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10"
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HYG 020EP
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On DJ Balaton's second release, Space For Afternoon, the title says it all: this 10" features two laidback house tracks that belong in every set of a dignified afterhour. "Honey Future" impresses with driving bass and distorted Korg sound, while the focus is on repetitive delays and melodies. The single is completed by "Bedroom Floor" in a classic B-side style: the spherical sound carries you through space and time and makes you blur and forget them.
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2LP
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HYG 023LP
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Berlin-based producer Rampue has not released an album in 14 (in words: fourteen) years. Between 2008 and 2020 he toured the world and worked mainly on his live sets in the meantime. So now only a worldwide pandemic had the power to prevent the traveling musician from continuing this hustle and bustle and eventually share a new record with the public. The new Rampue album Tragweite came into existence in February 2021, which portrays the artist's desire for experimentation. Inspired by a modular synthesizer (Buchla), Rampue has seemingly put himself into a kind of trance, in which he lets the machines work and combines randomly created sounds with airy structures such as low drums or simple grooves. Rampue accomplished to break free by using random sounds as a new impulse and a way out of a creative crisis, which stemmed both from the enforced home isolation and from the self-perceived paralysis. Listening to Tragweite one gets the impression that the dialectical relationship between chaos and order, further supported by its production, is the defining theme of the album. After an initially perceived chaos, a delicate order, which is determined by structuring drum patterns and basslines, takes over throughout the course of the album. Later, it frays and loses itself again in sounds and tones created mechanically. However, it never seems arbitrary, but willful and skillfully staged. For instance, "Furō" begins with apparent arrhythmia. The combination of bass and subtle percussion, however, gives this arrhythmia a shape, guiding the track which gradually becomes more and more driving without losing its original playfulness. Although one might be inclined to think of genres such as downtempo or ambient at the beginning in the further course of the album results in such a diverse sound and rhythmic landscape that one willingly questions one's own perception of music while listening and finally throws every type of categorization overboard joyfully. The musical spectrum ranges from straight arrangements that live entirely without a drum foundation ("Für Dich") to almost meditative sound collages ("Regengesicht") to the four-to-the-floor banger "Kembang". "Direct Faden" on the other hand, surprises with its simple guitar-based foundation on which the omnipresent synth snippets and pads are allowed to let off steam towards the end of the record. The track that most closely combines the progressive production style with a danceable club atmosphere is probably "Phobia". Rampue breaks with his old, musical habits as Tragweite creates the impression of improvisation and jam character without getting lost.
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LP
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HYG 008LP
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Take your phone, your tablet, and your TV and throw them out the window! That's the spirit and the idea uniting the eight tracks of the album Out the Window by Christopher Schwarzwälder & Iannis Ritter. Listening to this otherworldly piece of downtempo electronica will make you feel relieved and excited, as if you had actually removed your electronic shackles for a little while. This album is light and heavy at the same time, it's in your room and outside, it is loud and quiet like an extroverted introvert. The nature of this album is organic and analog and simply weird -- it's a juxtaposition of well-known, homey sounds and the strange. The intro "Snow Broom" feels like waking up on holiday, where you hear the familiar sounds of your loved ones in the kitchen, however they are in a new kitchen, so it feels alluringly different. The title track "Out the Window" seems to conjure the listener and you will find yourself spacing out as if you were smoking really good sativa for the first time. "Electron", featuring Mo, is another highlight, with its different characters it resembles an audio book of The Neverending Story. The vocals in "Make Things Smaller" and "Safe Place" feel hip-hop influenced and ancient, like someone rapping in-front of an open fire. Out the Window is an album for late summer, autumn, winter time, or any time that you like to look out the window and inside your own mind. Includes download code.
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LP
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HYG 007LP
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Each track of Oberst & Buchner's debut album Sfumato is rich with anticipation and residue -- it feels like being taken on a very controlled journey through space and time by another life form. The two friends and musicians from Vienna and Berlin shift themes and melodies gradually into one another, producing billowing pieces of music with soft and foggy outlines. Just like you can get lost in the perfection of a single brush stroke in a renaissance painting from up close, if you step away you can't help but admire the planning, skill and instinct coming together in this album and every single track. The two producers almost seem to make use of the sounds that are not there, triggering our expectations and creating premonitions in our minds. The complex sound patterns are frequently juxtaposed by simple, almost naive melodies that make everything feel innately known but alien at the same time. On "Eye Liquor" the feature guest Tobias Koett brings just the right amount of fragility and humanity to offset the moodily awakening fantastic sonic beast beneath. With analog sounds the two celebrate the past and the future, creating murmuring, breathing streams of consciousness.
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12"
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HYG 005EP
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Unnatural, uneasy, unexpected. The Great Filter keeps you on your toes constantly, it makes your fingers tingle with anticipation and the hairs on your arms stand up from the tension. It is eerily calm and controlled. Unorganic sounds, alien voices, excited synths, and sobering organs. Reality is so mundane. Krink he does what is unexpected and stretches conventions somewhere around techno and deep house. The music is driven by imagery rather than song structure. The EP puts cutting rhythms over comfort and sound over beauty. Like a focused dream, it is concrete and abstract.
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