This is a mix record in the style of Michael Mayer's
Immer series, except this time the focus is on dubstep and electronic reggae rather than minimalist German techno and microhouse. The album has the benefit of being better sequenced than Mayer's series; the unexpected introduction of Ekkehard Ehlers' orchestral pieces in the middle of the mix gives the album an emotional heft these kind of mix records don't usually have. The problem is how repetitive the album is, or, more accurately, to what minimal purpose such repetition is put. Repetition in dance and techno music usually works by creating an atmosphere of hypnosis where the track
seems to be changing even though it isn't, where the brain kind of tricks itself into thinking that the next time the melody rolls around, things will be different. What happens here is even though the album is 23 tracks long the ones that would work in repetition are too short to have any effect, and the ones that would work in atmosphere are too short to create one. After a strong beginning the album becomes a depressing series of downtuned beats, a weaker version of the kind of stuff Tricky was doing thirteen years earlier, and that Burial had already bested in 2007 with his masterful
Untrue, probably the greatest electronic record of the decade. This one had the bad luck to appear a year later, and it can't help but suffer from the comparison. At its best it
is effectively atmospheric and the interpolation of "Brooklyn Anthem" adds a nice moment of aggression that works, but this thing basically needed to be twenty minutes shorter or twenty minutes longer.
MY RATING:
6.0
ConQuest - "Mirage"; Team Shadatek - "Brooklyn Anthem (Acapella)"
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