Articles
Robert Henke
Deepchord and Soultek

Albums
Amoebazoid
Boy Is Fiction
BTB
Calika
Vic Chesnutt
Enrico Coniglio
Eric Copeland
Deadbeat
Deepchord : Echospace
Ditch
Terrence Dixon
Brian Ellis
Reinhold Friedl
The Green Kingdom
Marc Hannaford
Hrsta
K. Leimer
Lights Out Asia
Nebula 3
Netherworld
Le Peuplier de Simon
Po
Portable
Lou Reed
Jeffrey Roden
Skallander
Swod
Gregory Taylor
Telephone Jim Jesus
Pau Torres
Tunng
Rolan Vega
Robert Vincs
Warmth
Otomo Yoshihide

Compilations / Mixes
Sander Kleinenberg
One Point Two
Total 8

3"/ 7"/ 10"/ 12"/ EPs
Adultnapper
Arrow!!!
Ascoltare
Beneva vs. Clark Nova
Cinematic Orchestra
Deepchord : Echospace
Easy Changes
Fink
Peter Grummich
The Heavy
Isomer Transition
Laptik
Larytta
Nadja
Pendle Coven
Polvere
Redhooker
Spied
Andy Stott
Torrance & Hochstrate
Andy Vaz

Adultnapper: Maxwell's Demon
Ransom Note

Craig Torrance & Philip Hochstrate: Shrinkage
Four:Twenty

New York DJ-Producer Francis Harris launches the Ransom Note label with his own high-octane Adultnapper banger “Maxwell's Demon” and sweetens the deal with a heavy acid-house treatment by Alexi Delano. The nine-minute original opens brightly with snappy jacking techno but the mood darkens when a, yes, demonic theme swoops into view two minutes in, hijacking the tune into ominous territory and lending it an aura of paranoia—none of which prevents it from kicking up a full head of steam, especially during its final laps. Delano 's mix recasts the tune as a mind-bending stomper that's as delicious as the original. Aside from the shared central theme, the remix is radically different from the Adultnapper version, especially when Delano adds perpetually burbling keyboard patterns and a swinging house pulse.

There's certainly nothing puny about “Shrinkage,” a sultry and hypnotic slice of deep tech-house by London-based Craig Torrance and his Berlin compadre Philip Hochstrate. The tune may start out rather unassumingly but, over the course of its nine-minute trek, it swells into a chattering colossus boosted by wave-like washes and an aggressive synth ostinato that eventually rises to a dramatic crescendo. Samim weighs in with a ‘Schoenaeboelae' remix that upends the original's straight-up groove with a lurching funk pulse, wholly redefining the original in the process, and with handclaps and breathy exhalations that bolster the tune's physical character.

September 2007

This review also appears in Grooves.