Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?
It was my birthday recently. I don't ordinarily deal with birthdays particularly well; anything that reminds me of the number of years I have wasted getting to my current lowly position in life is frankly unwelcome - but the creeping black horror was tempered somewhat with the receipt of a lovely present from Tiny Dancer; a CD by a German techno dude I had not heard of until then, Stephan Bodzin. The album is called Liebe Ist... and has two of the most important things a good German techno CD should have - brilliantly clean, crisp pumping tunes that throb with dark energy and more essentially, a really cool minimalist sleeve. I would describe his music as... well, as exactly what you would expect German techno to sound like really. Check out Turbine and then buy the album from here.
Points of interest culled from his myspace page are that his influences are listed as Kraftwerk (makes sense), Motorhead (those crazy Germans do love their heavy rock) and, er, Miles Davis. I'm finding it hard to get my head around that last one - the king of improvisational avant-garde jazz somehow doesn't fit in with the precision sounds of Bodzin, but there you go. We also like the fact that the production company Bodzin has set up - Herzblut Recordings - sponsor a local kid's football team, Union 60 Bremen. What a genius idea - I can't wait to see this catching on everywhere else.
Listening to this album reminded me of Circulation's 2000 album Colours, which whilst having a much more laid back housey / jazzy sound, also features extremely exact production values. On both albums I would warrant that there is literally not a single sound out of place - truly music made by machines. Take a listen to White to get an idea of what I mean.
And what the hell, whilst we're knocking about chatting techno why not wrap your ears around the tune that introduced a harder, darker edge to house music back in 1991 and virtually invented techno, Joey Beltram's Energy Flash. Rather depressingly I have just calculated that most of the kids out there in club-land were toddlers when this came out, whereas I clearly remember it being played on the radio at the time of its release. God, I hate birthdays.
Crisp Debris
Labels: circulation, joey beltram, stephan bodzin, the kids want techno
posted by Tiny Dancer at Friday, March 14, 2008
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4 Comments:
"Rather depressingly I have just calculated that most of the kids out there in club-land were toddlers when this came out, whereas I clearly remember it being played on the radio at the time of its release."
Pffft...I remember listening to this at clubs on its release calculating that most of the kids in club land were toddlers when I first started going out.
Acid Ted
Ah, it comes to us all I guess Acid Ted... I realised with a shock recently that a large part of my music collection now seems to be taken up with classical music. When the heck did that happen?!
his music is very deep, i love it. happy birthday
Hey! I love Stephan! you should check out http://mixer.pointblanklondon.com/ where you can mix your own tunes online! xx
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