Digging through the archives last night, I found a terrific bit of spacey techno from a Canadian law student that we released on Red Antenna back in 2000. It’s back in heavy rotation.
Modular Mike - 51° 30′ 0º 30′
(The New Electric Policy, 2000)
Unfortunately, I can’t find much about Modular Mike on the World Wide Web . . . if you’re out there, Mike, drop me a line.
Kyra Porada collects red things; photo by Stephen Baker
On Tuesday Kyra said “Let’s put all of the red things in our office in a big pile and take a picture.” We thought this was a brilliant idea and by Wednesday we had a pretty respectable pile underway that included Big Red gum, a fat marker, a cutting board, some rejected poster designs, a Midi-Control Voltage box, The Elements of Style, a Tomorrowland 12″, a Netflix sleeve, Emigre’s Rant, packets of Kikkoman soy sauce, Sagmeister’s Made You Look, a Chinese Calendar, Pole’s CD 2, and an apple, among other things.
Then we made the pile look like the Red Antenna logo and that was pretty rewarding, too. You can see a slide show of the red photographs on our homepage here.
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Studio One – Red
(Studio 1, 1996)
Wolfgang Voigt’s color-coded tracks continue to improve with age. Rumor has it that he’s going to start making tracks named after all of the numbers..
Wheels in the Mojave Desert, a few miles west of Boron, California – home to the Borax mines.
“As you get older you realize that ‘finding a voice’, or ‘developing a creative language’ is not only a very difficult task, but also one of the most boring goals a human being can aim for,” says Federico Urdaneta, aka Boraxx.
Fair enough, but Mr. Urdaneta’s music is certainly honing in on something. His two new tracks play like a classic 12″ should: they demonstrate the range of an artist’s capabilities while exploring a clear idea. In this case, the idea is an inexhaustible loop that builds and decays, yet remains firmly pegged to a restless drum pattern that knocks about with guitars and bells – and it’s better for it.
Boraxx – Seasons in Reverse (Red Antenna, 2008)
“Seasons in Reverse” drifts like an Eno transmission before melting into a Villalobos-worthy groove at the one-minute mark. This isn’t just another lazy comparison to Chile’s finest: Urdaneta has a knack for sweaty percussion that bangs and builds with the urgency of a live drum solo. Which makes sense, because the other track is a tight Krautrock affair made from looped samples of his own drum and guitar sessions.
Go to Red Antenna to get the other track and marvel at the sentimental cow drawing.
I’ve had the good fortune to play a couple of shows with Marco Raab. He always surprises. His set kicks off with a whooshing sound that sweeps the room like a drugged helicopter blade. Everyone in the audience grows uneasy, perhaps even physically ill before the sound drops into a filthy bed of bass-heavy electro around the two-minute mark that would make the guys at Interdimensional Transmissions and Bunker blush.
Here is a final version of that opening track (with an abbreviated helicopter intro + an inscrutable title):
Marco Raab – Charles Schulz Returns (Red Antenna, 2008)
Over at Red Antenna, we’ve also posted one of his first songs, which was recorded in 1995 for the bathroom of a sauna in Prague. It’s a nice bit of dubby home-listening and makes one wonder what he’s been doing for the 13 years between the two tracks. Surely there are other songs squirreled away on his hard drive that would be well-suited to clubs, saunas, and other places that demand low-end thrills.
Our ‘Coming Soon’ page from Spring 2007 turned into a dark joke several months ago, so I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally relaunched the Red Antenna site for 2008. Take a look.
Although the Red Antenna shop is keeping a full plate of client work, we’re slowly and stealthily resurrecting the record label. The alpha (or is it beta?) version of the new label site lives here and we’ll be posting new and old releases in the popular mp3 format on a semi-regular basis. Stay tuned this week for vintage Mega Man theme music and brand new evil electro.
Some exciting physical releases will be in stores later this year (we’re still debating between CD and vinyl).
If you’re interested in submitting some techno to Red Antenna, let us know. And if you have any techno that you’d like posted or reviewed here on KinoSport, please let me know about that, too. Particularly if it’s NYC techno.
Also, Candy Chang recently kicked off a terrific blog, posting daily notes on graphic design & the city. Stefan Sagmeister, E.B. White, and the NYC subway all rub shoulders beneath the benevolent gaze of an enormous red C.
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Here are some old tracks from the Red Antenna vault that haven’t been properly released yet:
Com.munikation – Com 04 (Red Antenna, 2002)
Mental Tsp – Air Bolt (Red Antenna, 2003)
Variable X – Nitrogen Narcosis (Red Antenna, 2003)
Candy Chang has posted six new tracks from her recent live set. With tracks named “Cobo Hall” and “Highland Park”, the inspiration for the Detroit, Detroit EP is obvious: dramatic urban landscapes that are noble, sometimes failed, and very legendary. Aside from the track titles, there are direct nods towards some of Detroit’s other landmarks: the nervous sounds of Ersatz electro ca. 1999, Plastikman’s Muzik melodies, and a touch of Moodymann’s loopy retro-house. There are even a few plain-out dirty Dj Assault moments (see “Greektown”). The overall sound, however, is not so obvious: disco crashes into minimal techno, which is fuzzed over with brash synths and firecracker drums and a few skittering high-hats. I’ll lay off the adjectives now, except to say it’s big and raw and very much Detroit.
Candy Chang – Woodward Avenue
(from Detroit, Detroit. Red Antenna, 2007)
Download the rest of Candy’s tracks here. (I like to think that this has something to do with her making new songs).
By the way, we’re counting down over at Red Antenna . . . exciting!
At last, I’m official. After eleven months, I no longer need to fumble the same lame joke at important meetings (“A design company designing its own business card? Why, that’s like a barber cutting his own…”). Now I just need to say clever, self-promotional things one thousand times. Be sure to collect all four and solve the secret puzzle.
Here’s a good track for working on a grey city day:
Ester Brinkmann – 19′ 50″ (from the 20 to 2000 series)
A clamshell CD case surfaced the other day while sifting through a forgotten shoebox of items whose reasons for being saved were no longer clear. The ticket stubs, tattered receipts, and blurry photographs were perplexing, but the CD was a rewarding re-discovery: in 1999, Raster-Noton released one twenty-minute release per month from minimal & experimental techno’s finest: Wolfgang Voigt, Mika Vainio, Komet, et al. And clamshell CD cases were exciting and new at the time.
Brinkmann’s entry is the best: starting up with an isolated flight of drums, the track teaches you patience before dropping into a cunning, come-hither, and slightly dirty loop that could go on forever. And it pretty much does. Before you know it, a French lady is whispering sweet nothings and you’ve finished a ton work.
