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Since debuting with 2004's Elephant Island EP, Berlin based producer Roger Semsroth is responsible for some of the most impressive and amazingly unique minimal techno in recent years. Full of haunting echoes, crackles and bleeps, with austere and sparse rhythms and a crystal-clear and pristine overall construction, this is awesome stuff, even if you're not that much into techno!
This live-set at Vienna's Flex Club in January 2006 is a soundboard recording and boasts excellent sound quality.
(Click on the picture to download.)
Jan Jelinek is taking his cues from the micro house sound of labels like Kompakt, Force Tracks or Playhouse - especially its more ambient-leanings strains - as well as from the clicks & cuts and glitch techno approaches pioneered by the likes of Oval, Pole and Vladislav Delay and there's also more than a shade of Basic Channel/Chain Reaction/~scape-like dubbiness. It's a case of innovation through adaptation: Jelinek doesn't so much invent a new musical vocabulary. Rather, he combines his influences in a highly idiosyncratic fashion and distills a distinct and fascinating sound from them.
In a way, Jelinek's releases as Gramm are halfway between his more abstract output under his real name and his relatively dancefloor friendly work as Farben. Personal Rock - Jelinek's first full length album - is tranquil, gentle and melancholy. It's full of skippy, fluttering micro rhythms composed of tiny glitches, clicks and static, the basslines are deep and droning, but house is constantly and explicitly present - not so much through four-to-the-floor beats, but more through the structures of hooks and riffs or typical filter effects. But it's a weirdly spectral and ghostly presence. Personal Rock mirrors the feeling of the rave-comedown: it's like coming home from a club just before it starts to dawn, the rush of dancefloor euphoria slowly ebbing to become a fading, yet still present memory, and you can still feel the basslines and the thumping beats pulsing through your body.
