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The Electrifying Mojo (Roman Flügel Remix)

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/pop_ambient_2022

With the cover artwork for Pop Ambient 2022, longtime KOMPAKT graphic artist Veronika Unland has once again outdone herself. Following the almost baroque, blood-red and jet-black, extremely physical sculptures of Pop Ambient 2021, which emerged from a dark, floral sea like bodies erect for dancing, the front of 2022 is adorned with a pastel-white form, intertwined, folded many times and crisscrossed with delicate shading, which seems to float on a pale pink background; soft, gentle waves woven from Venetian colors that leave the viewer puzzled: Is it a flower, a coral, a mollusk? 

Again, the current edition of the tradition-steeped compilation series curated by Wolfgang Voigt is about the persistent and ever-necessary definition of beauty, of reduction, of electronic music of heavy lightness and light heaviness, of ambient's eternal promise of a state of physical and acoustic weightlessness and Pop's of redemption. And about the question why a never arbitrary combination of soundscape, drones, samples and loops, put together in a certain way, can create this feeling of warmth, depth and space, - something three-dimensional, where the imagination feels at home as a fish in the water or a bird in the sky. A key aesthetic stimulus that sends all the senses into a slow glide and drift, after which your synapses feel like they've been bathed in essential oil. Next to Soul, Ambient is probably the most effective musical healing plant of mankind. 

Behind the aural test tubes, the who's who of Pop Ambient is once again at work, led for the first time by the highly trafficked Californian duo Blank Gloss, whose debut album "Melt" this year was certified by The Guardian as nothing less than "heartaching beauty". Yui Onodera's "Chrome" as well as "Kari", a cooperation of Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth, could also be imagined in the score of Denis Villeneuve's new film version of DUNE - however, colleague Hans Zimmer managed that quite well without the three. After such wonderful and stylish contributions by Reich & Würden, Triola and Thomas Fehlmann, the ear then lingers a bit longer on the ghostly "Weiht" by Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella, a track like a temple of sound, a deep electronic immersion in a Japanese onsen. In this sea of unnameable time you could sink forever, but with the tracks of Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden & Pepo Galán the journey slowly comes to an end.

Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella - Weiht

Thomas Fehlmann - Rosen Fliegen

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/blu

From collaborating with The Weeknd on his new album to their latest breakthrough hit “The Mirage” on Afterlife, the Italian duo Agents Of Time are already proving to be unstoppable in 2022.

We welcome them back timed as an anthem to celebrate the end of the pandemic given their last release for us “Music Made Paradise” sadly was released at the start of it all.

“Blu” signifies a new direction for Agents Of Time as they hone in their production ambitions to embrace a more song driven approach to their club driven sounds. Sung entirely in Italian, “Blu” feels like an immense exhale to the frustrations and loneliness we have all felt the past 2 years. Poignant and vibrant, we expect some tears of relief to be shed on the dancefloor to this opus.

To be able get Joseph Capriati onboard for remix duties on “Blu” gives us the utmost pleasure. When we first heard “Blu”, we knew that Joseph was the most sensible choice for the single. But when we heard it, our jaws dropped. He goes down the road not taken and completely surprises with a gloriously, twisted take on epic 00’s driven melodic minimalism that will certainly give great pleasure to our long time fans of Kompakt.

KOMPAKT PREMIERE: Agents Of Time - Blu (Joseph Capriati Remix)

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/blu

From collaborating with The Weeknd on his new album to their latest breakthrough hit “The Mirage” on Afterlife, the Italian duo Agents Of Time are already proving to be unstoppable in 2022.

We welcome them back, timed as an anthem to celebrate the end of the pandemic given their last release for us "Music Made Paradise" sadly was released at the start of it all.

"Blu" signifies a new direction for Agents Of Time as they hone in their production ambitions to embrace a more song driven approach to their club driven sounds. Sung entirely in Italian, "Blu" feels like an immense exhale to the frustrations and loneliness we have all felt the past 2 years. Poignant and vibrant, we expect some tears of relief to be shed on the dancefloor to this opus.

To be able get Joseph Capriati onboard for remix duties on "Blu" gives us the utmost pleasure. When we first heard "Blu", we knew that Joseph was the most sensible choice for the single. But when we heard it, our jaws dropped. He goes down the road not taken and completely surprises with a gloriously, twisted take on epic 00's driven melodic minimalism that will certainly give great pleasure to our long time fans of Kompakt.

Agents Of Time - Blu

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/jesus_was_an_alien_digital_single

The dance floor as devotional is a trope as old as the club itself. But, with her new single, Jesus Was An Alien, Perel subverts the stakes of our collective communion: Who are our arms raised to? Who are we seeking salvation from?

“Jesus Was An Alien is a discourse about whether Jesus was an actual alien,” she explains, “but also a social debate about what is and implies religion today.” It’s a soundtrack for the listener’s own journey through the intricacies and ironies of modern belief.The track stirs like a late-night revelation, a heady discovery awakened in the dark. Perel lays out a fiercely disciplined electro pulse, with French Canadian musician and songwriter Marie Davidson’s proclamations growing more fervent over the song’s sensual stride. “I already said everything with my synthesizers and the melodies I created,” Perel explains of the collaboration, but “somehow she gave the song a voice I couldn’t.”

Perel / Marie Davidson - Jesus Was An Alien (Club Edit)

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/jesus_was_an_alien_lp

The dance floor as devotional is a trope as old as the club itself. But, with her new album, Jesus Was An Alien, Perel subverts the stakes of our collective communion: Who are our arms raised to? Who are we seeking salvation from?

“Jesus Was An Alien is a discourse about whether Jesus was an actual alien,” she explains, “but also a social debate about what is and implies religion today.” She offers up her provocative second record – her first on Kompakt – as a soundtrack for the listener’s own journey through the intricacies and ironies of modern belief.

Picking up on the themes she brought to her debut, the 2018’s LP Hermetica on DFA, Perel has created ten tracks rich with spirit and allusion. Her influences are myriad, from the indie dance hitmakers of the early 2000s – Hot Chip, Simian Mobile Disco, Justice – to rave compilations that predate her ascent to the DJ booth, to more abstract inputs. Living with synesthesia, she says, “I feel emotions and colors piling up inside me, then there’s a triggering sound or event that opens a valve. My tracks are color streams that tell a story.”

Jesus Was An Alien is not just multicolored – it’s multi-lingual too, slipping in and out of tongues in a single track, sometimes dispensing with words altogether (the ecstatic breakdown of “The Principle of Vibration”). The album features Perel’s voice almost entirely but for her special collaboration with Canadian songwriter Marie Davidson on the title track.

“Jesus Was An Alien” stirs like a late-night revelation, a heady discovery awakened in the dark. Perel lays out a fiercely disciplined electro pulse, with Davidson’s proclamations growing more fervent over the song’s sensual stride. “I already said everything with my synthesizers and the melodies I created,” Perel explains of the collaboration, but “somehow she gave the song a voice I couldn’t.”

Perel drives further not only spiritually but sonically across the ten tracks, taking thrilling production risks: standouts include her breathy vocals atop a melodic piano strut on “Matrix;” the delirious blur of ghostly chimes and disembodied voices of “Religion;” and the retro radiance of “The Principle of Vibration,” in which Perel exhorts us to “come on and vibe” over an athletic riff and shuffling percussion.

“Kill The System,” meanwhile, hits the listener with tense acid pulses, building to only an imagined release and calls out the end of patriarchy. Album closer “Am Kanal” starts as a pensive cloud of a track, finally breaking into a rich textural rain of synths and stabs.

The variety throughout Jesus Was An Alien underlines Perel’s purpose in this latest project; she’s experimenting her way to answers – or maybe just more questions. After all, she says, “questions are the beginning of something new.”

Perel / Marie Davidson - Jesus Was An Alien

“When Violeta first approached me to remix Willkommen I was really excited, as it's such a beautiful track. It was a challenge to figure out how I was going to reinterpret it, but as soon as I put the spoken word stuff about Japan in the mix, I imagined a Japanese shopping mall. So that was the vibe for me.. walking through a shopping mall in Japan... maybe a little off your head... then this song comes on the mall sound system ...." 
"Primavera means spring to me ...so that is what I tried to evoke in my mix. Hopefulness and a bit of gazing...at the stars and your shoes....celestially seasoning and sprinkling my vocals and electronics throughout the mix. With Violeta’s strings it makes for a magically delicious recipe..."  DF Tram

Willkommen = [ˈwelkəm]. Welcome in German. Light and positivity, the rythmic repetition of the strings are like sun rays bouncing off a lake’s surface. The prominent synths and strings are indistinguishable, resulting in a pure symbiosis of the acoustic and the synthetic; modern technology and western classical tradition.

Next up in Violeta Vicci’s AUTOVIA REMIXED project comes another stunning and wildly eclectic track from ambient artist DF Tram. Violeta’s debut album AUTOVIA, produced by the legendary Martin ‘Youth’ Glover was originally released on Painted Word Records

Violeta Vicci is a multifaceted, contemporary artist and musician of Catalan – Swiss descent, based in London, she feels comfortable genre-crossing from Classical to Improvisation, Ethno Avantgarde, Ambient, Multilayered Electronics, her influences ranging from traditional to pop. Violeta has collaborated with an eclectic array of artists such as Thom Yorke, Elbow, Jonsi (Sigur Rós) amongst others.

Willkommen - DF Tram's Japanese Shopping Mall Mix

Out now

Violeta Vicci - Willkommen - DF Tram's Japanese Shopping Mall Mix

Slightly remastered version. Just a little more "mojo". More glued together, more ambiance and a little louder. Should fit better to actual playlists.

Best,

C.

Codec & Flexor - Robot Funk (Remastered 2022)

Search For Utopia

Search For Utopia - Part VI

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/total_22

It’s common knowledge that KOMPAKT’s TOTAL series serves as our yearbook, a musical wrap up of the past 12 months. Therefore it doesn’t come as a surprise that this year’s edition is informed by another pandemic year, where dancefloors were still mostly deserted and the devastating developments in Eastern Europe. Kompakt’s A&R team still kept on foot on the imaginary dancefloor, while scouting different realms apart from the big room euphoria. Anyway, brain dance has always been a key ingredient to our catalogue.

The Voigt brothers are opening this year´s vinyl edition in an unusually romantic fashion. ‘Why’ combines a bubbly FM bassline with lush washes of looped guitars. High off the (presumably high) heels of her recent album ‘Jesus Was An Alien’ she delivers a spanking new excursion into her sonic world, ‘The Hill’. Our Mexican friend Rebolledo makes his first ever solo appearance on TOTAL with his trademark hypnotic desert sound. Jürgen Paape is calling a spade a spade with ‘Le Monde À Changé’ – The world has changed indeed. Our prodigal son, Matias Aguayo, returns to the mothership with ‘Cinco Y Rojo’. An exercise in Chicago-esque groove theory paired with a cheeky visitor from Denmark. Spot the reference and win a pair of hooves. It’s hard to find a quality party around Cologne without Jonathan Kaspar on its bill. Rightly so, as he continues to hone his craft as an impeccable DJ and producer. Michael gives the tremendously talented Danish singer songwriter eee gee a proper Mayer treatment and Kompakt founding member Jörg Burger closes off the festivities with a groovy midtempo chugger that reminisces ‘Blue Lines’ era Massive Attack as much as the late Andy Weatheralls low slung psychedelia.

Total 22

Jörg Burger - Crawling Up That Hill (Instrumental Version)

Buy/stream: https://kompakt.fm/releases/universo

Italian duo Agents Of Time have been incredibly busy over the past few years, from releasing a string of classic singles – including their recent single for Afterlife, “The Mirage”, which earned more than five million views on Instagram – to remixing The Weeknd’s “Take My Breath”, which appeared on his recent Dawn FM (Alternative World). But the biggest news is here now – their second album, Universo, is ready. Elevating their trademark melodic techno with an exquisite pop-ness, Universo has found its ideal home with Kompakt, following their Music Made Paradise 2020 debut EP for the label. It’s a meeting of minds that makes perfect sense.

Andrea Di Ceglie and Luigi Tutolo, the two members of Agents Of Time, used their time during the pandemic to work on Universo, an album loosely conceptualised around their ‘personal universo’, a manifestation of the world Di Ceglie and Tutolo built both within and around their studio. This accounts for the sparkle and brightness of Universo – it’s full of personality, vim and vigour, the duo experimenting with their music, exploring its furthest corners. If you come to Universo expecting just another album of melodic techno, get ready to be pleasantly surprised – there’s a whole lot more going on here, and it’s all equally compelling.

After a typically poetic opening gesture – the swirling, synaesthetic, self-titled intro track – expectations are immediately blindsided with the two-step pop of “Fallin’”, sung with gentle clarity by guest Audrey Janssens, a dream of a song that harks back to the glory days of early ‘00s UK garage. “Interstellar Cowboy” is a confident, lithe, disco-fied strut; the gentle minor-key piano of “Liquid Fantasy” spirals into a gorgeously melancholy techno-pop epic, Vicky Who?’s voice rich with yearning. Janssens also reappears on the electro-swirl of “Poison”; “Dream Vision” revisits their single “The Mirage”, soft with sweeping strings, loaded with drama; “Part Of Life” sashays into view with a schaffel-stomp.

This rich variety throws the more dancefloor-focused tracks, like “Ciao”, into even starker relief – they’re more decisive, streamlined, yet rich with detail, chugging, Moroder-esque bass meeting strobe-lit synths that fire melodies out into the firmament. Universo feels texturally dense, but it still breathes, its sounds so tactile you want to reach out and grab them, its tunes so seductive you can’t get them out of your head. Universo is a fiercely beautiful album, brave in its spirit, a perfectly poised meeting-point of pop melody and stylish, lush techno: Agents Of Time in excelsis.

Universo

Agents Of Time - Interstellar Cowboy

Agents Of Time - Fallin Feat. Audrey Janssens

Agents Of Time - Universo

Head East - Never Been Any Reason (Budd Foxx Re-Edit)

Nine Lives

In the Mood (2006 Remaster)

Nightmares...And Other Tales From The Vinyl Jungle

Must of Got Lost

Xylem Tube EP

Polynomial-C

Aphex Twin - Polynomial-C

Buy here: https://www.beatport.com/release/car-car-car-pt-1/2028353

DJ Hell - Car Car Car (Phil Kierans Drums Mix) - Official Teaser

Nichts - Eingeschlossen (Total Lockdown DJ Hell Remix 2020)

Orginal Released: 1981 

The Song was written in Düsseldorf 40 years ago and released on Schallmauer Records.

Today it got a new approach/meaning true the pandemie and total lockdown 
For all musicians , artists , DJs or People working around that area.

The world is out of control.

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muddy mike