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Marek Hemmann - In Between - 11-Nov-09 01:14 PM
At least two affairs in Polish politics have died down since the last time an album consisting of a couple of house tracks gave me as much joy, as the debut LP from Marek Hemmann did. Released on the German Freude An Tanzen label, which has been present on the market for over a decade now.
It’s not a superb piece of work, nor defining the genre anew. It’s a collection of perfectly produced unpretentious tracks. For every one of them the young producer from Gera had a plainly explicit idea, which he apparently manages to realize, because all of the tracks are simply working, causing a state where writing about this album while listening to it is not an easy job. Is this not the best recommendation for an album of dance music?
I would be very careful with using the term ‘tech house’ in order to describe the content of ‘In Between’, because it would be a little unfair. Mostly from the fact that not every producer associated with it reaches out for cheerful sounds of trumpet (‘Kaleido’), or saxophone (‘Gemini’). I will certainly not intend to destroy Marek’s hard work insistently trying to categorize it.
Not many albums rouse you from the chair without falling into cheap dance floor chase. On ‘In Between’ there are no unnecessary experiments with the structure of the tracks, none of them is too complex, yet every single one is full of life and pulsing with a very distinct energy. Nothing feels forced, in fact the exact opposite – you can sense the actual joy of composing, so rarely seen nowadays, which spreads directly to the listener.

Hemmann & Kaden - 2 Zu 1 EP - 03-Feb-05 01:34 PM
The idea however being that some music is so compelling that only at a certain volume level do you begin to get that unmistakeable euphoric feeling. On their second EP for Freude-am-Tanzen, the two Thuringian gentlemen storm the corresponding brain sections using 5 star ingredients taken from the electronic kitchen.The section that sets the body to an immobile state is completely switched off. Writing and listening to these lines is almost impossible. Intense rocking up and down in your seat is accompanied by loud and sometimes quieter sections of the song. 'Sense' is carried by simple, waving drumbeats, driven by a booming bass line. Swallowed voice samples containing the title words play throughout the entire track, and are accompanied by melodic fragments from the underwater world.