Loading ...Berliner electronic music veteran Thomas Fehlmann of Oceanclub and part time The Orb fame, has released his second album on Kompakt after 2002’s Visions of Blah.
I have to admit that I’m not really a fan of Kompakt and related labels musical route since 2002-2003. The surge of German teenager dance music producers has effectively killed the dancefloor for me, while gaining a huge amount of haters as fans once the notorious Cologne minimal sound was watered down and molded into electro house. With the minimal and dubby aesthetic of Studio 1 replaced by synth techno I abandoned ship, but it’s always a rewarding occasion to listen to Fehlmann’s albums, precisely because he knows the old code about doing minimal dance music.
Honigpumpe has 12 tracks with Fehlmann’s toolbox consisting of dark and warm soundscapes, minimalist dubby pads, driving basslines, mostly 4×4 beats with shuffle beats on a few, not unlike a run-of-the-mill new techno artist. The difference here is in the quality and his intuitive compositional judgement through experience. The fact that he’s been making electronic music since 1979 from the era of Neue Deutsche Welle should be enough to explain his notorierity on this subject. Musical aesthetic is pretty hard to describe in terms, especially for dance music but the thing that strikes me most is how refined and coherent everything is throughout Honigpumpe, just a little bit of more non electronic influences apart from the pseudo-jazzy “Atlas 2” or some “melody” on a few tracks and it would have been the icing on the cake!.
Fehlmann and Jerry Abstract
