Browse by Label: PROFAN (GERMANY)

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Freiland Klaviermusik
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 009CD

If experimental minimalistic dance music as we know it today had existed during the lifetime of Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, it might have sounded much like this present album. Something fascinating and possibly well known, is that Kompakt label founder Wolfgang Voigt has a fondness for historical music like this. Freiland-Klaviermusik stays true to this idea, maintaining its focus on music composed for the piano, but composed with a very different approach. It's once again Voigt's effort to find a musical structure that eliminates the boundary between freely-improvised "virtuosic" music and fine-incremental sequencing of a computer matrix. In Voigt's Freiland project there is one underlying theme; one single sound varied in many different ways surrounding the main idea of minimal-techno music: the four-to-the floor bass drum. In this case, it's a synthetic piano, which moves between rhythmic and abstract, between deliberateness and coincidence, within a somewhat predefined structure. Sometimes the clock of the bass drum does not accompany its presence at all. The present aesthetics of atonal, sometimes Kafka-esque and early 20th century classical music are rather a "pleasant by-product" than an authentic classical-music statement. Blasting borders and breaking rules to create apparently new revelations has always been Voigt's drive. Apart from his timeless preference to adopt different musical styles such as classical-music, jazz, schlager or brass music into his own music, in this case, Voigt's encounter with the music of composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) was an important influence. In Nancarrow's work, Voigt found strong parallels to his own; the search for unpredictability and spontaneity, often affecting his way of working, to find a symbiosis between man and machine. This approach has also influenced Voigt's work as a visual artist. The front cover of the record presents an excerpt from one of Voigt's Tetrapak-paintings, in which he covers, combines, and confronts a predetermined mechanical structure (pattern, wallpaper ≙ loop, pattern) with more or less a free, progressive, and rhythmic painting technique. The current releases on Voigt's re-launched '90s label Profan together with the reunion of his music with his lesser-known work as a performing artist represent that in 2010, Voigt sees minimal music through as it relates to minimal art rather than minimal techno. It could also be that Voigt believes that art can express complication and pain in ways that the minimal techno of today cannot.

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Kafkatrax
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	PROFAN 010CD

For Wolfgang Voigt, techno is a means of constantly reinventing himself. After the publication of the highly idiosyncratic Freiland Klaviermusik (PROFAN 009CD), the two Sog records Abweichung and Fremde Hände, and Du Musst Nichts Sagen, on Profan, his new album Kafkatrax is dedicated to the human voice. As in previous projects, Voigt is solely interested in the sound and the structure of the original material -- in this case, recited text. Using various cutting and covering techniques, he disassembles the text into a disturbing, abstract "literature rap" that at best creates an illusion of comprehending fragments of the shredded words and sentences left over. In combination with Voigt's typical Umta techno beat, the outcome is a kind of vocal polka consisting of voices and their side acoustics that sound like psychedelic without guitars or acid without 303. The fact that Voigt used a Kafka audio book CD, reminiscent of his literary preferences as a teenager, is entirely meaningless to the final musical product -- Voigt is only interested in the sound of recited vocal text. He could have equally used Thomas Mann or the Grimm Brothers. What is interesting, however, is that by covering and layering the voices across up to 5 octaves, a claustrophobic, nightmarish atmosphere is created that can definitely be described as Kafkaesque.

Artist:	PENTAX
Title:	Konkret
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	2LP
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 024LP

1999 release, double vinyl version; CD is now deleted. This is a solo album by Reinhard Voigt. A low-key electronic stunner of shifting muting beats, cloaked sound emanations and fascinating abstract vibe. "And it goes on: Pentax Music. Profan presents Reinhard Voigt in a longplay format and on a temporary climax of seriousness. Minimal Bass without frontiers, spectacular groove-artistics. Reflecting particles, low, little, very small. To save the groove, you have to hide it sometimes. Anyway, it will never disappear. Everything is rolling, nearly out of tune, all pieces get out of place, into every little corner of hearing. Experiences of pain and healing. Eleven tracks like the Ten Commandments. Trendspotting magazines like Spex and De:Bug already declared it a monument of the New School of German Techno."

Artist:	WASSERMANN
Title:	W.I.R. Die Remixe
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$9.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 028

Repressed! Classic Wolfgang Voigt tracks from 2000, with remixes by Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas. "Coming from the heart is the solid-rocking version by Frankfurts DJ-high priest Sven Vath. In collaboration with the supersmart producer-duo Roman Flugel/Jorn E. Wuttke (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High) he handed in a fat modern DJ-tool. As heartily is the mix of the Cologne DJ-heroes Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas. Sweated out Studio 672-like, spaced out and tranced into form. And finally once more by the original Wassermann."

Artist:	SOG
Title:	Abweichung
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 032EP

Profan (...remember Wolfgang Voigt's abstract techno label from the 1990s) is back from the future. Like his earlier projects, the brand new SOG release combines seemingly familiar and extremely unfamiliar signs, and in the most unusual way bends them around the utterly familiar bass drum. The result is a conspiracy of four sound frescos of peculiar beauty which deserve the title "Abweichung" (trans. "deviance") -- named after Voigt's painting featured on the cover. This is minimal art-techno that raises questions.

Artist:	SOG
Title:	Fremde Hände
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 035EP

Following the legendary first two, stoically super-minimal records, Profan presents Fremde Hände. The A-side contains a tonally noncommittal sequence ambling across the keyboard in quantized form, reminiscent of the arpeggiator (accompaniment function) function of early '70s and '80s synthesizers. On the B-side, daring and thoroughly unquantized quaver rhythms rock around a bass drum that, as the only straight element, tries to keep the whole thing together. The result sounds a little like a delirious Can live.

Artist:	PENTAX
Title:	Konkret
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN CD5

"Scarily accurate rendering of contemporary anti-utopia by Reinhard Voigt (aka Sweet Reinhard, etc...). Extremely damaged post-post dancefloor militancy, devoid of ANY pleasure-inducing elements save for the harsh, foreboding THUD of crisp 808 kicks sampled & filtered 10x over. Babelfish says (of Pentax): 'and anti-No. andantino cuts itself a piece of sausage of the finger and feeds thereby its turteltauben dog if the turteltauben dog from birth without hearing is, takes it feeds gratefully against otherwise possibly remembers it at their sight a phonograph record this incommodity can andantino and its turteltauben dog, if this was accustomed to the playplay play, thus save that it inverts the turteltauben dog before feeding the huendische turteltaube is with grains to feed from serious jandl.'" -- Hrvatski. Limited stock.

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Artist:	VOIGT, REINHARD
Title:	Premiere World
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	LP
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 029LP