Repeat Germany レコード& CD

Review: UK tech house legend Mark Ambrose is now back with a third volume of his The Journey series on Richard Davis' reissue label Repeat. The revered veteran crafted plenty of the genre's best and most unique sounds and you can revisit three of them now. 'Acid' is a slow, deep and meandering monster with rubbery bass and undulating 303 lines. 'The Ghoulash Monster From Outer Space' is a more dark and tribal, chunky and sci-fi sound with rich sound designs and eerie atmospheres and '5 AM' closes on a serene deep tech groove. Ricardo Villalobos, Sonja Moonear and Marcel Dettmann are just some of the names who have played these jams over the years, which is a testament to their quality.

Review: Minimal heads will be chuffed to see that the third volume of the Dis Chronicles series has now arrived on Repeat. It is another stylish collection of Grant Dell beats starting with a cut as Chicago Transit Authority. 'Emotive' is a perfect blend of jazzy keys and skipping garage drums with deep house vibes and swirling pads to add extra heat. On the flipside, Dell links with Jay Tripwire for 'Cosmic Kebab' which leans more into tech house territory but as the title suggests has nice starry synth work and to close out, Dell goes it alone on 'Rhythmic Science' which looks you into his precise beat work and diffuse late night chords.

Review: Tech house is an unfairly maligned genre. While criticisms of the blandness of the sound might hold weight for much of the stuff released today, the same simply can't be said for the work of Terry Francis, who helped pioneer its sound. All & All is a new series, this one documenting Francis' contributions to the underground, with many of the tracks appearing on it made during the period in which he was a resident DJ at London's Fabric. As you can hear, 'tech house' at the origin point, as propagated by Francis, was much dreamier - closer to its cousin, deep house. And on cuts like 'How Can Something', you can really hear where the received 'dreaminess' of house and the uptempo, industrial pulse of techno, converged.

Review: The second Volume of Terry Francis' All & All series hears much of the work of the esteemed tech house pioneer and Fabric resident DJ compiled into a retrospective compilation. One can hear the convergent nature of Francis' tech house - it's in the name, 'tech house', i.e. techno and house - truly come together on this LP. The likes of 'Wish On', 'Helicopter' and 'Funky Future' are honest movers, made with deft precision and accuracy, - and bringing together many different popular styles at the time, from speed garage to tribal to funky house, with tech house resulting as a kind of distillation of them all.

Review: Repeat's 'All & All' series is doing a great job in documenting the immense contribution that UK tech-house pioneer Terry Francis has made to the electronic underground. The genius of Francis's work of the late 90s and 2000s is how it presented a form of purist tech-house that drew as much from classic US deep house as the stargazing futurism of techno. This fifth instalment in the series boasts three decidedly deep excursions. Side A sports 'Loving You', an ultra-dreamy and immersive affair from 2001 that wraps deep house elements around a typically chunky and hypnotic groove. Over on the B-side, the echoing male vocal snippets, sumptuous pads and bubbly electronics of 'Strong Woman' are followed by the slightly more dubby (and even dreamier) brilliance of 1999's 'Love In'.

Review: Nathan Coles and Nils Hess dropped a couple of LPs and a tidy run of 12"s as Get Fucked in the late 90s and early 00s, and now Repeat are taking us back to one of their finest moments. Their debut LP Dot To Dot is a quintessential demonstration of tech house at the turn of the millennium, shot through with a wonky humour which pointed to the impending minimal boom, but still rough and ready like the UK sound which had proliferated around parties like Wiggle. There's also a dash of the Viennese jazz twist you'd associate with labels like Cheap, and more heads down grooves than you can shake a nose bag at.

Review: The late, great Nathan Coles is rightly hailed as UK tech house royalty - an originator in the scene who embodied its headsy, underground energy in the long and winding years before the sound broke through to its ubiquitous popularity it enjoys now. Of the many projects he turned his talent to, Get Fucked found him studio sparring with Nils Hess around the turn of the millennium on labels like Eukahouse. Now leading tech house reissue label Repeat have gathered together the best of the singles, and as you might well expect it's heavyweight, rolling gear for the late night marathon crew, crafted masterfully with grit and groove in equal measure.

Review: It's hard not to be a fan of Jay Tripwire if you like tech house. The man turns out a consistently excellent line in spaced out sounds that are masterful reduced to only their most core components. Here he steps up to work with John Howard on a pair of superb new tracks for Repeat. The opener, 'Shiva Needs Some Lovin,' is a mix of stiff drum work and coarse snares with more loose and fluid synths. The duality makes for an enticing groove that takes you off amongst the stars. 'Boom Boom' then gets more down the business with hefty, raw drums landing heavy under reverberating leads as drunken bass falls about the mix.

Review: During the early 2000s, Jay Tripwire was responsible for a string of killer records that blurred the boundaries between tech-house, dub-house, deep house, acid and more tribal-tinged flavours. The ongoing 'My Life With The Machines' series taps into this golden period from the Canadian producer, offering a mix of sought-after classics, rarities and unreleased jams from the archives. Highlights are naturally plentiful, with our picks including his deeply sub-heavy, Dubtribe influenced rework of Yabby You dub classic 'King Pharoah's Plague', a tough, TB-303 laden stomp through Marky Starr's 'Disco Freak', the dense-but-rolling deep house funk of 'In Your Mind', and the '4AM at a Californian free party' flex of the accurately titled 'Dope Groove'.

Review: There is a load of Jay Tripwire newness around at the moment and some of it is from his back catalogue and some of it is all new. Here the longtime minimal mainstay and Canadian scene-pioneer serves up a multi-volume collection of cult tracks of his from the early 2000s. They have a west coast tech house sound and are still future in design. The likes of Villalbos have long been banging these and they sit well with the days current underground sound. Acid, dub, tech, electronic soul and more all colour the grooves.