Music

A History of Kompakt Records in Eight Releases

It’s 1993, and in the city of Cologne – a good 573 km from Berlin, Germany’s main protagonist in its self-mythologising post-unification dance history – buddies Wolfgang Voigt, Jörg Burger, Jurgen Paape and Ingmar Koch open a record shop called Delirium. A customer and DJ, Michael Mayer, buys in to the project, and becomes a crucial addition, not least because he gets the shop in order by actually ordering stock. Their musical micro-climate is inspired by pop, particularly British synth pop from northern industrial towns, Germany’s burgeoning techno takeover and acid house, and by 1998 the enterprise is releasing records. Somewhere between changing their name to Kompakt and getting an in-house chef, that little German eagle logo (based on Cologne’s city shield, and created by designer Bianca Strauch) comes to define a sound. This is true both on a local level – the Cologne sound – and more generally, in techno.

How? A naif, and not entirely faux one at that, approach to the prescriptive parameters of techno saw them unflinchingly advocate pop, trance and ambient under the Kompakt banner. Their early releases set a trend for a chunky minimal sound that was seemingly everywhere seven years later, while they broadened and consolidated luxuriant micro texture, a precise, economical sonics, and a touchy-feely melancholia (a prickle of bittersweet euphoria creeping up your spine and exploding into your brain like ticker tape). They did this so well that the label’s name has hardened into journalistic shorthand for anything mildly emotive and 4/4. Now if any poor sod dares to layer minor chords over a kick drum they’ll be lumbered with the epithet “Kompakt-esque”. Even more virulent is the way it’s become fashionable for bands to namedrop the label in order to chirpse the club contingent, all doe-eyed and sincere. Friendly Fires, we’re looking at you.

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As part of their birthday celebrations they’re taking a pop-up shop on the road throughout Europe, with a week long residence at Ableton’s HQ in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg until September 7th . As celebrations go, it’s all very well, but we thought it only right to pay our own tribute with a history of Kompakt in eight releases.

Jürgen Paape – “Triumph” (1998)

Despite his talent for recovering gold from the ripe effluence of schlager (“So Weit Wie Noch Nie”, for example) elusive Kompakt totem Jürgen Paape is probably at his best when building muscular, oh-so Teutonic techno. While clipped hi-hats, rustles of static and a singular Detroit chord drop in and out, it’s that kick-drum spine, dense and rubbery, that holds this monster together. Almost any of Paape’s numerous outings on Kompakt could have made the cut, but this is where it started.

Reinhard Voigt – “Robson Ponte” (1999)

Ascetic formalism as diesel-powered party music. Sweet Reinhard is the younger bro of Wolfgang and someone who’s gone on to make some extraordinary music, much of it brutalist. “Robson Ponte” is another example of the label’s primitivist beginnings. The combination of a bludgeoning 808 and a comically looping sample obfuscated by a coating has the same effect as a bump of speed: aggro, numbing and energising – and it leaves you with the same cheap and nasty feeling after. Robson Ponte, by the way, is a Brazillian football player who spent time with Bayer Leverkusen. Germans, eh?

Justus Kohncke “2 After 909” (2002)

From the moment that pointillist synth figure wriggles under your skin, you’re held in Justus Kohncke’s tractor beam. The master of ascetic, synthetic disco the regular Kompakt fixture never did anything as loveable (nor as efficient), as “2 After 909”. The wafts of organ, those deep, globular synths, the clipped, microhouse trickiness mid-way through – all beautifully realised components which contribute to making this Kohncke’s best record and a candidate for the label’s too. Quite the contrarian, Kohncke is also responsible for the crunchy disco of Timecode, a track which lifts the bassline from Lipps’ Inc’s “How Long” and, somewhat weirdly, this classic piece of straight-up house music.

M. Mayer Immer (2002)

There’s so many tracks could that have made the cut from the Black Forest’s favourite son: the schaffeling “Love Is Stronger Than Pride”, “Lovefood”, that ridiculously cheesy remix of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Flamboyant” (OK, maybe not that), but this game-changing mix exemplified how Mayer is able to follow his anti-purist impulses and mould it into high elegance. Like true minimalism, there’s not a single superfluous element. Mayer sweats the micro details whilst never losing sight of the overall picture. In an age when the internet buckles under the weight of free mixes, the idea of an indispensable mix seems alien but that’s exactly what this is.

Superpitcher Here Comes Love (2004)

Whether it’s sunken deep into the crevices of a gnarled stomper, or prised apart under the microscope as on the label’s longrunning Pop Ambient series, pop is a common thread on planet Kompakt. And it’s Aksel Schaufler who synthesises it in its purest, most undiluted form, even if it often feels like it’s coming out from under a fluffy blanket of medication. His debut Here Comes Love is so squarely pop that it features a cover of “Fever”. Ok, so it’s strung out on 4/4 beat and possesses the kind of attention to micro-level detail you’d expect not just from a Kompakt regular but, presumably, a world-class navel gazer. But who are we kidding here? “We are sad boys for life” ran the chorus to “Sad Boys”, and a generation of over-sensitive, be-scarfed Europeans were vindicated.

The Field From Here We Go Sublime (2007)

The mid-2000s were an odd time for the label. The beast they’d created had spawned, leaving clubs crowded with cookie-cutter minimalism while forays into the digital marketplace with Kompakt-MP3.net were doomed to failure. It took a full-length (ironically inspired by the forest-like ambient output of Wolfgang Voigt’s 90s project Gas), to claw back relevance. On From Here We Go Sublime, Axel Willner tuned into some eternal, circadian rhythm with fastidiously built loops built from sonic ephemera – including, in one case, Lionel Richie’s “Hello”. Refusing to observe the rules of dance music, there’s no build and drop structure; the whole thing is one big ecstasy plateau.

Mathias Aguayo “Minimal” (2009)

When the minimal scene stagnated and became parody worthy, attempts to address this often came from within, and were riddled with masturbatory self-referentialism (we’ve taken too many drugs AND WE KNOW IT) Mathias Aguayo was an outsider, both geographically and creatively. His cutting attack on a music that’s “got no groove, got no balls” was not only funny as hell, but was so brazenly funky and spring-loaded with swing that it shamed any producers still tempted by kickdrum and pitch-down vocals from ever setting foot outside their K holes again.

Coma In Technicolor (2013)

Fellow Kölner Marius Bubat and Georg Conrad are so brazenly children of Kompakt that it’s almost touching that the label has hung around long enough to have ‘em. Feeding a gift for the melodies into techno’s grid system, their homespun techno admittedly doesn’t represent the frontier of dance music. The sprawling “Cycle” is built wholly around the inhale-exhale of arpeggios, with some fey handclaps chucked in. Still, what it does prove is that the label, two decades on, isn’t quite ready to become a legacy just yet.

If that wasn’t enough Kompakt for you they’re also hooking up with our pals Boiler Room. For more details go HERE.