D-Nox (Christian Wedekind) & Beckers (Frank Beckers) are 2 seasoned players in the Electronic music scene. Although their first steps can be cautiously called Psy Trance related (D-Nox as the person behind the success of Plastic Park, Tatsu and most recently Sprout Music and Frank Beckers behind his old alias, Space Safari, Export Audio and recently simply Beckers) their current output is very loosely Psy Trance related . Both of them are amongst the most stubborn infiltrators of the Progressive House and Minimal Techno into the Psy Trance scene, a crime that many dreadlocked party goers will swear to never forgive. For the rest of us mortals they brought many interesting directions into the somewhat stale lately Psy scene. Beckers’ Switch 12” was one of the biggest dust raisers in 2005 a surprising success of which was followed by a myriad of remixes ranging from excellent to simply horrible “replace the bassline and raise the BPM bar full-on remixes”. D-Nox in his turn became one of the most demanded DJ’s and became a top crowd pleaser in any respectable summer festival. The two at first collaborated on Air Bureau’s We Shine remix and soon afterwards released a few 12” hits, notably My Number One, You’re a Star, Memory Cell with Amo and Navas and Naked Punch.
With this album that followed the great success of the singles I am guessing they had 2 options. One is to continue their well established sound and release another album that will copy the hits and will staple their already prominent presence. The other and the harder option was to try to create something new. Luckily they have chosen the second option and attempted to create something more minimal, more abstract and deeper than anything they have created before. My first impressions from this album were quite disappointing to say the least. The album sounded like a bunch of loops that move along with no visible progression and on top of that a few tracks had some of the cheesiest vocals I have been exposed to since I have stopped listening to mainstream electronic music. But… for some reason I just couldn’t stop listening to it, little by little understanding the little things that actually evolve, the little but fat grooves and those typical German percussion tricks just made me want more. After few weeks of raping these tracks over and over I came to the inevitable and fair conclusion that this album is the shit, but not for everyone. This album has almost no connection to Psy Trance and as such this review’s appearance on Isratrance is unusual to say the least and misplaced to be fair. Yet, since those guys’ music is a very frequent visitor in our parties and tracks from this album are already shaking the dancefloors as I type, this review shall appear here, and also shall be hailed as it is the best non Psy Trance album that you’ll probably be hearing in all the best parties this summer. |
