The ill-ec-tro-nic

Ok, so my plan of following the world cup’s progression with a series of german-related posts hasn’t exactly kept on track being as this as only the second one and the final is on Sunday! Never mind, I guess I’ll just post the tracks up over the coming weeks nonetheless as I’m sure the music is what you’re interested in rather than the tedious commentary anyway.

Noting comments from the Langer’s Sonar post and some of the feedback he’s had, it seems some questions are starting to be asked around the current ubiquity of minimal or more specifically the monotomy of the sound. Whilst I tend to sympathise with these sentiments in so far as a sparce percussion-based loop repeated umpteen times over 11 minutes does not generally a great record make, there is still some absolute quality music being pumped out of this scene at the present time.

So for today’s post, I’m giving you live sets from two of Germany’s finest ambassadors of the stripped down audiophile techno sound. Both artists have been getting lots of press in recent months so as usual I’ll avoid warbling on endlessly about a bunch of stuff you’ve probably read elsewhere already.

Sleeparchive – Live - Vienna

The first set is by sleeparchive, a relative newcomer to the scene with a handful of his releases dating back to 2004 on his own label and various remixes on mainly German-based labels including the his superb ‘interpretation’ of monolake’s plumbicon. Which also brings me nicely onto the second post…

Monolake – Live - Melbourne

Monolake is probably a name that many of you are also already familiar with as they’ve been knocking out quality tunes for the last 10 years including releases on the seminal chain reaction label. The Monolake lineup has however changed over the years with one of the original members leaving then it becoming a solo project for a while then going back to a duo for last year’s superb polygon cities, one of my favourite albums of 2005. The track above is actually linked directly from Monolake’s website, www.monolake.de, which is well worth a visit not least as there’s a couple of other freebies there too. Monolake’s mainstay has been Robert Henke, one of the technical gurus associated with Ableton Live, a key production / DJ tool of recent times and the program responsible for making numerous layered sample compilations possible in recent years including two absolute corkers of particular relevance to this post Scion’s ‘arrange & process…’ and Hawtin’s ingenious DE:9 series.

Right, that's more than enough writing for today so I'll just leave you with a little reminder to support the artists and buy some of their stuff.

// posted by RAW @ 7/05/2006 10:48:00 pm