onsdag 3 Okt 2007, 17:39

click here for a tag radio station containing all the linked minimal techno artists below

Article courtesy of:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/electronic/story/0,,2178449,00.html

One of the best places in Berlin to watch the sun rise is from inside the massive Watergate club, on the banks of the River Spree, in the trendy Kreuzberg district. The side facing the river towards the east is glass-plated floor-to-ceiling; between 5am and 7am, the room is gradually transformed from a dark, heaving mass of European bodies syncopating themselves to a house beat into a gloriously sunlit morning-after.

Berlin has been the spiritual home of dynamic, forward-thinking dance music for much of the past decade, house and techno in particular; it is a hub where artistic talents converge and nascent genres emerge to spread across Europe. The combination of a famously liberal attitude towards partying and a startlingly low cost of living has made the city a magnet for art scenes of all descriptions, a hedonistic centre of creativity where clubs open on a Friday night and often don't close until well into the following week, and where three-day parties are par for the course. It is home to some of Europe's most famous clubs (Watergate; the dungeon-like, labyrinthine Tresor; Berghain, a gothic building which looms up from an industrial landscape) and achingly hip dance labels (Get Physical, Bpitch Control, Cadenza).

The sound that has been filling those clubs and distributed on those labels, and which has exploded across the continent, is broadly known as minimal. Over the past five or so years, it's grown from an arcane subdivision of techno into an ubiquitous buzzword on the dance scene. Even two years ago, minimal techno was still the preserve of the so-hip-it-hurts sunglasses-at-night set. Its trendiness was endearingly encapsulated in the ubercoolische.com website, a charming soap opera written about the adventures of minimal figureheads Ricardo Villalobos, Magda and Richie Hawtin. In 2006, minimal finally crossed over, though, when Gabriel Ananda's 10-minute percussive epic Doppelwhipper exploded across Ibiza.

"For a few months, anything on any minimal German label sold," says Simon Rigg, manager at London record shop Phonica and longtime supporter of the sound. Now, even the unlikely figure of will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas has somehow cottoned on: his forthcoming album samples minimal's biggest 2005 hit, M.A.N.D.Y., and Booka Shade's Body Language - though he is still some way behind Kylie Minogue, whose 2003 No 1 Slow was essentially a minimal track with an added pop vocal.

Characterised by simple, spare beats and subtle sonic details, minimal can baffle novices: how can music with seemingly so little to it manage to work dancefloors into a state of frenzy, let alone cross over to casual dance fans? But there is a rich emotional pull to the best minimal records: furthermore, by stripping all extraneous sound from a track, all the subtle details - shifts in tempo, melodic phrases, textural effects - are magnified a hundredfold. It is equally cerebral and physical: on the dancefloor, you can lose yourself in thinking about how the dots join up with each other even as your body moves automatically to the beat.

Craig Richards, techno house pioneer and resident of London superclub Fabric, has been a minimal enthusiast since first hearing Basic Channel records in the 1990s. "At first, people were irritated by simplicity, frightened to be absorbed by a sound so simple in the same way that people in art galleries are threatened by minimal abstract paintings," he says. "Only now are people willing to be engaged by very little." Rigg, meanwhile, has an alternative explanation for its rise in popularity: "A lot of people have suggested it's all linked to the popularity of ketamine, which means that you can listen to 17-minute minimal epics for hours."

Another factor in the surge of popularity is how minimal has evolved - or rather, what the term "minimal" has come to mean. It has always covered a multitude of styles: the gap between the m_nus label's austere, menacing minimal techno and the lush microhouse and pop-friendly hooks favoured by Michael Mayer's Kompakt label is vast. Now, "minimal" is an umbrella term covering a massive swathe of house and techno - much to the annoyance of dance connoisseurs, whose second favourite activity after dancing to techno is semantic hair-splitting, and who cannot bear to see the label "minimal" stuck on music they think does not merit it. In fact, the resilience of the name is a testament to its popularity, despite its increasing meaninglessness as a term; it is also in large part the result of the scene's sense of community, wherein even a label releasing chunky, maximalist techno (such as Areal) is tagged minimal purely because its artists associate with true minimal artists.

Two of 2007's key albums find two leading lights of the sound pursuing very different paths. Mathew Jonson is the classically trained Canadian founder of the Wagon Repair label; his Cobblestone Jazz project is an unlikely fusion of techno with jazz. For five years, it has been a live project based on improvisation and interaction with Danuel Tate and Tyger Dhula, the other musicians who comprise Cobblestone Jazz; the album, 23 Seconds, is a gorgeous, loose-limbed, trippy affair that retains the easy spontaneity at the heart of the project.

Ricardo Villalobos, meanwhile, is a Chilean exile in Berlin (his family fled Pinochet's regime when he was three) whose name is spoken in minimal circles with a kind of hushed reverence: his reputation as an auteur has been cemented by a string of seminal releases including last year's Fizheuer Zieheuer, a 37-minute epic based on a Hungarian wedding song. His own new release is ostensibly a mix compilation, the 36th in the Fabric series, but it's comprised entirely of Villalobos' own new tracks. To all intents and purposes it is his third album; uncomfortable with his own reputation, though, Villalobos has opted to release it in this way so as to avoid excessive hype. It is a revelation: Villalobos spends the first quarter gently easing the listener into his mind, skeletal rhythms weaving in between each other without ever impinging themselves too heavily; slowly but surely, though, he begins to pull out his tricks and the madness begins to set in.

The 12-minute centrepiece, Andruic & Japan, is a riot of thunderous tribal drums and what appears to be a lone female voice (in actual fact the voices of Villalobos and a friend fed through a machine) that begins conversationally, and ends up in an insane rant about chicken giblets. Dark, unsettling, and possibly enough to induce psychosis on the dancefloor, the album finally breaks into the light with the gloriously sunny Primer Encuentro Latino-Americano, based on a traditional Chilean folk song.

Villalobos and Jonson are good friends, but their attitudes to their art could not be more different. Villalobos is, to put it bluntly, a renowned party freak: in most pictures he is dishevelled, wild-haired and wild-eyed. I interview him a week before his girlfriend gives birth to their first child; when asked how his lifestyle will be affected, he sighs deeply before replying, "I guess I will have to go home after the first afterparty instead of the fifth."

He rhapsodises about partying endlessly - "I try not to miss a single opportunity for happiness" - and casts his hedonistic lifestyle as a political act: "We are living in one of the most unjust situations in human rights in the history of all humanity. It is a bad energy which is taking control of the world, like cancer. It's important to find the little light in between all this blackness, to find your space and fight for your right to party, to build up a worldwide net of people who want to have a good time and to forget reality for a while. I try to deliver the music to make the quality of escape better."

Jonson, on the other hand, is more introspective. He talks at length about how the process of production is an attempt to recreate the music in his head: "If I go into a museum or art gallery, I'll hear music in my head - not a song, but a non-stop progression in real time. Often I hear something in my head which is far better than anything I could conceptualise or write … I'm hoping as I get older I'll be better able to capture that." Until recently he based himself in Vancouver rather than Berlin for artistic reasons: "In a city which doesn't have a club scene, I find that more creative - because there's less to do, all the musicians are hanging out with each other and making music. And I don't really take inspiration from clubs - nature inspires me. Art, architecture, the weather inspires me. And girls."

What both agree on, however, is that at the heart of minimal techno is a yearning for liberation. Returning to the theme of location, it is no coincidence that postcommunist Berlin has become the scene's hub, or that Villalobos pinpoints Romania as the country most likely to produce the next generation of techno leaders. Hedonistic freedom will always hold special significance for those who have known the absolute lack of any freedom: Villalobos himself, an exile from Pinochet's regime in Chile, identifies with that idea, while Ellen Allien, the founder of the Bpitch Control label, pinpoints the moment when the Berlin Wall came down as the key to her work. In minimal techno, what is not in the music can be as important as what is there: the gaps in between the beats and the melodies provide the spaces in which the dancers can find liberation, to free their minds by losing them. Villalobos smiles, and says merely: "That freedom is what I want to give to everyone."

2 AM/FM , 2 Dollar Egg , 2 Dollar Egg / Akufen / Decomp , 2 Dollar Egg / Plastikman , 2000 & One , 2000 and One , 2am/Fm , 3 Channels , A. Vivanco , Ada , Adam Kroll , Adam Proll , ADJD , Adultnapper , Afrilounge , Agaric , Agnès , Agoria , akiko kiyama , Akufen , Alejandro Vivanco , Alex Smoke , Alex Under , Alexander Kowalski , Alexi Delano & Xpansul , Alter Ego , Ambivalent , Âme , Andomat 3000 & Jan , Andre Crom , andre kraml , Andy Stott , Andy Vaz , Anja Schneider , anja schneider & sebo k , ANTISLASH , Antonelli Electr , Argy , Aril Brikha , Audio Werner , Audiofly X , Audion , Audion and Ellen Allien , Axel Bartsch , Babicz, Robert , Baby Ford & Zip , Baby Ford / Steve Bug / Zip , Barada , Barem , Basic Channel , Basteroid , Bastien Grine , Ben Klock , Benjamin Wild , Berg Nixon , Bern , Billy Dalessandro , Bodycode , Bodzin & Huntemann , Booka Shade , Boris Brejcha , Brian Aneurysm , Broker/Dealer , Brooks , Bruno Pronsato , Butane , Butane/Audion/Yamo , Cabanne , Captain Comatose , Carl Craig , Carsten Jost , Cassy , Chaim , Chaton , Chelonis R. Jones , Chupacabra , Cirez D , Claude Vonstroke , Closer Musik , Cobblestone Jazz , Convextion , Crackhaus , D. Diggler , Damian Schwartz , Dan Berkson , Dan Berkson and James What , Daniel Bell , Daniel MehlHart , Daniel Stefanik , Dapayk , Dapayk & Padberg , Dapayk solo , Dario Zenker , Daso , Dave Ellesmere , David Alvarado , David K , David Roiseux , Davide Squillace , Daze Maxim , DBX , Deadbeat vs. Stephen Beaupré , Decomposed Subsonic , Deep Chord , Deepchord , Denis Karimani , Dennis DeSantis , Digitaline , Dilo , Dimbiman , Dinky , Dirt Crew , ditch , DJ Koze , DJ Koze a.k.a. Monaco Schranze , Dj Koze aka Adolf Noise , DJ Minx , DJ Oskar & Sebo K , Dj T. , D'Malicious , Dominik Eulberg , Dominik Eulberg & Gabriel Ananda , Double X , Dub Kult , dublee , Dum Dum , Duoteque , Easy Changes , Efdemin , Egoexpress , Einmusik , Einzelkind , Elektrochemie , Elektrochemie LK , Elektrochemie LK featuring Caitlin Devlin , Ellen Allien , Ellen Allien & Apparat , Exercise One , Extrawelt , Fairmont , Falko Brocksieper , FALSE , Farben , Fenin , Ferenc , Florian Meindl , Flügel, Roman / Sikora , Flügel, Roman / Sikora / Stewa , Forever Sweet , Franco Cinelli , Frank Lorber , Franklin de Costa , Frivolous , Fuckpony , Fusiphorm , Future Beat Investigators , Gabriel Ananda , GAISER , Gamat 3000 , Gebr. Teichmann , Geoff White , G-Man , Gregor Tresher , Grungerman , Gui Boratto , Guido Schneider , GummiHz , GURTZ , Gustavo Lamas , Guy Gerber & Shlomi Aber , Håkan Lidbo , Half Hawaii , Heartthrob , Heib , Heiko Laux , Heiko Voss , Hemmann & Kaden , Hieroglyphic Being , Housemeister , Hug , Hugg & Pepp , Hugg and Pepp , Huggotron , Hutton Drive , Ion Ludwig , Isolée , Italoboyz , Ivan Smagghe , Jabberjaw , Jacek Sienkiewicz , Jackmate , Jake Fairley , James T. Cotton , Jamie Jones , Jason Emsley , Jay Haze , Jeff Samuel , Jens Zimmermann , Jeremy P. Caulfield , Jesper Dahlbäck , Jesse Somfay , Johannes Heil , John Dahlback , John Dahlbäck , John Keys , John Tejada & Arian Leviste , Jona , Jonas Bering , Joris Voorn , jpls , Julian Jeweil , Jürgen Paape , Jussi-Pekka , Justus Köhncke , Kalabrese , kaliber , kAzooo , Kenneth Graham , Kenny Leaven , Kiki , kollektiv turmstrasse , Konfekt , Konrad Black , Konrad Black & Ghostman , Konrad Black & Selfpartwo , Krikor , Lawrence , Lazy Fat People , Le Dust Sucker , Lee Curtiss , Lee Van Dowski , Lee Van Dowski & Quenum , Len Faki , Lindstrøm , Lineas De Nazca , Loco Dice , LOD , Lopazz , Losoul , Louderbach , Louderbach aka Troy Pierce , Luci , Luciano & Quenum , Lucien-N-Luciano , Lump , Luomo - Mathias Schaffhauser Remix , Lutzenkirchen , M of M , M. Mayer / Reinhard Voigt , M.A.N.D.Y. , M.A.N.D.Y. vs. Booka Shade , M.I.5 , M:I:5 , Maetrik , Magda , Marc Houle , Marcin Czubala , Marek Bois , Marek Hemmann , mark henning , Markus Nikolai , Martin Buttrich , Martin Donath , Martin Landsky , Martin Schulte , Massi DL , Mathew Jonson , Mathew Jonson & The Mole , Mathew Jonson and The Mole , Mathias Kaden , Mathias Schaffhaeuser , mathias schaffhauser , Matias Aguayo , Matt John , Matt Star , Matthew Dear , Matthias Tanzmann , Matzak , Maurizio , Maxx Cavalerra , Melchior Productions , Meta.83 , Metaboman , Metope , Michael Mayer , Michael Mayer & Reinhard Voigt , michael mayer/reinhard voigt , Michal Ho , MICROFUNK , Mikael Stavöstrand feat. Big Bully , Mike Shannon , Minimal Man , Miskate , Miss Fitz , Misstress Barbara , Mitte Karaoke , Modernist, The , Modeselektor , Monne Automne , Monoroom , Mossa , Mowbray & Sullivan , My My , MyMy , Namito , Naum , Niederflur , notsignal , Octex , Off Pop , Offshore Funk , Oliver Hacke , Oliver Huntemann , Oliver Koletzki , Onur Özer , Osborne , Oxia & Tom Pooks , Oxia Vs Ginos & Snake , Pablo Akaros , Pablo Bolivar , Paco Osuna , PAN POT , Pan-Pot , Pantha Du Prince , Pantytec , Paradroid , Pascal F.E.O.S. , Patrick Chardronnet , Paul Brtschitsch , Paul Kalkbrenner , Paul Nazca , Paul Nazca/Paul Nazca , Paul Ritch , Peter F. Spiess , Peter Grummich , Peter Horrevorts , Petre Inspirescu , Phage and Daniel Dreier , Pheek , Philip Bader , Philip Sherburne , Pier Bucci , Pig & Dan , Pig and Dan , Plasmik , Plastikman , Popkan , Popnebo , Portable , Porter Ricks , Querida , Radio Slave , Raudive , Reinhard Voigt , Rekleiner , Rekorder , Remute , Rene Breitbarth , René Breitbarth , Ricardo Villalobos , Ricardo vs. Jay , Richard Davis , Richie Hawtin , Robag Wruhme , Robert Babicz , Rocco Branco , Roman Flügel , Ruede Hagelstein , Ruede Haglestein , Run Stop Restore , Ryan Crosson , Sami Koivikko , Samim , Samim & Michal , Sammy Dee & Guido Schneider , Samuel L. Session , Sarah Goldfarb , Sascha Funke , Sasse , Savvas Ysatis , Scion , Sebastian Roya , Sebastien Leger , Sebbo , Sebo K , Sender Berlin , Seph , Sergej Auto , Seth Troxler , Seuil , Shane Berry , Shinedoe , Shlomi Aber , Shonky , skoozbot , Sleeparchive , Sleeper Thief , S-MAX , Smith n Hack , Solieb , Someone Else , Someone Else + Miskate , Soulphiction , Soylent Green , Spektre , Stardiver , STEADYCAM , Stefan Goldmann , Sten , Stephan Bodzin , Stephen Beaupre , Stephen Beaupré , Sterac , Steve Stoll presents The Blunted Boy Wonder , Stewart Walker , Studio 1 , Styro 2000 , Styro2000 , Substance , Substance & Vainqueur , SuperMayer , Superpitcher , Swat Squad , Sweet N Candy , sweet 'n' candy , Tadeo , Tanzmann & Stefanik , tekdev69 , Terje & Anders , The Field , The MFA , The Modernist , The Modernist/Justus Koehncke , The Suffragettes , The Vanisher , Theodor Zox , Theorem , Theorem vs. Sutekh , Theorem vs. Swayzak , Thomas / Mayer , Thomas Gwosdz , Thomas/Mayer , Tigerskin , Timtim , Tobi Neumann , Todd Bodine , Todd Sines , Tolga Fidan , Tom Clark , Tom Pooks , Tony Rohr , Touane , Tractile , Traffic Signs , Trentemoller , Trentemøller , Triple R , Troy Pierce , Ultrakurt , Unai , Und , Urban Force , Vector Lovers , Vienna Vegetable Orchestra/Audion , Vincent Casanova , Voigt & Voigt , Voltique , Wassermann , Water Lilly , Water Lilly & Plastique de Reve , Wighnomy & Robag Wruhme , Wighnomy Bros. + Robag Wruhme , Wighnomy Brothers , Wighnomy Brothers & Robag Wruhme , Yoshimoto , Zander VT , Zentex ,

for another minimal techno article, see http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/10326-column-the-month-in-techno