City Songs
Michael Mayer & Reinhard Voigt - Transparenza
Another beautiful spring day here in NYC - the kind of day where there's loads of (mostly smiling) people out walking around, despite the fact that it is a bit unseasonably cool and windy. It is the kind of day where putting on headphones and cruising around to your own city-soundtrack seems like the best idea since sliced bread.
With that in mind, here's a special treat: it has been a while since I've posted anything on Kompakt, so here's a new track from Kompakt's dancefloor sublabel Kompakt Extra, courtesy of Label co-head Michael Mayer and the legendary Reinhard Voigt (younger brother of Wolfgang Voigt aka Mike Ink). This comes from the latest 12" in the Speicher series, where they've already reached Speicher 36!
This is a relatively slow-paced track for the series, at least recently, as most of them lean towards club-banger style with pretty high tempos. I'm a big fan of the slow-burner type tracks myself, such as the Simian Mobile Disco remix of Ladytron, or pretty much any track Ewan Pearson lays his remix-hands on... Anyway, knowing the Speicher output as a whole, and generally what Mayer and Voigt have been up to lately, this track came as a surprise to me. It sounds a bit housey, as Mayer's work often does, but with a strong nod towards classic Detroit techno tunes, with a bouncing keyboard synth line, a nice slow build, and some fun klaxon-siren action in there to throw you off guard - essentially it has a great kick to it, and I personally can't wait to hear this on a big, booming soundsystem. Total summer song.
The 12" is out on May 29, and will be available at all fine vinyl retailers, direct from Kompakt, OR you can download super-high-bitrate MP3s via the brilliant Kompakt MP3 store. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the B-side! On it is another slow burner, this one by Davidovitch, a newcomer to the scene from Switzerland - a creeping synth line, crunching tech-house rhythm and some fun psychedelic effects that twist up vocal samples and churn them through filters. Both sides of this record make it well worth buying... in fact, keep your ear on Kompakt this summer, as they've got a string of essential releases coming up!
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PS: On a similar tip, this Thursday (May 25) me and my buddy (and NYC luminary DJ) James F!@#$%^ Friedman will be tearing the walls down at Cake Shop (Ludlow btw Stanton and Rivington) - expect disco-techno-madness, as we start late (midnight) and will go till they turn the lights on and throw us out... so come on, take Friday off and make a long weekend even longer by starting a day earlier!
Trust me, you'll thank me for it later.