ILWTT.07 “Blastic Smile”: A Sick Weird Rough Compilation

The only time we’ve been to Frankfurt, home to super-able uber-label SWR, we ended up in a subterranean bierkeller, soundtracked by an oompah band in full lederhosen. It’s fair to say we didn’t have any great musical epiphanies that night (though we did discover that there is, perhaps surprisingly, much to be said for veggie schnitzels).

There’s little doubt that Sick Weird Rough (for its first three releases, the more prosaically named Sven Wittekind Records) has been one of *the* most rewarding labels of recent years, and although it may be pure fluke that we were there at the start – not quite sure what prompted us to first give Sven’s “Never Forget” a virtual spin – it quickly became one of those rare imprints on which every release merited forensic investigation. We don’t greatly adore the revised label moniker: on any application of the Ronseal test the original label name couldn’t be faulted, whereas to our minds the music on SWR is not really sick, weird, *or* rough: it’s starlit, well-honed, and absurdly sleek.

As we said in 2013 in relation to one of the label’s (non-imaginary) collections, "Before We Restart" (a 28-tracker lasting three and three quarter hours!):

“a crammed-to-the-gills bargain compilation… of dark and cutting-edge European techno. Remember, outwith the likes of Sarah, Ron Johnson and Matinée there can surely never have been a roster more killingly consistent than SWR’s…”

Now. Our record collection, such as it is, shuffles meekly from available space to available space, as lifetime-gathered trinkets and the needs of little people buffet it from room to room, from room to loft. But it’s there, and no magic spell or click of the finger can ‘unmake’ it, and so long as we still live to breathe the stubborn fumes of these city streets, nobody will wrest these records from our living space, and no effluxion of time could persuade us to free up the boxes and shelves for anything else, and so *all* the labels we’ve compiled to date – 555, Factory, Earache, Sarah, Subway, Creation - are easily-reeled down memories, as vivid as the touch of a dusty sleeve or the sniff of decades-old vinyl.

Yet SWR is different: for all the tunes in this list are mere computer files, clickable icons that yield clinical folds of techno, but that can’t be touched, moved, cradled or kissed. Uniquely, they are songs we’ve experienced only and completely through the shyly spartan i-pod, usually in the neon-pricked black of the journey home from work, those precious three quarter-hours when the revolving doors spin behind you and the walk northwards is a world of plenty within a private, portable listening booth.

At first this lack of context seemed disarming, if not debilitating. When we listen to songs on those other labels, we recall the shop we bought the record in, the surly glare of the shop assistant, the first listen when we got home, the scrabbling around for a free C90 so that we could tape it and stick it on the next day’s Walkman, the days spent showing the record off at school. With these tracks, the first listen is invariably wrapped up in pre-work dawn or post-work dusk, in city streets and lights, amidst pavement hubbub and the glare of shop windows. That’s not a bad thing… it’s just… different.

Oh, and of course this one was a pain to compile, a real jigsaw puzzle: we knew that we would only ever be able to fit between 8-10 tracks on, but we wanted to provide as strong and representative a selection as we reasonably could. Unconstrained by the requirements of vinyl, SWR tunes don’t just touch the old edges of the 12” played at 45, but often surge well beyond, with the singles tending to range between 8 or 9 minutes: a few a little shorter, a few some minutes longer. Anyway, let the feast begin.

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1. Ryuji Takeuchi “Vital”

There may be some merit in starting with one of the best singles of the past several years, in any genre. Doggedly insistent and mechanistically urgent, the vitally vital fount of vitality that is “Vital”:

“builds organically, rolling drums subsumed in turn by layered strands of percussive noise, but within minutes it has completed a grim mutation into a seamless warp and weft of futurist techno, rattling synths criss-crossing darkly industrial soundscapes to create a bleak yet brisk dystopian void echoing with what sounds like a CS canister being let off at regular intervals (a sound that was de rigeur in minimal techno this yr)… "Vital" is austere, constructivist, monochromatic and brilliant, and you'll rarely find 7'43 whoosh by you so quickly.”

2. Tex-Rec “Kill The Dream”

Ahmet Meric, or Tex-Rec, flew the Bosnia-Herzegovina flag on SWR (alongside Dragan Lakic, aka Forest People) and he did so most mightily with this stunning title track from his 4-track EP, a defiantly unleashed

“smiling assassin of an EP which seduces you with rhythmic patterns as sleek and glinting as the bonnet of a newly polished Countach while at the same time moving in for the kill with dancefloor-massacring intensity… The title track proceeds to rather majestically patrol the boundary fence between moody and minimalist, sharing with "Detonator" a whizzing two-note motif and careful build… Immense.”

Alongside his crowd-wowing Darknet single “Encoding”, this is probably still our favourite Tex-Rec tune. This is probably also the time to point out that we were a little saddened by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s early exit from the last World Cup: the way they played against Argentina we were convinced that they would qualify, but after wrongly having a goal disallowed against Nigeria they didn’t react well enough, and in the end it all petered out rather. Still, they lasted longer than England.

3. Mintech “Black Mamba”

Mario Mangiapia is part of SWR’s sturdy Italian contingent down the years, alongside Frenkie V, Pe’ja, Irregular Synth and Frankyeffe, and this 2013 A-side is a real floor-filler, one of the label’s more “accessible” tunes, however unlikely it is that they’ll be rocking to it at Slim Jim’s Liquor Store next Saturday night.

“This is thrilling, heady stuff, actually quite... well, not commercial exactly, but should it "cross over" from the techno room to the main dancefloor, we wouldn't be totally surprised. We could certainly well imagine barging over a few bemused punters in our eagerness to join it there.”

4. Frenkie V “Exclude”

A few on Team SWR may be scene veterans (Andre Walter, for example, was producing in the early 1980s), but others came up on the ropes: Francesco Varchetta birthed this exhilarating single when just about still a teenager. We still like to imagine Sven listening to the final cut at label HQ for the first time and thinking, “um, where are the beats, kiddo?” as Frenkie spends the best part of a minute just messing around with the soundboard. But after that, the Neapolitan just goes for it, and “Exclude” is as provocative and refreshing now as it was on first listen:

“a hugely enjoyable instrumental frolic through the (far) left-field which after a *completely* insane beginning (more unhinged than "Riot" and "Bury" put together!) gradually recasts itself into an equally captivating hunk of somewhat gleefully obscurist techno, defying the genre's usual "layer, build and dismantle" tradition with a frankly liberating "er, what's he going to next ?" approach to song structure. The prospect of more like this from him in future is not unwelcome.”

That was all the way back in 2010, mind. So we’re a bit concerned about where our Frenkie has got to: there was a second SWR single “Rimshot”, which was good, but not as mischievous or downright enjoyable as this one (a bit like the Golden Dawn having followed “My Secret World” with “George Hamilton’s Dead”) and then, it seems, there was just a big black hole of silence (a bit like the Golden Dawn having followed “George Hamilton’s Dead” with, er, nothing). Shame.

5. Gayle San “Blastic Wifester”

I sense romance, wedding bells, the burned-out husks of single lives: for SWRs 14 and 16 respectively were Sven’s “Hubster” and Gayle’s “Blastic Wifester”, a romantic gesture up there with Stew and Jen’s “Wedding Album” picture-disc (yes, in the words of Phil Wilson, “I own it”). The “Wifester” EP also came with a widescreen remix of “Hubster”, just to make the link clear.

Possibly one of the best-titled singles in history, “Blastic Wifester” is an engaging bustle of tinselly, loose-packed techno, a ringing swarm of defiant beats from Gayle San, who grew up in Singapore but spent some time DJ-ing in London before decamping to Germany.

6. Sven Wittekind “Measure of Justice”

Sven is the house band, SWR’s Biff Bang Pow! / Flatmates, and verily

“there is nothing straightforward or workaday about the seamless way which he continues to create techno charged with just the right blend of urgency and (albeit suppressed) emotion”.

"Measure Of Justice” was a late 2013 single, as well as a highlight from the long-play joys of “Voodoo”, that showed the house band on top, top form:

“eight minutes of weighty, righteous jurisprudence… starting brazenly and cockily with a full minute of just a single repeating beat - soon unfurls itself into a gliding masterpiece of clanking and techno pointillism”

and our abiding memory of it, given our digression above, was half an hour at a bus stop in Grays’ Inn Road, post-Water Rats, listening to it again and again, letting it seep with urgency and excitement to warm our cold, chastened ears. Wonderful.

7. Pe’ja “Gilgamesh (Part 1)”

Tuff enuff stuff from Amedeo Mazzotti, who deserved better than a pizza metaphor, but unaccountably got one anyway:

“The song pivots around a repeated, scuffed and fuzzy motif… but what distinguishes it from much of the rest of Europe's minimal techno crop is Pe'ja's use of breakbeats to provide a crunching, pizza-crust edge to proceedings. Nice.”

And we’ve gone for Part 1 because… well, because Part 2 wasn’t as good. The opposite of "Shook Ones", then.

8. Michael Schwarz "Function" (Ryuji Takeuchi Remix)

We fell hard for this confection, a supplement to the Schwarzster’s “Function” / “Disfunction” double-‘A’, and ended up in a very excitable digression which checked Rothko, Twombly and – but of course - Bubblegum Splash!

9. Sven Wittekind & Andy White “Bass Junkies”

There was no little competition to be the last track. Indeed we could probably have squeezed a couple more on had we not gone for this 12-minute ‘early hit’ from the boys (Sven plus compatriot Andy White, the man behind the Audiosignal label). But despite strong claims from Forest People, Virgil Enzinger (who also helped out on the “Bass Junkies” remix front) and Andre Walter (“oscillates rolling, ricocheting rhythms with jacking spring-heeled hydraulics”), we’ve gone for this, and all because:

“This is buried treasure, a 12" that takes us straight back to those days of staying up late on a schoolnight, listening to teasing techno tremors on John Peel to offset next-day lesson dread. Slowly bubbling bass from the German pair sets the scene for a couple of minutes before the tune starts to build, but it's only really around the six-minute mark that "Bass Junkies" properly springs into life, pivoting on a single, sampled operatic held note before the percussion busies itself in more traditional Wittekind style, but the track still keeps things close, more minimal than hard tech, just gently nibbling away at your ears, resolutely refusing to swing and instead keeping it metronomic, hypnotic, *close* for its blissful, subtly ever-undulating second section.”

* * * * *

On re-listening to all these songs we’re immediately struck by the clear tone and timbre of SWR’s artists: instrumental frequencies, clean-lined caresses. The track listing that *flows* in a way none of the compilations to date can quite manage. So “Black Mamba” seems like a sequel to “Kill The Dream”, irrespective of the years between their release and the many miles between their respective composers. Even Frenkie V’s mischievous, unpredictable “Exclude” (exclude what? Pupils? Draughts?) manages to sit comfortably with the longer, more carefully built-up and then gradually dismantled songs around it.

Here’s to SWR, and to many more years of their positive, empowering, art.