throwing in a healthy supply of his own productions, both solo and in conjunction with long-term collaborators Arian Leviste and Justin Maxwell. The entire mix seems to uphold a peculiarly high standard of production, with insightful picks like 'Equalized001' by Eq'd revealing a discerning ear. The fact that Tejada's been so thorough in his sequencing and mixing really shines through too, and the whole playlist presents the aesthetic of a single, overarching narrative seamlessly evolving through the likes of Namlook's 'Subharmonic Atoms' and Donnacha Costello's 'Colourseries Olive B', segueing into the low-frequency robustness of WAX's 'WAX10001'. Tejada himself has billed the mix as being akin to an "electronic symphony", and as potentially daft sounding as that is, there's a defined sense of continuity and organisational meticulousness evident throughout.

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Dirt Crew - Soundwave


Dirt Crew's 'Soundwave' gets reworked by Quarion and Filippo Moscatello, backed up by original Dirt Crew track 'Blow'. The Quarion remix gets the EP underway with a nicely delay-saturated stab sound that maintains a kind of watery momentum over the course of its eight minutes, while Moscatello opts for a slightly rougher sound with heavy use of synthesizer lines and punchy kick sounds. Finally, 'Blow' introduces a looser feel with a solid house beat holding together spaced out edits and sample interjections.

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SCSI 9 - Easy As Down


Russia's premier minimal techno duo SCSI-9 have notched up some 25 releases for countless imprints from Craig Richards' Tyrant to Force Tracks to the indomitable Kompakt over the last 10 years. 'Easy As Down' is their fourth album to date and features a skillfully calcified sound which warrants the huge respect they've garnered from all corners of the minimal, tech house and techno scenes. 'Vesna, Lastic & Elliot' intorduces some considered synth chord sequences in harmony with an austere bowed cello to cleanse the techno-spirit, before 'Vesna, Lastic and elliot' takes your breath away with a lush and perfectly Kompaktian Pop ambient swooner. The spherical jazz harmonics of 'Nothing will change it' feature gorgeous vocals from Ryba and start to put this album in the post-club listening bracket but the run of tracks from 'Tu Eres' to 'Outtro' maintains an ambiguous function that can easily keep the party perked or reclined depending on your inclinations. A fine triumph for lush and ultra clean minimal techno.

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Cobblestone Jazz - 23 Seconds


A whopping triple LP outing for the Candian jazz/techno fusionists Cobblestone Jazz, which for the uninitiated, comprises Mathew Jonson, Danuel Tate and Tyger Dhula. Traditionally, Tate's keyboard work has given Cobblestone Jazz a distinctive live feel, but launching into the opening title track here there's no real evidence of that, instead everything has more of a programmed sound to it, albeit with a lively, analogue warmth. Elements of Rhodes and smooth chord changes start to appear in 'Slap The Back', and on the next side 'PBD (LP Edit)' features a bit of soloing, but the overall feel is one of silky movements within a fairly fastened-down techno framework. 'Hived Touch' is far more interesting, exhibiting some big bass and substantial, muffled beat production, yet this sort of minimalism is abandoned altogether for 'Lime In Da Coconut' which marks a departure for sunnier, more playful sounds. Even the beat seems to have a spring in its step. More overtly jazzy numbers crop up towards the end of the album, with the vocoder funk of 'W (LP Edit)' standing out in particular. Cobblestone Jazz have clearly honed and streamlined their approach to music-making since their debut 12" five years ago, and as a result the potentially quite jarring elements of live instrumentation and programmed electronics sound as though they've reached a natural balance on 23 Seconds.


Part 1
Part 2

Monday, December 22, 2008

Claro Intelecto - Metanarrative



Small and perfectly formed, 'Metanarrative' explores Mark Stewart's experiments with midnight techno variants, utilising a stylistic reduction that looks for warmth and detail in every nook and cranny. Of course, over the last couple of years Stewart has been best known for his 'Warehouse Sessions', a series of stripped twelves that make use of an astute line in reduction and a love of sonorous basslines to develop a sound best noted for its devastating production and frayed dub sequences. Metanarrative is a different beast altogether, built around 8 tracks that provide the backbone and emotive arc for the grand narrative alluded to in the title. Gone are the uncompromising percussive arrangements of the Warehouse Sessions, and instead the sound explores a more melodic, quietly euphoric display of opposites : sweet melodies and heavily padded bass frequencies, introspective conceits and propulsive percussion, and populist arrangements built with a deviant sound palette.

Link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3EFW3GH0