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12"
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AGCG 004EP
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This is part 4 in a 4-part series of limited edition 12"s from A Guy Called Gerald's Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions (LI 017CD). Tronic Jazz takes the foundations of house and techno as though they were a kind of language, and speaks volumes with them. These three tracks include "Dirty Trix," "Indi Vibe," and "Merfted."
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12"
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AGCG 002EP
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This is part 2 in a 4-part series of limited edition 12"s from Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions (LI 017CD). A Guy Called Gerald has spent the last couple of years flitting through shadows, turning up on labels like Perlon, Beatstreet and Sender like a peripatetic prophet of the Berlin underground, seeding the scene with cryptic singles that return to the past to suggest alternate futures. The three tracks included here are "Nuvo Alfa," "Flutter" and "Wow Yheah."
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12"
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AGCG 001EP
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This is part 1 in a 4-part series of limited edition 12"s from Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions (LI 017CD). These tracks reveal A Guy Called Gerald's vision for techno in its third decade of existence. After so many years of digital anything-goes, you might have forgotten the kind of sounds that are possible with "old" machines. These tracks exemplify the warmth of house and techno, recapturing the ghosts of the past by shrouding them in new, simple garments.
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CD
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LI 017CD
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A Guy Called Gerald has spent the last couple of years flitting through shadows, turning up on labels like Perlon, Beatstreet and Sender like a peripatetic prophet of the Berlin underground, seeding the scene with cryptic singles that return to the past to suggest alternate futures. Now he returns to Berlin's Laboratory Instinct label with the follow-up to 2006's Proto Acid: The Berlin Sessions (LI 011CD/LP). Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions builds upon the foundation established by its predecessor to create an even more powerful statement of intent, one that communicates more persuasively than ever Gerald's vision for techno. Where Proto Acid offered a seamless mix of 24 cuts, recorded in one epic session, Tronic Jazz collects 13 stand-alone tracks. That's welcome news to DJs. But there's something else: freed from the flow of the mix, the tracks go deeper into themselves, even while contributing to the overall shape of the album as a single, coherent form. They're more varied in tone and mood, and even tempo. While Proto Acid was, by definition, a track-y affair, a kind of puzzle comprised of interlocking pieces, Tronic Jazz stretches out to explore its ideas in greater detail and greater depth. Nothing overstays its welcome: Gerald is a master of concision, and he manages to express everything he needs in five-minute chunks -- inside which time stops still, arrested by the interplay of deftly-programmed machine rhythms, carefully arranged chord progressions, and a masterfully intuitive sense of sound design. Like Proto Acid, Tronic Jazz is an extension of a life spent listening closely to machines, knowing exactly what knob to tweak at exactly the right instant. It represents a feedback loop through the artist and his circuitry -- a spontaneous journey though the miles of silicon in his vintage boxes. You could call Tronic Jazz's sound classic: its Spartan drum machines, analog synthesizers and carefully-sculpted funk are all modeled after a blueprint laid down decades ago in Chicago and Detroit. Cutting a glissando lead through a field of drum shrapnel, like some kind of pixie earthmover, or rubbing two bass lines up against each other til they throw off sparks. This stuff is wide-eyed and full of life. When it funks, it funks hard, and when it smoothes out, it can be as intimate as a hand-written note left on a lover's pillow.
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CD
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LI 015CD
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2009 release. After five albums for Thomas Brinkmann's max.ernst label, Tbilisi, Georgia-based producer Natalie Tusia Beridze aka TBA comes aboard Laboratory Instinct with Pending. It's her first album since 2007's Size and Tears (MAXE 014CD), and between its tentative melodies and its astonishingly rich tones, it might be her most emotionally-focused yet. But the record's cohesive feel doesn't mean that she has tempered her ambitions. Quite the opposite: Pending runs a gamut of moods and styles, borrowing bits and pieces from ambient, hip-hop, house, techno and pop. Where so much electronic music pledges itself to a lone technology or a single beat structure, Beridze only takes what she needs from swollen synthesizer patches, jittery drum programming, sampled pianos, even the occasional breakbeat. Beridze's own voice, often stretched like gauze through an array of reverb, lends an extra layer of warmth. "To 'Hell Risers'" opens the album like a calm intake of breath, with acoustic samples pulsing beneath a purring spray of syllables. "Don't Know Why" feels like Underworld on helium, or the Postal Service wearing anti-gravity boots: it's classic electro-pop, and it soars. On "Good Night Tokyo," notes flicker like a time-lapse film of a night-time skyline, but slowly decaying chords and drifting vocals impart a sense of stillness that only deepens with the beatless "X.It (Endo)," three minutes of keys and strings. The classically-inspired sketches "Ice Turns End" and "Isole" suggest excerpts from film scores, which makes sense, given Beridze's own filmmaking work and her multimedia activities with the Goslab collective. One of the album's most powerful tracks, "Cuts vs. Ignorance" fuses Detroit techno's keening synths to stuttery, hip-hop-influenced beats. "Everything Pushes Me Further Away" is even heavier, with an unrelenting spray of metallic scraps abrading a dark, velvety backdrop. Occasionally, Beridze will come clean with relatively straightforward pop songs, but always rendered in her unusually intimate, voices-in-your-head style. At the album's center, there's "Come To Kiss Me," a nine-minute masterpiece of fluttering chords, indebted to Steve Reich and Terry Riley's pulse minimalism. It's a gorgeous, expanding mass, a slow-motion explosion of color as dizzying as its title promises.
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12"
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LI 009EP
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After their first full-length collaboration called Superstructure, Berlin-based Christopher Dell and Roman Flügel (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High) release Study For A Skyscraper EP, featuring two Superstructure CD cuts not included on the vinyl version. Clearly designed for the club, the bright bumping techno of "4 Door Body Cell" and the infectiously grooving title track are exquisite dance floor material. Best of all, A Guy Called Gerald (Gerald Simpson) contributes what he calls a "drop-tech infusion" of Dell & Flügel's entire album. This UK acid house pioneer alchemizes the album's sonic particles into a fabulous slab of driving electro-techno.
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LP
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LI 008LP
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LP version. This is the premiere collaboration between Christopher Dell and Roman Flügel (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High). Brace yourself for Superstructure, an incredible poly-stylistic fusion of jazz, hip-hop, glitch, dub and techno. Flanger devotees will be drawn to the pair's like-minded genre-defying approach, with Dell's sparkling vibes a recurring focal point throughout the album's nine adventurous tracks.
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CD
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LI 008CD
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This is the premiere collaboration between Christopher Dell and Roman Flügel (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High). Brace yourself for Superstructure, an incredible poly-stylistic fusion of jazz, hip-hop, glitch, dub and techno. Flanger devotees will be drawn to the pair's like-minded genre-defying approach, with Dell's sparkling vibes a recurring focal point throughout the album's nine adventurous tracks. The wild, vibes-drums duet "Miniaturisation" suggests the playful outcome of a lost Frank Zappa-meets-Thelonious Monk session, the mysterious "Wolkenbügel" marries clip-clopping tom-tom rhythms with Hancock-flavoured Rhodes ruminations, and "4 Door Body Cell" offers bright minimal techno bolstered by lashing handclaps and frenzied cymbal patterns. Distinguished by a rich array of soft gamelan tinklings and burnished trumpet musings, the jazz-tinged stuttering hip-hop of "Urban Practise" is equally arresting, with Dell's cascading vibes detouring into an oblique solo that would do Monk proud. Bookended by the glitchy soul-jazz and clipped syncopations of the warm opener "Superstructure" and the darker, hypnotic glitch-dub of "Dirty Realism," this remarkably assured album inhabits a unique computer-enhanced interzone of futuristic sounds.
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CD
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LI 007CD
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"iMix miniLP is his first solo outing under the Atom TM guise since 1996, not to mention his first album for Ryo and Miho's Berlin-based Laboratory Instinct. Presented in his inimitable and unique Atom style, Schmidt brings da funk on the rocking dance-club outing iMix miniLP. Over the course of seven sample-heavy tracks, Schmidt distills stylistic traces of his various aliases-Señor Coconut's spicy rumbas, Flanger's mutant space jazz, and Geeez'n'Gosh's spindly click-hop-into lush slices of sexy acid funk."
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CD
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LI 006CD
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"While his previously published EP Xiringuitos Perdido was rather technoide and by all means danceable V.L.A.D.'s new album Emo-droidz brings out completely new facets. The 9 pieces are dominated by clear and simultaneously peculiar complex forms. He renounces spheric blurry areas. If someone would visualize Emo-droidz it would be the soonest a drawing." Although considered a full length album, only 24 minutes long.
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LP
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LI 006LP
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12"
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LI 005EP
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"V.L.A.D.'s music emerges from the death throes of new wave and electro-body-music... In fact, V.L.A.D.'s tunes are often based on unrestrained tempos with electro sounds typical of Human League, New Order or Fad Gadget. His metal roots regularly emerge through an undeniable obsession with nerve-racking and distorted sounds a typical feature of the most experimental drum'n'bass German productions. With this universe both schizophrenic and epileptic, V.L.A.D. has become one of the new French producers whose works are today in demand by such different people as the Paris label artefact, the Angstrom compilation or even Warp."
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2LP
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LI 004LP
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2LP
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LIRD 1001LP
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CD
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LIRD 1001CD
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"Already highly recommended by press worldwide, Laboratory Instinct showcases its wide musical range with contributions by great artists like Eight Miles High, Thomas Fehlman, Luke Vibert, Freeform, Sutekh, Soul Center and others. Ryo, who has been spinning records for ages, moved a few years ago from Tokyo to Berlin."
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