Denis Karimani first popped up on my sonar via his fantastic ‘Inhuman Things’ EP on Areal. It managed to fuse the mania of mid-catalogue Mouse on Mars to Areal’s crayon-drawn sunny electribe pattern-making. A few patchy EPs later and he returned to form under his own name with the noisy, boisterous ‘War es Nicht’ EP on Hamburg’s normally sadsack deep/click/tech/house inprint Dial. His music was always under-produced, full of punchy ideas and often deeply annoying – and nothing much has changed here.
This uneven collection gathers together a dozen tracks, around half of which have appeared earlier this year on two vinyl-only EPs. It’s not an album then, and it doesn’t sound like one either. It’s full of chops and changes, stops, starts, implosions and digressions – a crunkless Modeselektor. Each track has a strong personality, which cuts both ways I guess: it’s certainly not bland, but the ‘big’ tracks, cloudburst electro-disco stompers like ‘5000 euro’ and ‘The Man-Eating Elevator’ rarely make it to the fifth minute on my stereo without the merciful intervention of ‘skip!’ I’m certain they’d work really well live or in the mix, but taken one-by-one and listened to from start-to-finish, end-to-end, Karimani’s emotional rollercoasters make me start to feel a little queasy. I can’t help but feeling all these intensities also require a liveness that this clean track-by-track format seems to undermine, and without the sweat on the walls Karimani’s music seems stuck choosing between noise and static.
So… I’m torn really. Is this any good? Parts of it are, yes. I’d like to see a Remute live set, and I’ll continue perusing his EPs for those magic moments when it all comes together. But I’m not sure there are quite enough of those here to warrant dealing with the headache their unsuccessful others induce.
I think the problem is this: this is great music, just not to listen to.

They must be smokin’ the bad shit round Wiener town – this is one weird album. The title should be a give away – anything that sounds like it was written by a pair of Chinese pandas (or maybe was) is bound to be a bid oddball. But tracks that manage to combine Zapp & Roger, Kraftwerk, classic disco and minimal house in two minutes... well, that’s not unusual, I suppose. What’s really weird is that, in VoomVoom’s case, the influences re-appear undigested. To say regurgitated isn’t quite right – if you regurgitate something, it looks, well, different, innit. No, in this case they’re just put side by side, sometimes for the better, often for the weirder, and overall for the worse.
Ableton users will know the temptation well. It’s all too easy in this day and age to just re-combine four bar loops into a track. Within the space of a minute, you can have a searing 303 tear-out looping in time and in phase with a Pat Benetar vocal snippet, a John Bonham drum break and the hook from ‘manah-manah’ by the Muppets. I stress can. I wonder, with equal stress, should we?
Voom Voom seem to think so. I don’t. What’s even stranger is this is kind of an electronic ‘super group’- not quite the ‘Travelling Wilburys,’ but three very established names: Roland Appel and Christian Prommer from ‘Fauna Flash’ and Peter Kruder of ‘Peace Orchestra’ and ‘Kruder and Dorfmeister’ fame. You’d think they’d know better. You’d think they could do better. They don’t. Obviously this collaboration came about through a few weekends mutual (and perhaps brutal) midi-controller spanking. You tweak my knob, I’ll twist your tone pot. No doubt it was pleasurable, but when it sounds this bad, should we have to listen to the moaning?

I’m gonna cut and call it from the start: I think this is one of the best new releases I’ve heard all year, easily. A quiet wow. Not just a new soundmap, but maybe even a different kinda compass. It might be dubbed psychedelic disco universal boogie, for easy reference, but handle with care - there’s a more beautifully bastard groove at work on your headspace than an off-the-rack label will lead you to – this duo have swallowed their influences whole and assimilated them, subliminated them and re-constituted them into something intensely reminiscent, yet entirely of and on its own.
It’s a musical map that overtly references kraut rock, italo/disco and postpunk, but also sheds an innate affinity with incidental musak, TV theme choons of olde and even chill comp. filler. Throughout, there’s an exceptional understanding of melodic narratives & groove building. It’s another episode of songcraft’s revenge, sublimely composed in all senses of the phrase, and made into something as agreeable as it is satisfying.
The tracks will sit weightlessly on the edge of audibility, but it’s not wallpaper – despite the lack of apparent gravity there’s a definite propulsiveness, an urge at work that bends you and time and tunes forward, onward.
Perfect driving music, and I’m reminded of other wonderful freeway albums; Can’s Future Days, Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express and even Dark Side (or perhaps better and more apt, Dub Side) of the Moon. Turn it up and it turns you on, keep it playing and it’ll keep you fed or (let’s mix a metaphor) lit-up and warm like a well-built campfire. There is a similarity there with a nice fire, that sense steady combustion – its actual warmth and then the intangible resonance, the thing that draws you to it.
I have as little doubt as my scepticism will allow that this album will become a classic – but wither the future, for at least the time being, this is the best thing I can put my ears close to.
Lovely.

As a child I remember being impressed by my father’s radio receiver – a huge old Kenwood, with a backlit display and a heavily weighted tuning knob that spun slowly and precisely across the frequency bandwidth. When you turned it on, the glow of the LEDs would slowly strengthen until with a little ‘click’ the unit would begin to function. It had the words ‘solid state’ written across the faceplate.
‘Movements’ too, feels solid state - an album with no audible moving parts. It’s the sounds of a super-efficient machine that has effortlessly converted its potential into kinetic energy – a master of friction. A Modernist wet dream, or ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as the Audi people say.
But isn’t friction a good thing? To pose the question another way – try walking, try chewing – hell, try fucking without it. Yet too much and you start to smoke, you seize up, you get a nasty rash. All too human. Hasn’t techno and electronica always dreamed of overcoming the entropy of bodies, of exiting the ugly, squirting, straining and sagging of biomechanics and entering an effortless existence where everything is brushed smooth? ‘Movements’ sings with this desire, it’s an old hymn harmonised through new machines. And a brilliant one.
From the outset, the sense of purposive propulsion is abundant – so too is that this is an emotional journey. The strings might be synthesised, but they’re tugged heartstrings – not nonetheless, but because they’re artificial.
‘Night Falls’ gives the feeling of returning to somewhere – to the place of your childhood, via either autobahn or aircraft, express flight. All the tracks follow form – without a tone wasted, they somehow superefficiently mobilise your feet and your feelings. We’re going forward into the future, and if we look in the rear-view mirror to our childhoods, it’s without either the capacity or the desire to slow down, to turn back. There is a sadness in that, too – the now well-flogged ‘Mandarine Girl’ (thankfully re-worked here) conveys a palpable sense of something... gone. But what? Whenever I listen ‘Movements,’ I’m propelled back to the sublime moments of parties I never went to, years ago. Do I want to go back there? Can I go back there? Was I ever there? Have I left that longing behind, or was it ever mine to long for? Is that a bad thing, when the future ahead sounds so wonderful? I wonder.

As a force in the world of music, Kompakt have never been stronger. But don’t fool yourself if you think it’s got anything to do with the sound they’re pushing. In fact, the great irony of Kompakt is that even though it’s nearly a spent force creatively, the label has got distribution so thoroughly sorted that we’re probably going to see the release of Kompakt Total 25, regardless of its contents.
The Total series’ strength was always in its diversity. When it peaked with the third annual, it felt like almost anything was possible and everything was to be done. Even at its’ weakest moments though, you always felt the presence of the ‘Kompakt’ sound. Fast-forward four years though and the ‘Kompakt’ artists sound ill-at-ease on their own label. Total 7 sees some capable, interesting producers come up with limp, out-of-date, flat facsimiles of sound fads being done better on other, more vibrant labels.
All the old-skool members come out to bat: we have the obligatory Reinhard Voigt track (still talentless after all these years), Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer half-heartedly fanny-farting out their old formulas on ‘Sweet Harmony’, Superpitcher justifying another infidelity on ‘Tonite’ and Thomas Fehlmann offering some b-grade ‘jazzy’ beats with ‘Saft’. None of the big tracks littered throughout the compilation like Gui Boratto’s ‘Aquipélago’, Hug’s ‘The Happy Monster’ and Wighnomy Bros’ ‘Wombat’ seem to fit either, not together, and not with the overall Kompakt ‘thing’, if there is such a thing anymore. There are some gems here though – Kontrast’s ‘Grey Skies to Blue’, the Field’s ‘Over the Ice’ and Jonas Bering’s ‘Melanie’ are all lovely. But even the best moments here struggle against tired and ruined formulas failing to make sense and new noises creating dissonance among them.