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Net Decks 11

  Tobias

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reviews

Are you, by any chance, looking for the warmest, deepest, most dreamy and romantic music imaginable to pick you up at the end of a hard day and put your mind at ease? Then “Blüte seines Lebens” by German duo “Das Kraftfuttermischwerk” should be on the top of your list of “things to check out without delay”. On their regularly updated website/blog, Saint Sebastion & Inge Immergruen muse about the reunion of “The Police”, the greatest concerts ever and domestic political issues, but their music is pure and potent escapism. Oldschool drums put down slooooow and sexy grooves as a basis for a dialogue between analog synths, delayed drums and cosmic sampledelica in a mushroom fantasy of Jamaica. Time is virtually standing still in pieces like “Blütenstaub in Basel”, which sound like hammock-versions of dub and seem to move vertically and without effort. On the final track, “Shadows On Wooden Beaches”, hummed vocals join, drifting like little fluffy clouds on the picture-book  blue sky of an airy arrangement. Listen to this after you’ve finished this issue of “Net Decks” or risk falling into happy slumber before you’ve reached the end of the next paragraph.
Equally detached from all worldly hardships is “Traum – a” by Jarmo Huhta aka Twile. Two years have passed since his debut release “Chiaroscuro”, but it’s been quite worth the wait. Huhta’s music also drowns in lush ambient reverb and his pieces follow the same slowmotion path as Das Kraftfuttermischwerk. But throughout, the mood is rather one of eeriness, of surrealism and of an immanent outburst. “Designed to be listened to in seclusion”, he advises, but these four track not only ought to be appreciated in a place of solitude – they must have been composed in one as well. Underneath the threatening surface, a concrete bassdrum beats at a comatosed rate, while the slide effects of Huhta’s violin mix with gargantous piano chords and ghoulish marimbas. Everybody likes a good ghost story and few tell them as effectively as Twile.
http://thinner.cc

Over to Düsseldorf – or is it Frankfurt? Or Wiesbaden rather? Or even Amsterdam? Let’s get the facts straight: D.Soul, the man behind the tropic netlabel, which we have already featured twice before on these pages, was born in Wiesbaden, then moved to Frankfurt (where he, just like your truly, discovered the now defunct “Omen” club) and now releases “One Night in Amsterdam” as a free netrelease with his friends from the Corpid label, hailing from Germany’s capital of Marketing Düsseldorf. Just as much as there is nothing complicated about the backgrounds, D.Soul’s music has a light and weightless feel about it, an instant recognition and appreciation factor, which allows the synapses to open up immediately and allow the intricate structures in. The more focussed one listens to this music, however, the more the clever and quietely creative arrangements become apparent. Daniel Tischer regards the repetitive nature of techno less of a tool for hypnosis than for slowly expanding the scope of his music. The essentials of each piece are present right from the very first note, but with each loop cycle and thanks to “pit stops”, which almost inaudibly fade and add certain elements, their beauty becomes ever more apparent. “Puddles”, with its open breakdown section towards the end even has a more experimental character, while the playful “Till my Heart Stops” kicks like a baby on testosterone. Special cudos to the formidable, transparent and yet powerful production.
www.corpid-label.de/

Dark, magnetic trancestates, meanwhile, are what Loran Valdek specialises in. It’s not that easy finding valuable information about the man on the web, despite a MySpace account and an elaborate website, but no matter: The “Be Alone EP” on Stratospherik tells us all we need to know. The title track alone is a monster. Six and a half minutes filled with relentless and unchanging pulsations. Truthfully, this piece is nothing but a hyperventilating bass and some abrasive chords splattered on top, but this bastard between electro and apocalyptic soundscape keeps burning for its entire length. The play on words of “Machine against the Rage” suggests Valdek has an interest in areas outside of electronic dulture, but the music is all synthetic aggression, a distorted tone hanging over minimal beats like a siren in the dark parts of town. In “The Cloudmaker”, Valdek attempts to reconsile both approaches in a work that is both atmospheric and danceable, an intense cloudburstflight with spaceous pads. Edgey, but promising material.
www.stratospherik.com

By Tobias Fischer

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“Net Decks” is a weekly feature of tokafi.com covering Netlabel releases from the techno and electronica scene. It is published each Monday. For including your infos, please contact us at tobias@tokafi.com