Memory keeper. Mostly music, some movies, series, video games. Obscure darkness meets pop culture glow.
This record is like a sampler to my current taste in techno. Brilliant tempo, minimal beat, but there’s also hooks and occasional vocal samples. There’s also this trance sound that’s new for me in techno and I’m completely in love with. This is yearly top 10 level of amazing. Makes me miss the dancefloore once more.
Beautiful, easing ambient, IDM, and some very soft techno. Think Moderat but with more chill.
Minimal techno, coming from one of the godfathers. This shines through with purity and a good sense for essence, but also some retro sounds here and there. Although, it’s not the most important record of the year, not even in techno, but it’s a good listen.
All I can think of while listening to this is how much I miss live music. I understand there are way more severe consequences of the pandemic in the world out there, but what makes me go nuts in my little world of my own is that I cannot go to live music events. Jump around at a concert with bodies smashing into one another. Barely hear a friend over screamning guitars and snearing drums with a beer in hand just to cut the sentence when the chorus hits us and shout the words from the top of our lungs. Dance in a barely lit dancefloor with beautiful techno thumping in my ears taking me on so well know but still unexpected journeys. Close my eyes and see what the music paints in the darkness while cosmic peace melts with ecstatic bursts of joy, and open my eyes slowly to let the faint blinking of the neon through and carve illuminating runes in my retina. I miss the people sharing the moment, breathing the sweaty steam of everyone moving at the same time to the same rhythm. I miss these moments, and I miss the people that we share it with so much.
Definitely techno for the dancefloor, but like with trance blended in. It’s not silly but still not serious.
This is easily one of my most influential albums that I came across in 2020. Modern technoid EBM with bubbling analog synths and tight industrial beats. It has all the dark beauty of any oldschool EBM but without the spotlight mainstreamism of some retro abusing modern electronic music. They are to EBM what Led Er Est was to post-punk goth rock—something new that understands the roots and fully lives in the present. Wonderful, fantastic music, soundtrack of my life material.
Tripping melodic mid-tempo techno and tech-house.
I have a feeling that I became a sucker for something that’s too mainstream with listening to all these Koletzki and Township releases. But I feel like it’s 2008 again and Kalkbrenner is new. Although these releases are from 2016-17, so I’m late to this party. Well, like I was late to the Kalkbrenner party, too, by just stumbling upon him after Berlin Calling came out. And there was Kah-Lo just recently as well. It shows that I’m usually a late adopter for dance music. Except that I’m getting more and more fond of trance, that has to be something different being in a revival time frame. You cannot be late by a few decades. (Or can you?)
Tripping techno continued today on a long player record format and with some occassional house beats. It’s interesting to hear how the tracks and the whole structure of music is changing when it is intended for an album release. It doesn’t feel like an assembly of single tracks but rather one coherent atmosphere and flow of music. Also, motivational brain juice work music for the day.
Definitely one of the best dreamy techno records that I’ve heard this year. It is tripping but still fits a dance floor just fine. Makes me ache for that neon-pierced pitch black box of techno club that we love so much. I miss it badly.
At the beginning it totally starts like some Brandt Brauer Frick record, having all those acoustic instruments, drums, guitars, strings, brass instruments, making all those little noises mixed up with the electronics. Then from the third track it goes fully electronic and creates this wonderful, cinematic journey with pulsing techno, ambient soundscapes, and broken beats. It all creates this great flow even though stylistically it’s not the most coherent album. I’m not afraid to say that it could well deserve a spot on my year-end toplist, even if it doesn’t make the Top 10 it could easily sit within the twenty.