19.6.2009 von mk.

Essen, Germany may not have established itself on the map of musical creativity that stretches from Chicago to Berlin and back, but it’s suffice to say the unassuming German city has provided Manuel Tur with enough inspiration to name his debut album after its area code. It may not be 90210, but if it’s helped provide the backdrop for this slice of soulful deepness then we’ll just have to choose coal mines and a second rate football team over Tango babes and beaches. Having released his first EP at the age of 16, Manuel’s notched up a rather handsome looking back catalogue in the last 6 years. Influenced by artists as diverse as Ian Pooley and Pépé Bradock, two of his most high profile releases to date have been his Freerange debut Acorado and Deviate (on Drumpoet), the former wormed its way into the record boxes of everyone from Karizma to Ben Watt, and the latter being nominated for Beatport’s Best Deep House Track. Manuel also picked up nominations for Beatport’s Best Deep House Artist and Best Newcomer at the Ibiza DJ Awards. Recently he has been making forays into the live arena, working with Dessous artist Langenberg under the moniker Ribn to create rough and ready analogue sounding house and techno. Their debut has just been released on Josh Wink’s Ovum label. Manuel’s debut album, 0201, however, is a departure from the more dancefloor friendly productions he is known for; instead downtempo and abstract sounds sit happily alongside broken beat infused deep house and filtered French disco. Avoiding the classic dance music trap of creating an album of hastily thrown together 12” highlights, this is beautifully constructed slice of deeply atmospheric delights, with a beginning, middle and end your English Lit. teacher would be proud of. It’s not a dancefloor album – although some of the tracks would certainly make an impression at any afterhours worth its salt – the penultimate Radial especially, with its soaring melody and driving bassline. Rather, it was literally made in a bedroom, for listening to in a bedroom. 0201 harks back to other great ‘bedroom house’ albums such as Etienne de Crecy’s Super Discount or Cassius’s 1999. The dramatic sounding piano keys of the opening track quickly give way to a bassline and chords with echoes of French filtered disco at the height of its powers. Woven in with the darker and more emotive deep house sounds of now, Manuel has managed to create something that feels both fresh and nostalgic. There’s no denying the strong US influence on the album too, as Manuel does his bit for intercontinental relations – marrying soulful house vocals with a more European sound. Golden Complexion features Mark ‘Blakkat’ Bell whose legendary Shaboom label is another major inspiration for Manuel. Alexander East contributes on Will Be Mine turning in a sublime soulful delivery that shows why his distinctive sound has seen him work with the likes of Phonique, Jimpster and Mazi. The rich atmosphere and at times soundtrack-esque qualities to the album may be partly down to the huge variety of sounds that Manuel brings together on 0201. He explains that: “The whole album was made up from samples that I’ve been collecting for almost 10 years now and that I’ve put together like a jigsaw or ‘patchwork’, as is the title of the first track.” Obviously a true sound collector with one ear on the past and one eye on the future. The last track of the album Final Layer has the finality of the end of the road, or at least the end of the night, but you know you haven’t heard the last of this one.

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15.6.2009 von mk.

A smooth, soulfull summer tune spiced with the voice of Sandhy Sondoro. The man who can sing like Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett has found a wider audience through Stefan Raab´s casting show, a popular segment within one of Germany´s most successful late night shows. The Indonesian born singer has been living in Berlin for many years and has released his debut album last year. “Shine” has all the ingredients to become THE summer hit of the year.

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5.6.2009 von mk.

Producer and Five Six Media boss King Britt got his hands on this track, off Santigold’s debut album, and promptly turned the number into a smooth boom-bap-style remix. “This song is a very heavy tune,” says Britt. “I wanted to give Santi a very cinematic point of view.”

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4.6.2009 von mk.

This is what Peter Kruder himself said: “The initial idea for this compilation came after I played a series of concerts that were called “The Listening Sessions”. Bringing people into great sounding venues with an amazing sound system and have them sit down and just listen to music for two hours. A rare feat these days as most people just don’t take the time to sit down and listen to music without any distractions.”

1. the rainbow / talk talk (7:58)
2. on the chin / tortoise (5:05)
3. waste your live / the observatory (0:43)
4. enchanted lady / milt jackson with the ray brown big band (5:05)
5. adrien / pierre moerlen´s gong (3:30)
6. sweet butterfly / charles webster (5:23)
7. clap hands / tom waits (3:42)
8. darkness/earth in search of a sun / jan hammer (4:26)
9. consequences (private edit) / peace orchestra (6:07)
10. sleazy rider / kruder&dorfmeister (6:14)
11. three girls / stargard (3:58)
12. in my own words / craig armstrong (2:32)
13. ghosts / japan (4:21)
14. the days do not end / bernard hermann (4:00)
15. here we go / jon brion (4:39)
16. superflight / chateau flight (6:17)
17. mariama / rokia traore (5:34)

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19.5.2009 von mk.

Hidden Treasure

…is a hold on to your seat, white-knuckle rollercoaster of a track that combines the rawness of Ska, jump-up party vibes, and spine tingling vocals from the effervescent, soul-wrenching, voice you won’t-know-how-you-lived-without, sabirajade; Hidden Treasure drags you kicking and screaming out of the ordinary. Commercial, yes, accessible, yes, but this is independent music and proud of it.
DJ Vadim, a man who this year conquered cancer has dug deep, learned new skills and used his imagination to produce his best work yet. This first glimpse of the fresh sounds from this reinvigorated master of the international, dynamic and exciting independent music scene is a fast paced double time ode to good times, good people, freedom and adventure.
The truly international DJ Vadim has journeyed around 60 countries playing over 1500 gigs on a musical and life forming adventure. Vad brings with him these ingredients - sounds he’s heard, artists he’s met from long and far, experiences and emotions - as he steps into his basement studio to sonically distil.
The reggae tinged Soldier is almost too heavy to be a B side, with Big Red from France and 5Nizza from Russia lacing this radio-friendly spring time banger. Bonus track Saturday uses the well worn Auto-Tune to masterful effect, leaving Kanye a little something to aspire to…

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2.5.2009 von mk.

“Music Matters” is Dzihan & Kamien’s 3rd studio album. After “Freaks and Icons” (2000) and “Gran Riserva” (2002) as well as the live recording of the dZihan & Kamien Orchestra, “Live in Vienna”, they are challenging our musical senses again.
Recording for this album started about 3 years ago in San Remo, Italy, followed by sessions in the extraordinary Saal 4 Studios in Berlin and was completed at Couch Studios in Vienna in December, 2008.
On this album they went into exploring songs and the melodies. The recordings were basically made in a “vintage” way- quite the opposite of the previous records, “Freaks and Icons” or “Gran Riserva”.
On “Music Matters” they’ve been collaborating with the outstanding vocalist Helgi Jonsson. They perform and play almost all of the instruments by themselves, intentionaly avoiding the techniques of the past, whether it be sampling, cutting or editing. This gives them a brand new and almost atypical sound, but their uncompromised and well-know “finger print” is always there!

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21.4.2009 von mk.

Slow down. Relax. Take a deep breath. Steal back an hour from your busy life. This really is worth your full attention. Tosca, the Viennese masters of deluxe soundscapes and sensual rhythms, are back with their most magical and mesmerising album yet. It’s called No Hassle.

Multi-instrumentalists Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber have been friends since their Vienna schooldays, when they founded their first experimental band, Dehli 9. Richard later became half of the globally acclaimed DJ-producer duo Kruder and Dorfmeister, while Rupert composed piano music, soundart installations and acoustic networks. But the duo rediscovered their musical chemistry again with their Tosca debut, the 1994 12″ Chocolate Elvis. A string of highly praised albums and remix collections followed.

No Hassle is Tosca’s fifth studio album, and their most beautiful musical statement so far. A luxurious tapestry of analogue and digital sounds, submerged samples and live instruments, it evolves and expands into an hour-long ambient symphony. The title reflects not only the duo’s laidback approach to making music but their whole philosophy of life.
“It’s our personal reaction to everything,” says Richard. “To all things that are pressuring you from outside, or internally, from every angle. It’s sort of the ideal position to achieve, and it’s the same idea behind the music: to achieve an hour where you feel hassle free.”

No Hassle is all about contemplation and concentration. While recent Tosca releases like J.A.C. (2005) and the remix collection Souvenirs (2006) were a move towards classic song structures and club-friendly grooves, their latest is a much more introspective journey into inner space. It was conceived as a single seamless sea of sound, deeply layered with liquid rhythms and tidal melodies. Warm and enveloping, each leisurely track flows gently into the next, a musical ocean moving in slow motion. This is an album to plunge deeply into and get lost inside.
“We wanted to make the ultimate one hour of music where you don’t feel like you have to skip to the next track,” explains Rupert. “This is what we’ve been working on all these years. An album to invest one hour of your attention and concentration, almost like an audio massage.”

In a bold break with Tosca tradition, No Hassle is an almost entirely instrumental album featuring no main vocal tracks. It does contain a few sampled voices among its fluid ambient soundscapes, but nothing that fits a conventional song structure. As the duo explain, this was a deliberate stripping down process. Less is more.
“This time we decided not to have any lead vocals,” Richard explains, “but just to take some fragments of sounds that we liked. It’s a very back-to-basics, instrumental approach. The more we listened to normal vocal recordings, the more we didn’t like them. This reduced vocal idea seems to last longer for us.”
“There are some vocals on the album, but more as an instrument, not a song thing,” says Rupert. “We just wanted to have voices which are not disturbing you, more like a collage than a story. More like a landscape of vocal
sounds.”

The overall sound of No Hassle draws on classic Tosca ingredients: dub and funk, blues and krautrock, acoustic and electronic, strings and samples, mellow grooves and elegant piano melodies. As usual, the album is a product
of collective chemistry, with Richard and Rupert improvising together in their Vienna studio, discovering sounds and layering ideas in a purely intuitive manner. “We love this merging of different things, without a concept, just because it feels right,” Richard says.

On this album, Richard and Rupert have taken their music to more intense, meditative depths than ever before. From the dreamlike ambi-rock of Elektra Bregenz to the lush avant-jazz tapestry of No Hassle itself, this is an
engrossing musical journey which calms the mind and floods the senses.
The album’s stark musical landscape may seem alien and exotic in places, but there are a few familiar signposts along the way. The parched guitar twangs on the melting sci-fi symphony My First and the heat-haze desert blues Joe
Si Ha contain ghostly traces of broken blues guitars. The perfumed magic carpet ride Elitsa and the spooky cinematic ripples of Rosa recall psychodelic music at it’s most cosmic. And the beatific female voice drifting through Birthday has all the hypnotic power of the sun rising over the ocean.

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15.4.2009 von mk.

Just wanted to remind you to download Texas, Exponential Records label sampler. 17 Tracks from the Texas electronic music scene that has really been heating things up lately. One writer even said this album will help you impress the opposite sex with your fine taste in music….well it is Spring time maybe it’s worth trying? Anyway…this one is entirely free so go get it at www.antipop.net/texas

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7.4.2009 von mk.

With his debut single “Fragrant” in 2005, FLAER aka Stefan Fallmann made his mark, displaying an absolute passion for dry electro-funk grooves. “Demontage” is another step in the direction of Electro House - and taking a very direct route. A small foretaste of the tracks: Demontage: Starting with a colourful sound like a bell generated by an E-piano, the introduction switches over to a rhythmic string line in a very edgy synth-bass, which forms the clear foundations of the track. This robotic-like groove builds to a climax with carefully orchestrated vocal lines and funky guitar moves, which mixes fluidly with synthpatterns and bold trumpet accents for the crescendo. Concrete: This track starts with a finely defined and short accustic guitar, then evolves, as the title suggests, into an extremely „concrete“ and hard „House-Stamper“. Using constantly varying sounds, the track adds power to an intensive, interlocking rhythm collective in a broad, flat and very open sound landscape. Demontage Skwerl Remix: Using new innovative synth-arpeggios, Skwerl creates a very memorable and exciting soundscape that moves into a morphing sound, something that is combined brilliantly with an electronic 80’s Drum-Attitude. This calm and meditative track is the perfect complement to the original.

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28.3.2009 von mk.

“Digital Germs”? What meaning stands behind this phrase? Tee phrase stands behind another well selected compilation of tracks, which are of high standards to music lovers worldwide. Therefore we called it “Digital Germs” to allow customers to purchase something really worthily for their collection. Sonar Kollektiv’s finest diamonds.

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