Kompakt Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 34 Items

With Lucifer, Kompakt presents an album of rare beauty from two masters of modern music. A family affair, it’s a collaboration between the Italian father-and-son duo of Luciano Michelini and Lorenzo Dada, whose combined histories bring to Lucifer a depth of experience alongside clarity of vision and a finely tuned, neatly developed combined compositional voice. A lovely, beguiling suite of music that combines the electronic and the acoustic, the urban and the pastoral, its gorgeous night-eye vision and tender melancholy sits neatly within the Kompakt universe, while offering the curious listener some rich new perspectives.

There is already plenty to know both artists by. Lorenzo Dada creates across multiple fields – a techno producer and DJ who has already worked with the likes of Jay Haze, Fete, Leo Benassi, and Der, he’s released a small clutch of stylish, smartly designed EPs, and a solo album, Second Life (2018). His complementary background in classical music and composition informs his ensemble project, Tears Of Blue (who appear on Lucifer), where Dada paints with neo-classical tones for a quartet of violin, viola, cello and grand piano, supplemented by electronics for live performance.

Luciano Michelini’s history is yet richer. He may be best known, to many, for his piece “Frolic”, the theme to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm series; it was also sampled by Snoop Dogg for 2022’s “Crip Ya Enthusiasm”. But there’s much more to Michelini’s story. A successful soundtrack composer, Michelini both studied and taught at the Conservatoro di Santa Cecilia, and worked for RCA from the sixties to the eighties; his soundtracks from this period are gorgeous examples of the form, particularly his work for Il Decamerone Nero (1972), L’Isola Degli Uomini Pesce (1979), and the devastatingly gorgeous Dimensione Donna (1977).

In the eighties, Michelini and his wife Anna Gutling founded the Electronic Music Division studio and academy in Rome, which is where the majority of Lucifer was recorded. Dada reflects on the experience: “We never worked together before, so it was all new for both of us,” with Michelini adding, “I truly love this experience with my son. He’s a talented pianist and composer. I am not very familiar with electronic music nowadays, but we did it fluently.” There’s certainly a familial energy at play through Lucifer, and you can hear how Dada and Michelini, through exploration and experiment, find a shared language, balancing Dada’s tendency toward minimalism, and Michelini’s composerly voice.

Lucifer flows as a suite that interweaves electronic music with acoustic instruments: the lonely sigh of saxophone; Michelini’s lush, verdant piano; the weeping strings of Tears Of Blue (recorded at the studio of Michelini’s friend, the late Maestro, Ennio Morricone). These multiple voices are located within the electronic sighs and swarms from Dada’s kit; there are moments of propulsion, and passages of lambent drift, where the album revels in its tonal sweetness. If it flows so effortlessly, that’s because Lucifer was designed that way, as a suite or a sonata of sorts.

And the title? Dada reflects, “Lucifer was an angel who decided not to be one anymore. The miracle of life is that we can decide what we want to be, even if we are born as angels or vice versa.” This feels somehow apposite: there’s certainly something of the transformative, and the transportive, in Lucifer, a unique family collaboration of rare poetry and sensitivity, where two generations meet in the modern crucible that is the electronic music studio.

With Lucifer, Kompakt presents an album of rare beauty from two masters of modern music. A family affair, it’s a collaboration between the Italian father-and-son duo of Luciano Michelini and Lorenzo Dada, whose combined histories bring to Lucifer a depth of experience alongside clarity of vision and a finely tuned, neatly developed combined compositional voice. A lovely, beguiling suite of music that combines the electronic and the acoustic, the urban and the pastoral, its gorgeous night-eye vision and tender melancholy sits neatly within the Kompakt universe, while offering the curious listener some rich new perspectives.

There is already plenty to know both artists by. Lorenzo Dada creates across multiple fields – a techno producer and DJ who has already worked with the likes of Jay Haze, Fete, Leo Benassi, and Der, he’s released a small clutch of stylish, smartly designed EPs, and a solo album, Second Life (2018). His complementary background in classical music and composition informs his ensemble project, Tears Of Blue (who appear on Lucifer), where Dada paints with neo-classical tones for a quartet of violin, viola, cello and grand piano, supplemented by electronics for live performance.

Luciano Michelini’s history is yet richer. He may be best known, to many, for his piece “Frolic”, the theme to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm series; it was also sampled by Snoop Dogg for 2022’s “Crip Ya Enthusiasm”. But there’s much more to Michelini’s story. A successful soundtrack composer, Michelini both studied and taught at the Conservatoro di Santa Cecilia, and worked for RCA from the sixties to the eighties; his soundtracks from this period are gorgeous examples of the form, particularly his work for Il Decamerone Nero (1972), L’Isola Degli Uomini Pesce (1979), and the devastatingly gorgeous Dimensione Donna (1977).

In the eighties, Michelini and his wife Anna Gutling founded the Electronic Music Division studio and academy in Rome, which is where the majority of Lucifer was recorded. Dada reflects on the experience: “We never worked together before, so it was all new for both of us,” with Michelini adding, “I truly love this experience with my son. He’s a talented pianist and composer. I am not very familiar with electronic music nowadays, but we did it fluently.” There’s certainly a familial energy at play through Lucifer, and you can hear how Dada and Michelini, through exploration and experiment, find a shared language, balancing Dada’s tendency toward minimalism, and Michelini’s composerly voice.

Lucifer flows as a suite that interweaves electronic music with acoustic instruments: the lonely sigh of saxophone; Michelini’s lush, verdant piano; the weeping strings of Tears Of Blue (recorded at the studio of Michelini’s friend, the late Maestro, Ennio Morricone). These multiple voices are located within the electronic sighs and swarms from Dada’s kit; there are moments of propulsion, and passages of lambent drift, where the album revels in its tonal sweetness. If it flows so effortlessly, that’s because Lucifer was designed that way, as a suite or a sonata of sorts.

And the title? Dada reflects, “Lucifer was an angel who decided not to be one anymore. The miracle of life is that we can decide what we want to be, even if we are born as angels or vice versa.” This feels somehow apposite: there’s certainly something of the transformative, and the transportive, in Lucifer, a unique family collaboration of rare poetry and sensitivity, where two generations meet in the modern crucible that is the electronic music studio.

Dettinger’s Intershop and Oasis have long been held, by many fans of ambient and electronic music, to be some of the finest albums in their field. Produced by the mysterious Olaf Dettinger, about whom not much is publicly known, they were some of the earliest full-lengths released by the then-nascent Kompakt, and in many ways, they both articulated and defined the sound that would come to be known as Pop Ambient, while also existing, somehow, to the leftfield of any clearly recognisable genre.

Beautiful, sui generis works, it is a rare pleasure to see them being reissued on vinyl for a new generation of listeners to embrace. Originally released on CD only in 1999, Intershop was Kompakt’s first artist full-length. The music here simmers and broods, with opulent banks of tone marking out territory for rhythms that seem to be built from the clacking detritus of technology – hisses, thunks, knocks. Bass is deployed carefully, each drop a dubbed-out depth charge; drones spin and spiral, warping and weaving between the beats.

Oasis, released in 2000, refined the palette that Dettinger had explored on its predecessor. A blurred crusade of ambient texturology, its unassuming patterns, and subtle, incremental dynamics, admit to real beauty, and a kind of abstract sensuality that you don’t often experience with music that is, perhaps, similarly tooled, but not as poetic. Through seemingly simple gestures – whether lushly expansive repetitions, hyper-acute tremolo tones, or ear-tickling rhythms – it builds complex emotional resonance. It’s no surprise to discover Oasis is held in high esteem by artists like Panda Bear of Animal Collective, who once said of Dettinger, “For us, he was the dude.”

There is, of course, other music to know Dettinger by, too – his three excellent EPs for Kompakt, Blond (1998), Puma and Totentanz (1999), the latter of which, Michael Mayer once argued, “invented dubstep.” There is also a small, yet graceful run of compilation contributions, many of which can be found on Kompakt’s Total and Pop Ambient series. All this music has plenty to recommend it, sharing a clarity of purpose, and a rare, human warmth and depth. But Intershop and Oasis are the releases that distil Dettinger’s singular vision, and allow him, should he wish, to claim his place as a modern master of ambient and electronic music.

Dettinger’s Intershop and Oasis have long been held, by many fans of ambient and electronic music, to be some of the finest albums in their field. Produced by the mysterious Olaf Dettinger, about whom not much is publicly known, they were some of the earliest full-lengths released by the then-nascent Kompakt, and in many ways, they both articulated and defined the sound that would come to be known as Pop Ambient, while also existing, somehow, to the leftfield of any clearly recognisable genre.

Beautiful, sui generis works, it is a rare pleasure to see them being reissued on vinyl for a new generation of listeners to embrace. Originally released on CD only in 1999, Intershop was Kompakt’s first artist full-length. The music here simmers and broods, with opulent banks of tone marking out territory for rhythms that seem to be built from the clacking detritus of technology – hisses, thunks, knocks. Bass is deployed carefully, each drop a dubbed-out depth charge; drones spin and spiral, warping and weaving between the beats.

Oasis, released in 2000, refined the palette that Dettinger had explored on its predecessor. A blurred crusade of ambient texturology, its unassuming patterns, and subtle, incremental dynamics, admit to real beauty, and a kind of abstract sensuality that you don’t often experience with music that is, perhaps, similarly tooled, but not as poetic. Through seemingly simple gestures – whether lushly expansive repetitions, hyper-acute tremolo tones, or ear-tickling rhythms – it builds complex emotional resonance. It’s no surprise to discover Oasis is held in high esteem by artists like Panda Bear of Animal Collective, who once said of Dettinger, “For us, he was the dude.”

There is, of course, other music to know Dettinger by, too – his three excellent EPs for Kompakt, Blond (1998), Puma and Totentanz (1999), the latter of which, Michael Mayer once argued, “invented dubstep.” There is also a small, yet graceful run of compilation contributions, many of which can be found on Kompakt’s Total and Pop Ambient series. All this music has plenty to recommend it, sharing a clarity of purpose, and a rare, human warmth and depth. But Intershop and Oasis are the releases that distil Dettinger’s singular vision, and allow him, should he wish, to claim his place as a modern master of ambient and electronic music.

Dear gourmets of audio-aesthetic rapture, dear sound poets, please welcome - Pop Ambient 2024. Twenty-four. Twenty-four can be divided by two, four, six, eight, twelve and itself. If something can be divided by itself, it is not really divisible. Truthfulness knows no formulas. Beauty knows no formulas. Beauty saves the world for no reason whatsoever. “Beauty is a promise that beyond mediocrity there is something where calmness reigns. Beauty calms the nerves. Beauty is not a good intention but a fact. Beauty is provocation, rigor, responsibility. And beauty has its price”.

In addition to the official version of Pop Ambient 2024, there will be an art/music edition limited to 10 pieces, consisting of an exclusive mini bonus album (vinyl dubplate) from Blank Gloss, in combination with 10 individual fine art print artworks by Veronika Unland. The edition will be available via kompakt.fm/art exclusively on November 24th, 2023.

Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome, Pop Ambient 2024

Dear gourmets of audio-aesthetic rapture, dear sound poets, please welcome - Pop Ambient 2024. Twenty-four. Twenty-four can be divided by two, four, six, eight, twelve and itself. If something can be divided by itself, it is not really divisible. Truthfulness knows no formulas. Beauty knows no formulas. Beauty saves the world for no reason whatsoever. “Beauty is a promise that beyond mediocrity there is something where calmness reigns. Beauty calms the nerves. Beauty is not a good intention but a fact. Beauty is provocation, rigor, responsibility. And beauty has its price”.

In addition to the official version of Pop Ambient 2024, there will be an art/music edition limited to 10 pieces, consisting of an exclusive mini bonus album (vinyl dubplate) from Blank Gloss, in combination with 10 individual fine art print artworks by Veronika Unland. The edition will be available via kompakt.fm/art exclusively on November 24th, 2023.

Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome, Pop Ambient 2024

The man who gave us countless classics from the Kompakt catalog delivers his latest stroke of genius. “Allein” is based on “Ich war allein,” a schlager song by East German pop icon Ina Martell from 1967, of which there is only a video recording from DFF that never made it onto a record. Jürgen Paape conjures up two versions from it: a heart-wrenching downbeat pop version and “Allein in Italien,” his most catchy earworm since “So weit wie noch nie.” Caution, highly addictive!

Kompakt unveils the third volume of Jörg Burger’s Velvet Desert Music compilation series, dedicated to music that hits the sweet spot between the cinematic, the (pop) ambient, and the psychedelic. With Velvet Desert Music Vol. 3, Burger and his friends wander afar, taking trips away from, or adjacent to, the dancefloor that’s acted so long as the crucible for the Kompakt aesthetic. Like its predecessors, it’s a gorgeous, lambent collection of late-night mood music.

Because it’s such a broad church, Velvet Desert Music admits all kinds of new experiences, as well, with Burger looking for music that "leads out of the desert into the velvet universe". Indeed, of all the volumes in the series, this third instalment feels closest to an album made by a true collective. The roster has changed, with new contributors Flug 8 and Seb Martel, both with his trio Las Ondas Marteles and with Chocolate Genius and Zsela as La Finca, joining regulars The Novotones, Mount Obsidian, The Golden Bug, Paulor and Sascha Funke.

Burger himself reappears, too, alongside Fritz Ackermann (of The Novotones), Max Würden and Thore Pfeiffer, in The Velvet Circle. Their contributions are pure lush life electronica: “Our Tribe” hitches a ride with a low-slung groove, flickering psychedelic reels of acoustic guitar traipsing across moody bass and taffeta layers of drone; their opening remix of Flug 8’s “Puerto Rico” gently introduces the album with softly tangling electronic tones, while guitars, drenched in reverb, pirouette in the background. A Mount Obsidian remix of “Sacrosanct” by Burger’s The Black Frame -project is a swirling treat for the ears.

La Finca’s electronics and voice miniature, “What Clouds Say”, is a masterclass in poetic restraint; Martel’s “Dark Mambo”, remixed by Burger, is one of the collection’s big surprises, for it indeed does what the title says, a drifting, surrealist take on the mambo form, full of pensive chords, rich with unrequited longing, a breathy saxophone whispering under the song’s sly rhythmic carriage.

Elsewhere, The Novotones chime in with a slyly propulsive, Krautrock-esque charmer, “Liberty Bell”, and the guitar-led tone-drift of “Valley of Oblivion”; Paulor’s “The Last Coke in the Desert” is a chiming, lilting dreamscape; Mount Obsidian are joined by vocalist Charlotte Jestaedt for two modern takes on early-hours art song, “Marole” and “Fade”; Sascha Funke’s “Mathias Rust” is a lavish dancefloor dream, vocal samples drifting through the song as it slowly envelops the listener in its opulent radiance.

This is just a taste of the rich pleasures of Velvet Desert Music Vol. 3, a triumph of a compilation that takes the psychedelic visions of its predecessors and looks for the desert within, a dusty kiss, a road-movie hallucination flickering on the listener’s eyelids, a cinematic projection from deep inside the mind.

Sacramento, CA duo Blank Gloss’s third album, Cornered, is an exquisite statement of pop ambient starkness, an album that oscillates between lush beauty and spare melancholy. It follows from their 2021 debut for Kompakt, Melt, an album that saw Morgan Fox (piano, synths) and Patrick Hills (guitar) aligned, loosely, with the cosmic pastorale of the ‘ambient Americana’ movement. Cornered feels like a significant step forward, though – by peeling back the layers of their music, they’ve revealed both its restful core and its solemn gravitas. It is unendingly lovely, but with something disquieting at its centre.

A contemporary product of relentless capitalism has been a trend called slowness for several years now. In order to counteract the perceived fast pace of the times in which we live with a little deceleration, sustainability and relaxation, phenomena such as Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion or even Slow Cruising, the tourist sailing of the world's oceans with somewhat smaller cruise ships "away from the mainstream", have been introduced into the world.

That slowness is more than the opposite of speed, that elements, things, sounds that move as if in slow motion unfold a special power, precision, aesthetics and beauty, doesn’t need to be explained twice to ambient musicians. The 23rd edition of the Pop Ambient compilation, compiled as always by Wolfgang Voigt, is no exception, but instead provides the proof. Already with the first tracks of Leandro Fresco/Thore Pfeiffer, Gen Pop (Burger, Pfeiffer, Würden), Morgen Wurde feat. Tetsuroh Konishi and Max Würden up to Triola's gloomy and melancholic "Kupferblüte", the feeling of a slowness and calmness not experienced before, of an exceedingly lively standstill, creeps over us. A mental state that resembles dreams, in which we follow strange events as if paralyzed, yet awake and sensory.

The Cologne-based Sono Kollektiv, an association of experimental artists Annie Bloch, Stefanie Grawe, Joel Jaffe, Alex Linster, Luis Weiß, Moritz Riesenbeck, Lukas Schäfer, Emily Wittbrodt and Max Würden, is represented for the first time with two contributions on Pop Ambient. The two works, the fragile "Bolzano Sessions IV" and the rather light-flooded "Bolzano Sessions V" (only available on CD and in the digital version) nestle perfectly into the musical whole of this year's compilation, not only in terms of their majestic leisureliness.

In Jens-Uwe Beyer's "Nero", melancholic guitar chords reduced to the bare minimum are carried away by the wind like leaves, the reverberation holding the last note so long that it almost comes to a stop in the ear. If you like it synesthetic, look at the once again ravishing cover artwork by Veronika Unland right at this moment. Colors and shapes in which there is both everything and nothing to discover. Both feel equally right.

The final third of Pop Ambient 2023 begins with Reich & Würden's herbaceous "Receiver," a track so dignified and carried by pads reminiscent of the sound of bagpipes that it would have perfectly punctuated her majesty the Queen's 8-hour funeral ceremony - a wonderful example, by the way, of the spiritual confluence of deceleration and precision that eventually turns into trance.

The slowness is joined by togetherness at the end: Pop Ambient veteran Joachim Spieth cooperates with American sound artist zakè on his literally weightless "Air", Thore Pfeiffer co-produced the wonderful "Instinct" with Scottish brother duo Andy and Mike Truscott aka Kinbrae. California duo Patrick Hills and Morgan Fox aka Blank Gloss close out the vinyl version with the yearning "Down At The Heel," while that honor falls to debutant Ümit Han on the Pop Ambient CD. "Sieg über das Ungute" (victory over the unpleasant) in all its beauty brings us painfully back to reality.

A contemporary product of relentless capitalism has been a trend called slowness for several years now. In order to counteract the perceived fast pace of the times in which we live with a little deceleration, sustainability and relaxation, phenomena such as Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion or even Slow Cruising, the tourist sailing of the world's oceans with somewhat smaller cruise ships "away from the mainstream", have been introduced into the world.

That slowness is more than the opposite of speed, that elements, things, sounds that move as if in slow motion unfold a special power, precision, aesthetics and beauty, doesn’t need to be explained twice to ambient musicians. The 23rd edition of the Pop Ambient compilation, compiled as always by Wolfgang Voigt, is no exception, but instead provides the proof. Already with the first tracks of Leandro Fresco/Thore Pfeiffer, Gen Pop (Burger, Pfeiffer, Würden), Morgen Wurde feat. Tetsuroh Konishi and Max Würden up to Triola's gloomy and melancholic "Kupferblüte", the feeling of a slowness and calmness not experienced before, of an exceedingly lively standstill, creeps over us. A mental state that resembles dreams, in which we follow strange events as if paralyzed, yet awake and sensory.

The Cologne-based Sono Kollektiv, an association of experimental artists Annie Bloch, Stefanie Grawe, Joel Jaffe, Alex Linster, Luis Weiß, Moritz Riesenbeck, Lukas Schäfer, Emily Wittbrodt and Max Würden, is represented for the first time with two contributions on Pop Ambient. The two works, the fragile "Bolzano Sessions IV" and the rather light-flooded "Bolzano Sessions V" (only available on CD and in the digital version) nestle perfectly into the musical whole of this year's compilation, not only in terms of their majestic leisureliness.

In Jens-Uwe Beyer's "Nero", melancholic guitar chords reduced to the bare minimum are carried away by the wind like leaves, the reverberation holding the last note so long that it almost comes to a stop in the ear. If you like it synesthetic, look at the once again ravishing cover artwork by Veronika Unland right at this moment. Colors and shapes in which there is both everything and nothing to discover. Both feel equally right.

The final third of Pop Ambient 2023 begins with Reich & Würden's herbaceous "Receiver," a track so dignified and carried by pads reminiscent of the sound of bagpipes that it would have perfectly punctuated her majesty the Queen's 8-hour funeral ceremony - a wonderful example, by the way, of the spiritual confluence of deceleration and precision that eventually turns into trance.

The slowness is joined by togetherness at the end: Pop Ambient veteran Joachim Spieth cooperates with American sound artist zakè on his literally weightless "Air", Thore Pfeiffer co-produced the wonderful "Instinct" with Scottish brother duo Andy and Mike Truscott aka Kinbrae. California duo Patrick Hills and Morgan Fox aka Blank Gloss close out the vinyl version with the yearning "Down At The Heel," while that honor falls to debutant Ümit Han on the Pop Ambient CD. "Sieg über das Ungute" (victory over the unpleasant) in all its beauty brings us painfully back to reality.

For over two decades Bjørke has cut his own path, as a solo artist and enthusiastic collaborator. Bjørke’s Copenhagen home may be one of Europe’s great cultural hubs, and he’s certainly added a paragraph or two to that story, but his music is distinctly international. Even a cursory listen exposes an impressive, ever-evolving career. However, few expected him to initiate the collaborative ambient / neo-classical project Kasper Bjørke Quartet. In 2018 The Fifty Eleven Project was released on Kompakt Records, a deeply personal record that musically documents Bjørkes encounter with, and triumph over, cancer. The album topped many critics' lists, and was included among The Guardian’s Best Contemporary Albums of the year.

Mother, which will be released on October 28th, represents a quantum leap forward. Literally, when you consider the terrestrial shifts that informed it. Six compositions explore what the evolution of our planet sounds like. While Holst may have gotten there first, Mother singularly focuses on the orb where we reside, from its formation, to its likely conclusion. Other artists have tackled song cycles that parallel a day, a year, or even a lifetime. Mother spans a timeframe from 4.5 billion years ago up to humankind’s impending demise. It hints at how that may be sooner than we think, as well as the earth’s resilience, and the promise of another chapter.

Additional gravity comes courtesy of evocative choir arrangements - - and marimba recorded at the Copenhagen Opera House. “Formation” condenses 20 million years of runaway accretion into 20 minutes. It is sublimely padded by feature artist Sofie Birch’s gentle synths. “Abiogenesis” intimates a different type of emergence: the first life to inhabit our nascent planet. The entire cosmos is condensed into the layered vocals of Philip|Schneider. Birch returns on “Miocene,” which signals the divergence of proto-humans from primates not with foreboding, but rather cascaded notes and swells adumbrating a pure and curious being, revealing nothing of what the Catch-22 of knowledge will bring. That’s addressed in the diptych of “Anthropocene” and “Tipping Points,” respectively marking the dawn and foreshadowing the probable downfall of homosapians, through wondrous advancements and their climate damaging byproducts. It’s tempting to think the album’s finale, “Requiem,” implies only a dark conclusion, owing to its sparkling verrillon’s coronach, and the return of Philip|Schneider’s empyrean vocals, but its juxtaposition with revolving, enigmatic piano chords infers the earth will enter its next act.

Mother is a staggering achievement, encouraging contemplative thought. The album is released October 28th on Kompakt Records, both digitally and on limited edition double vinyl. The atwork is designed by multidisciplinary artist Trevor Jackson.

Das italienische Duo Agents Of Time war in den letzten Jahren unglaublich fleißig, von der Veröffentlichung einer Reihe klassischer Singles - darunter ihre jüngster Beitrag für Afterlife, "The Mirage", der mehr als fünf Millionen Aufrufe auf Instagram erhielt - bis hin zum Remix von The Weeknds "Take My Breath", der auf dessen aktuellen Album “Dawn FM (Alternative World)” erschien. Aber die bahnbrechendeste Neuigkeit ist erst jetzt endlich da - ihr zweites Album "Universo" ist fertig! “Universo" verbindet ihr Markenzeichen, melodischen Techno, mit einer besonderen Pop-Haltung und findet nach der EP "Music Made Paradise 2020" sein ideales Zuhause bei Kompakt. Eine Seelenverwandtschaft, die absolut Sinn macht.

Andrea Di Ceglie und Luigi Tutolo, die beiden Mitglieder von Agents Of Time, nutzten die Zeit während der Pandemie, um an "Universo" zu arbeiten, einem Album, das lose um ihr "persönliches Universum" herum konzipiert ist, eine Manifestation der Welt, die Di Ceglie und Tutolo in und um ihr Studio herum aufgebaut haben. Das macht den besonderen Glanz und die strahlende Helligkeit von "Universo" aus - es strotzt nur so von Persönlichkeit, Elan und Kraft, das Duo experimentiert mit Musik und erkundet auch noch deren entfernteste Ecken. Wer bei "Universo" nur ein weiteres Album mit melodischem Techno erwartet, wird angenehm überrascht sein - hier ist viel mehr los, und alles ist gleichermaßen spannend.

Nach einer poetischen Eröffnungsgeste - dem wirbelnden, synästhetischen, selbstbetitelten Intro-Track - werden mit dem 2-Step-Pop von “Fallin” alle Erwartungen sofort über den Haufen geworfen. Mit sanfter Klarheit von Gastsängerin Audrey Janssens gesungen, ist “Fallin” ein Traum von einem Song, der an die großen Zeiten von UK-Garage in den frühen 00er Jahre erinnert. "Interstellar Cowboy" ist ein selbstbewusstes, geschmeidig über den Laufsteg stolzierender Disco-Track; das sanfte Moll-Klavier von "Liquid Fantasy" entwickelt sich zu einem wunderbar melancholischen Techno-Pop-Epos, mit Vicky Who?’s Stimme voller Sehnsucht . Danach taucht auch Janssens Gesang auf dem Elektro-Wirbel von "Poison" wieder auf; "Dream Vision" greift die Single "The Mirage" auf, sanft und mit schwungvollen Streichern, voller Dramatik; "Part Of Life" dagegen ist ein echter Schaffel-Stomp.

All der Abwechslungsreichtum lässt eher tanzflächenorientierte Tracks wie "Ciao" noch deutlicher hervortreten - sie wirken noch entschlossener, stromlinienförmiger und dennoch reich an Details, pluckernde, Moroder-eske Bässe treffen auf stroboskopisch blitzende Synths, von denen aus die Melodien ins Firmament schießen. “Universo” fühlt sich textlich dicht an, aber es atmet trotzdem, seine Klänge sind so greifbar, dass man sie anfassen möchte, seine Melodien so verführerisch, dass man sie nicht mehr aus dem Kopf bekommt. “Universo” ist ein wunderschönes, mutiges Album, ein perfekter Treffpunkt von Pop-Melodien und stilvollem Techno: Agents Of Time in excelsis.

Das italienische Duo Agents Of Time war in den letzten Jahren unglaublich fleißig, von der Veröffentlichung einer Reihe klassischer Singles - darunter ihre jüngster Beitrag für Afterlife, "The Mirage", der mehr als fünf Millionen Aufrufe auf Instagram erhielt - bis hin zum Remix von The Weeknds "Take My Breath", der auf dessen aktuellen Album “Dawn FM (Alternative World)” erschien. Aber die bahnbrechendeste Neuigkeit ist erst jetzt endlich da - ihr zweites Album "Universo" ist fertig! “Universo" verbindet ihr Markenzeichen, melodischen Techno, mit einer besonderen Pop-Haltung und findet nach der EP "Music Made Paradise 2020" sein ideales Zuhause bei Kompakt. Eine Seelenverwandtschaft, die absolut Sinn macht.

Andrea Di Ceglie und Luigi Tutolo, die beiden Mitglieder von Agents Of Time, nutzten die Zeit während der Pandemie, um an "Universo" zu arbeiten, einem Album, das lose um ihr "persönliches Universum" herum konzipiert ist, eine Manifestation der Welt, die Di Ceglie und Tutolo in und um ihr Studio herum aufgebaut haben. Das macht den besonderen Glanz und die strahlende Helligkeit von "Universo" aus - es strotzt nur so von Persönlichkeit, Elan und Kraft, das Duo experimentiert mit Musik und erkundet auch noch deren entfernteste Ecken. Wer bei "Universo" nur ein weiteres Album mit melodischem Techno erwartet, wird angenehm überrascht sein - hier ist viel mehr los, und alles ist gleichermaßen spannend.

Nach einer poetischen Eröffnungsgeste - dem wirbelnden, synästhetischen, selbstbetitelten Intro-Track - werden mit dem 2-Step-Pop von “Fallin” alle Erwartungen sofort über den Haufen geworfen. Mit sanfter Klarheit von Gastsängerin Audrey Janssens gesungen, ist “Fallin” ein Traum von einem Song, der an die großen Zeiten von UK-Garage in den frühen 00er Jahre erinnert. "Interstellar Cowboy" ist ein selbstbewusstes, geschmeidig über den Laufsteg stolzierender Disco-Track; das sanfte Moll-Klavier von "Liquid Fantasy" entwickelt sich zu einem wunderbar melancholischen Techno-Pop-Epos, mit Vicky Who?’s Stimme voller Sehnsucht . Danach taucht auch Janssens Gesang auf dem Elektro-Wirbel von "Poison" wieder auf; "Dream Vision" greift die Single "The Mirage" auf, sanft und mit schwungvollen Streichern, voller Dramatik; "Part Of Life" dagegen ist ein echter Schaffel-Stomp.

All der Abwechslungsreichtum lässt eher tanzflächenorientierte Tracks wie "Ciao" noch deutlicher hervortreten - sie wirken noch entschlossener, stromlinienförmiger und dennoch reich an Details, pluckernde, Moroder-eske Bässe treffen auf stroboskopisch blitzende Synths, von denen aus die Melodien ins Firmament schießen. “Universo” fühlt sich textlich dicht an, aber es atmet trotzdem, seine Klänge sind so greifbar, dass man sie anfassen möchte, seine Melodien so verführerisch, dass man sie nicht mehr aus dem Kopf bekommt. “Universo” ist ein wunderschönes, mutiges Album, ein perfekter Treffpunkt von Pop-Melodien und stilvollem Techno: Agents Of Time in excelsis.

You might know Barnt as one of the people behind the idiosyncratic imprints Magazine and Schalen, through which he released his most of his EPs and the incomparable 2014 debut album, Magazine 13.; or maybe you know the thread of beautiful, unpredictable club hits he’s woven with labels like Cómeme and Hinge Finger.

Despite living in Cologne, and being friends with the label, Barnt has not put out anything on Kompakt yet, apart from an one-off appearance on Pop Ambient 11 over a decade ago. An EP had been in the air for several years, but it took Barnt a bit of time to get into the right state of mind, because he wanted to make sure the music paid tribute to “the ceremonial, emotional, grand sprit” that he connects with Kompakt.

Typical to the producer’s modus operandi, ProMetal Fan Decor Only Product spins out a surprising narrative, catching the listener unawares, while remaining fundamentally Barnt. After the elegiac opener “Fan”, stately in its melancholic, epic flourish, “You Know What’s Gone” stomps into earshot, the pounding thud of the drums pinning clanging patterns to the dancefloor, a Sturm Und Drang symphony, the tones all clashing metals and silvers.

After that, there’s release – the hypnotic psychedelic reels of “This Is For Decor Only” are Barnt gone trance, a sensual glide of a track that pirouettes out an eternity of sizzling hi-hats and strip light melodies. While you might want to be alone when listeniing to “Fan”, you might have the time of your life dancing to “This Is For Decor Only”, played by your favourite DJ at your favourite festival this Summer.

With ProMetal Fan Decor Only Product, wrapped in a sleeve by artist Lukas Heerich, Barnt and Kompakt finally come together, equal parts refined elegance and sweaty fervour.

Note: With THE Purchase OF THE Vinyl OR THE CD YOU Will GET THE Single MP3 Files AS Well AS A Continous MIX VIA E-mail. With the cover artwork for Pop Ambient 2022, longtime Kompakt graphic artist Veronika Unland has once again outdone herself. Following the almost baroque, blood-red and jet-black, extremely physical sculptures of Pop Ambient 2021, which emerged from a dark, floral sea like bodies erect for dancing, the front of 2022 is adorned with a pastel-white form, intertwined, folded many times and crisscrossed with delicate shading, which seems to float on a pale pink background; soft, gentle waves woven from Venetian colors that leave the viewer puzzled: Is it a flower, a coral, a mollusk?

Again, the current edition of the tradition-steeped compilation series curated by Wolfgang Voigt is about the persistent and ever-necessary definition of beauty, of reduction, of electronic music of heavy lightness and light heaviness, of ambient's eternal promise of a state of physical and acoustic weightlessness and Pop's of redemption. And about the question why a never arbitrary combination of soundscape, drones, samples and loops, put together in a certain way, can create this feeling of warmth, depth and space, - something three-dimensional, where the imagination feels at home as a fish in the water or a bird in the sky. A key aesthetic stimulus that sends all the senses into a slow glide and drift, after which your synapses feel like they've been bathed in essential oil. Next to Soul, Ambient is probably the most effective musical healing plant of mankind.

Behind the aural test tubes, the who's who of Pop Ambient is once again at work, led for the first time by the highly trafficked Californian duo Blank Gloss, whose debut album "Melt" this year was certified by The Guardian as nothing less than "heartaching beauty". Yui Onodera's "Chrome" as well as "Kari", a cooperation of Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth, could also be imagined in the score of Denis Villeneuve's new film version of Dune - however, colleague Hans Zimmer managed that quite well without the three. After such wonderful and stylish contributions by Reich & Würden, Triola and Thomas Fehlmann, the ear then lingers a bit longer on the ghostly "Weiht" by Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella, a track like a temple of sound, a deep electronic immersion in a Japanese onsen. In this sea of unnameable time you could sink forever, but with the tracks of Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden & Pepo Galán the journey slowly comes to an end.

Important Note: Unfortunately THE Sides ARE Reversed ON THE Vinyl, I.E. THE A-side IS THE B-side AND Vice Versa. With THE Purchase OF THE Vinyl OR THE CD YOU Will GET THE Single MP3 Files AS Well AS A Continous MIX VIA E-mail. With the cover artwork for Pop Ambient 2022, longtime Kompakt graphic artist Veronika Unland has once again outdone herself. Following the almost baroque, blood-red and jet-black, extremely physical sculptures of Pop Ambient 2021, which emerged from a dark, floral sea like bodies erect for dancing, the front of 2022 is adorned with a pastel-white form, intertwined, folded many times and crisscrossed with delicate shading, which seems to float on a pale pink background; soft, gentle waves woven from Venetian colors that leave the viewer puzzled: Is it a flower, a coral, a mollusk?

Again, the current edition of the tradition-steeped compilation series curated by Wolfgang Voigt is about the persistent and ever-necessary definition of beauty, of reduction, of electronic music of heavy lightness and light heaviness, of ambient's eternal promise of a state of physical and acoustic weightlessness and Pop's of redemption. And about the question why a never arbitrary combination of soundscape, drones, samples and loops, put together in a certain way, can create this feeling of warmth, depth and space, - something three-dimensional, where the imagination feels at home as a fish in the water or a bird in the sky. A key aesthetic stimulus that sends all the senses into a slow glide and drift, after which your synapses feel like they've been bathed in essential oil. Next to Soul, Ambient is probably the most effective musical healing plant of mankind.

Behind the aural test tubes, the who's who of Pop Ambient is once again at work, led for the first time by the highly trafficked Californian duo Blank Gloss, whose debut album "Melt" this year was certified by The Guardian as nothing less than "heartaching beauty". Yui Onodera's "Chrome" as well as "Kari", a cooperation of Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth, could also be imagined in the score of Denis Villeneuve's new film version of Dune - however, colleague Hans Zimmer managed that quite well without the three. After such wonderful and stylish contributions by Reich & Würden, Triola and Thomas Fehlmann, the ear then lingers a bit longer on the ghostly "Weiht" by Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella, a track like a temple of sound, a deep electronic immersion in a Japanese onsen. In this sea of unnameable time you could sink forever, but with the tracks of Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden & Pepo Galán the journey slowly comes to an end.

Over the past decade, Egyptian-born, Barcelona-based DJ and techno producer Raxon, known to friends and family as Ahmed Raxon, has popped out a steady stream of twelve-inch singles, precision-tooled, for labels like Cocoon, Drumcode, Diynamic, Truesoul, and Ellum Audio. An alumni of Kompakt’s Speicher series – check the insistent, vibrating pulses of “The Ancient” and “Dark Light” on 2019’s Speicher 107 – with Sound Of Mind, Raxon has produced a long-awaited debut album that’s ready and aching both for the dancefloor and the boudoir, traversing the heat of the club and the warmth of the home.

“The idea of an album has always floated around in my head for the past few years,” Raxon confirms, “but it was never the right moment in my mind.” Instead, he’s been insistently pursuing his vision of deep, elegant techno, taking him from early DJ gigs in Dubai, including the legendary audio tonic night, then relocating to Europe on the recommendation of Herman Cattaneo, all the while allowing his experiences to inform and transmute his producer’s thumbprint. He’s an architect by training (though he gave architecture up for electronic music), which might explain why Raxon productions are so sturdy and well-designed; but remember also that architecture is a field filled with brave experimentation, something Raxon definitely draws on throughout Sound Of Mind.

Like many albums from the past twelve months, Raxon’s debut developed partly thanks to the unique social situation the planet has found itself caught within. “In the beginning of 2020 I started working on a few tracks with the album in mind,” he recalls, “with no idea of what’s to come in the next few months. As catastrophic as the situation was/is, I found myself in the studio; in a way the lockdown gave me that creative freedom in the studio, [to] try to tell my story through sound.” And indeed, there is something in the way of ‘life writing’ about Sound Of Mind, particularly in the way Raxon’s productions pay subtle homage, perhaps, to his formative listening experiences in the late nineties.

It’s no retro trip, but there’s plenty of variety here, and a few moments that’ll tickle the collective memory – see the prowling pulsations of the opening “Majestic”, the alien breakbeat action of “Vice” and “Journey Mode”, where the interstellar tones feel like Foul Play or Steve Gurley, the leaking gas and woozy keys that make “Droid Solo” so subtly destabilising, or the strobelight drones that sputter and flare throughout “El Multiverse”, where dappled organ tones fight it out with interdimensional transmissions, all sucked into the vortex of a late-night techno mantra. Beautifully sculpted, Sound Of Mind feels consummate, an elegant set that pulls Raxon’s vision into its sharpest focus. Alive with possibilities, it’s a fever dream of creativity.

For Böser Herbst, Thomas Fehlmann returns to the sediment of ages, drawing from a similar lexicon of sounds to that used on 2018’s ‘1929 – Das Jahr Babylon’. Like that album, Böser Herbst was produced as the soundtrack to a documentary made by Volker Heise, ‘Herbst 1929, Schatten Über Babylon’, which offers historical insight to the third season of the television series Babylon Berlin. It adds yet another string to the bow of this most forward-thinking and creative artist, whose history takes in NDW (Palais Schaumburg), techno (3mb) and psychedelic ambience (The Orb), plus a clutch of gorgeous solo albums that explore wide terrain, from the dancefloor through supine home listening to compelling soundtrack work. Fehlmann’s approach here was to ‘capture’ samples of contemporaneous music, “picking up the dirt and dust of original 1920s archive sound and music excerpts and shaping the essence into this selection of tunes,” he recalls. After delivering the material to the editing room, Fehlmann “threw all the pieces up in the air, deliberately lost the overview in consequence, researched the atmospheric thread and assembled it for this album.” That explains the singular nature of the material here, and its ability to sit together so neatly and discretely, as its own entity. For Böser Herbst is a music box of possibilities, shadowed by its historical provenance, but never crudely beholden to it, rather “keeping the references only as a distant nod, a scent.” It’s certainly an evocative listen, a cornucopia of textural pleasure and sensual, tactile assemblage. The spiralling, psychedelic cycle of “Karnickel” winds its way between the ears like thread to the needle; “Mit Ausblick” immerses the listener in deep, gaseous tones, only to be lifted into the air by the glassy drones of “Umarmt”. “Wunschwechsler” crackles with the unpredictability of weather systems while a guitar-like loop unspools across the horizon. Throughout, you can catch tiny tastes of the source material, but they’re pressed into greater service, Fehlmann using these sources for their evocative capacity and then saturating them with grain and rumble, abstracting outwards. It’s a music of temporal disjuncture and clairvoyant resonance, “speaking with the past – alert, distant and quixotic.”

A download code is included. For Böser Herbst, Thomas Fehlmann returns to the sediment of ages, drawing from a similar lexicon of sounds to that used on 2018’s ‘1929 – Das Jahr Babylon’. Like that album, Böser Herbst was produced as the soundtrack to a documentary made by Volker Heise, ‘Herbst 1929, Schatten Über Babylon’, which offers historical insight to the third season of the television series Babylon Berlin. It adds yet another string to the bow of this most forward-thinking and creative artist, whose history takes in NDW (Palais Schaumburg), techno (3mb) and psychedelic ambience (The Orb), plus a clutch of gorgeous solo albums that explore wide terrain, from the dancefloor through supine home listening to compelling soundtrack work. Fehlmann’s approach here was to ‘capture’ samples of contemporaneous music, “picking up the dirt and dust of original 1920s archive sound and music excerpts and shaping the essence into this selection of tunes,” he recalls. After delivering the material to the editing room, Fehlmann “threw all the pieces up in the air, deliberately lost the overview in consequence, researched the atmospheric thread and assembled it for this album.” That explains the singular nature of the material here, and its ability to sit together so neatly and discretely, as its own entity. For Böser Herbst is a music box of possibilities, shadowed by its historical provenance, but never crudely beholden to it, rather “keeping the references only as a distant nod, a scent.” It’s certainly an evocative listen, a cornucopia of textural pleasure and sensual, tactile assemblage. The spiralling, psychedelic cycle of “Karnickel” winds its way between the ears like thread to the needle; “Mit Ausblick” immerses the listener in deep, gaseous tones, only to be lifted into the air by the glassy drones of “Umarmt”. “Wunschwechsler” crackles with the unpredictability of weather systems while a guitar-like loop unspools across the horizon. Throughout, you can catch tiny tastes of the source material, but they’re pressed into greater service, Fehlmann using these sources for their evocative capacity and then saturating them with grain and rumble, abstracting outwards. It’s a music of temporal disjuncture and clairvoyant resonance, “speaking with the past – alert, distant and quixotic.”

A download code is included. It’s 2020, the year Pop Ambient turns twenty-one years old, a spritely young adult waltzing out of its teenage joys and tears. Pop Ambient has always stood for a certain classicism and elegance, a kind of beatless music that’s diaphanous and hazy, gossamer and glittering. It’s a music that’s no less inviting for its slow pace and becalmed nature, with a different kind of tension bubbling under the surface. For twenty-one years, Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt has curated a series of peerless compilations that repeatedly find refreshing answers to a simple question – What happens when the dancefloor is empty, and everyone’s home to drift away?

ZAUBERBERG – Wolfgang Voigt’s most fundamental (and foreboding) release under his alias GAS and perhaps of all in his untold discography – finally stands alone once again and is released in the way its original splendour.

Originally released in 1997 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, and then reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX”, ZAUBERBERG is now released on his own label KOMPAKT on CD.

Though this narcotic symphony is not the first release under the GAS moniker, ZAUBERBERG is the first to disclose the true nature of Wolfgang Voigt’s unified sound and ideology as GAS. Layers of ominous intensity supported by muffled kick drums as classical music loops incessantly swirl with no direction, ZAUBERBERG is the definitive GAS album and a perfect starting point for those not familiar with his music.

Please note: This CD is a single release of the GAS BOX released in 2016.

POP – the album that has become widely recognized as the defining moment in which Wolfgang Voigt brought us into a clearing of his deep, psychedelic forest. A landmark release in the GAS odyssey that drew international attention, POP was originally released in 2000 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint MILLE PLATEAUX. POP was heralded by Pitchfork at the time of release as being “an exercise in sonic texture… pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth.”

POP has since been reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX” (now out of print) and finally now, POP is released on KOMPAKT – for the first time on CD in its original artwork.

Please note: This CD is a single release of the GAS BOX released in 2016.

Videosphere, the debut album by Kompakt’s latest signing, the London-based artist Lake Turner (aka Andrew Halford), swoons into focus with “The Sunbird”, a teasing drift of lilting, ambient tones, riding out a submerged piston-pulse rhythm. Across its brief 109 seconds, it manages to traverse evocative terrain – something mythopoetic, something both humble and grandiose, a glimpse of the other behind the sky’s curtain. “I wanted to conjure up something resembling an ancient ceremony or death procession,” Turner nods. “Like a hymn to the surroundings of a faraway hill.” It’s both sky-bound and earthen, a ritual incantation to call in the music of the spheres.

A download code is included. With Velvet Desert Music Vol. 2, curator Jörg Burger has intensified his vision for this new series of compilations on Kompakt. The music he’s collected here has a unique vibration, perhaps an audio equivalent to the legendary ‘acid Western’ films of the 1960s and 1970s, when the wild frontier logic of the western met the consciousness-altering psychedelia of the counterculture. ‘Velvet Desert Music’ is Burger exploring possibilities: what happens when you extract the essence from genres as diverse as spaghetti Western soundtracks, moody lamp-lit pop, downtempo, Krautrock, minimalism, classic ‘60s psychedelia, and more, and let their scents intermingle, Des Esseintes-style?

A download code is included. For the first time on vinyl. While during the 1990s - higher, faster, further! - the straight bass drum has been shooted around the globe, there arose a number of variations of more or less contemplative slow- and sacred music from all kinds of corners at the same time. In a sense, it’s the other side of the medal: Chillout, Lounge, Easy Listening, Trance, Muzak and elevator music, electronic music and intelligent techno… and of course and in particular: Ambient. In classical and new variations.

A download code is included. Pop Ambient Music is medicine against illnesses, that you don’t even suffer from. It’s giving everything, demanding nothing. Musical lotus leafs, off which the virtual wastewater of our time is rolling like the reality is dripping off the matrix. In this sense, we’re happy about the pop-ambient anniversary greetings from new and old companions like Thore Pfeiffer, Max Würden, Yui Onodera, Jörg Burger, Thomas Fehlmann, Morgen Wurde, Leandro Fresco aswell as contributions from T.Raumschmiere, Andrew Thomas and, after a long break, from friends from early days like Joachim Spieth, Markus Guentner und Klimek.

Kompakt welcomes veteran contemporary experimental producer Marcus Schmickler with the release of his spectacular noise/techno fused medallion entitled “Particle/Matter-Wave/Energy”. Marcus Schmickler’s fifty plus release discography is one of the most fascinating in his field. From his studies under Cologne based Stockhausen collaborator Johannes Fritsch to his releases through legendary imprints a-Musik, editionsMego and Mille Plateaux, over the years Schmickler has been behind innumerable collaborations and sonic explorations. Be it through his ground-breaking indie/electronic band Pluramon or through his releases that have included collaborations with musicians such as John Tilbury, Thomas Lehn, Julee Cruise or MIMEO he has even had his works being performed by ensemble recherche, musikFabrik or Paragon Ensemble. Beyond continuing to perform on the world stages, he authors theatre and film and currently teaches at Institut für Musik und Medien in Dusseldorf. This brings us to the release of "Particle/Matter-Wave/Energy" - a 37 minute long piece (split into 2 parts on the LP version) that explores the borders of a scientific universality of sonification towards something that becomes a singular experience – sound. The pieces’ foundational aim was to create an acoustic rendering of what it sounds like when two galaxies collide by gravitational forces. To avoid this one sheet getting lost in theory, the audible result of “Particle/Matter-Wave/Energy” is an incredibly, immersive work that is required listening from start to end. Contemporary experimental music and modern techno collide as waves of synths caress the listener through intense waves of frequency variables. The orchestral enormity of the piece is both discomforting yet embracing as the listener feels engulfed with it’s robotic caress.

Terrapin, The Modernist, Burger / Ink, The Novotones, Cologne Tape, Fantastic Twins, Rebolledo & The Novotones, Paulor, Xu Xu Fang, Sascha Funke & Cosmo Vitelli, Kenneth James Gibson. Velvet Desert Music Vol. 1 introduces a new compilation series on Kompakt, curated by one of Cologne’s leading figures in electronic music, Jörg Burger (aka The Modernist, The Bionaut, Burger/Ink and many more). Velvet Desert Music Vol. 1 combines elements of rock, folk, country, surf, krautrock and psychedelic in contemporary electronic music.

A download code is included.

Thore Pfeiffer, Coupler, The Black Frame, Kenneth James Gibson. Boum Boum Boum! 25 years of Kompakt. When a record label still thrives after a quarter of a century thanks to a focus of what was expected to be a short lived music phenomenon called Techno, then it stands to prove two things; that it techno has taken its place amongst serious, multilayered musical genres like rock’n’roll, pop and folk music. And that Kompakt has never been only for techno, but Kompakt stands as a broad-minded, genre-defying entity that has set out to cross-pollinate all kinds of musical inventions within the realm of electronic music. Through its course, Kompakt has sent “Around The World”, all kinds of sub-genres, concept series and crossover adventures based on the non- negotiable 4/4 beat. And back again.

All formats contain the full version of „Rausch“. The album is meant to be heard from beginning to end as a whole. It has been track marked or separated due to format restrictions. Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be / Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames / Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear / The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves / Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end / Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts / Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing / Once upon a time there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago / Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere / Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut / The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head / Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas / A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats / World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite. Wolfgang Voigt 2018

3xLP vinyl version comes with a CD version of the full album and a vinyl-only bonus cut and it includes a 24 pages booklet. Nearly two decades after the last official GAS album release, Wolfgang Voigt returns to his iconic Ambient project with a brandnew full-length. Narkopop continues the classic GAS aesthetic of symphonic scope and subtle variation, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey to the depths of rapture and reverie.

A download code is included. Following their much-acclaimed surprise debut album Vermont from 2014, Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Danilo Plessow and Innervisions' Marcus Worgull reunite for more synth daydreaming on the suitably titled “II”. The new outing continues where the first full-length left off, strolling further down the luminous and undulating path that the duo turned into, influenced in equal measures by kosmische, krautrock, minimal wave and synth soundtracks.