Various Artists – Clicks_+_Cuts
In the late 1990s and early ’00s, a bunch of electronic producers tired of the big-beat house, trance, and techno music coming out of Europe and the US started working in miniatures. Rather than amplify the stomp and thump of bass-kicks and synthetic squiggles zipping through the midrange of clubland tracks, artists including Pole, Jan Jelinek, Thomas Brinkmann, Kit Clayton, and Farben started amplifying the sounds that others sought to erase: record-skipped pops, heartbeat-murmuring bottom end, glitchy digital “flaws,” the wobble of a needle in a record groove, sibilant tics and taps where the high-hat would be. Though still driven by a steady four-on-the-floor beat, the result was spacious minimal techno that somehow managed to connect the heaviness of dub and the spirit of house music with the lightness of the 3 a.m. comedown – embracing an album’s between-song semi-silence as if it were a brief moment of solitude to be tapped. The German label Mille Plateaux documented the sound on the genre-defining collection Clicks_+_Cuts. Featuring tracks by the above artists and others including Reinhard Voigt, Vladislav Delay, Alvo Noto, and Pansonic, the three-LP collection seems to revel in a world where mistakes, flaws and miscues are the fuel and not the exhaust. – Randall
Recommended – Full Listen
A1 Frank Bretschneider–Kern
A2 Snd–Circa 1509
A3 Farben–Raute
B1 Vladislav Delay–Synkopoint
B2 Pole–Spass
B3 Stilluppsteypa–Confused Bear Thrown Into The Sea
C1 Pan Sonic–Koilinen
C2 Alva Noto–Prototype N.
C3 Skist–Shift
C4 Thomas Meinecke’s Framus Waikiki– Rechannelled From Stereo
D1 Neina–Clairvoyance
D2 Autopoieses– These Few Minutes
D3 Sutekh–Unstabile
E1 Ester Brinkmann–Maschine
E2 All–Überall
E3 Dettinger–Strange Fruit
E4 Jake Mandell–I Won’t Lie
F1 Kit Clayton–Loads Early Like Normal
F2 Ultra-Red–(Esta Gran Humanidad Ha Dicho) !Ya Basta!
F3 Reinhard Voigt–Matrix
F4 Ihan–Sans Titre No. 2
F5 Panacea–Sincore
Lacquer Cut By – K
Liner Notes – Sascha Kösch