CD – Ostgut Ton/Kompakt
No, they aren’t ‘Shut Up And Dance’, the famous combo from London: they’re German. The Berghain Club commissioned to five producers five musical pieces for five choreographies for five different dancers of the Berlin Staasballet. Together with the label Ostgut Ton, distributed by Kompakt, each composer started from his usual stylistic canons and adapted them to this particular field, realizing that contemporary sounds go well together with equally contemporary dance movements. There are the very articulated and elegant dub-tech threads in the long (16 minutes) suite by nsi. (Non Standard Institut, aka Tobias Freund and Max Loderbauer), cleanly cut and full of energy (even with their characteristic minimalist instinct), that encourage iterated movements, and there are the ambient-techno sequences by the Sleeparchive, which are more monotonous, but with gentler atmospheres, thanks to their expertise with synths. The piece by Âme, ‘Fiori’, has got a more traditional repetitive cut, while the clubbing-deconstructed progression by Luciano in his ‘Drunken Ballet’, even though the textures are very interesting, leaves less room for interpretation (because one of the peculiarities of some contemporary dance is to second/ignore the rhythms and ‘primary suggestions’ of the music). The last piece is ‘Symphony for the Surrealists’, by Luke Slater (who here uses the 7th Plain moniker), an ambient and elegiac track with click’n’glitch samples and harmonic space sounds.