dBridge - "So here we have it: the final plate of the Exit 100 series. I’ve been immensely proud of this project, and I believe this release is a fitting way to conclude it. We’ve curated a collection full of great music from artists I love, and I’m pleased that we’ve created a project that represents Exit’s future rather than its past."

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Fixate, a core artist of Exit Records, is proud to present Conundrum, a dynamic mini LP. Spanning a variety of tempos, this collection showcases Fixate’s love for house and techno, blending loop-driven beats with dancefloor energy. In his own words, “I made these tracks to fit into my own DJ sets, bridging the gap between tempos when playing out."

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“After releasing my album 'ÖÐRUVÍSI,' which was a very personal and emotionally challenging project, I felt the need to make something weird and energetic for the club. I’m really into tunes that feel both slow and fast simultaneously. The first track on the EP, 'Let’s be Havin u,' was initially hard to place genre-wise, i ended up sending it to Darren, who loved it and wanted to sign it. Releasing on Exit kinda feels like earning a black belt as a producer hah. I never imagined that a decade after buying Exit 12”s in 2014, I’d be releasing my own music on the label. When I started making the EP, I had just begun performing again. I often saw people on the dance floor, too out of it to enjoy the music and often some of them having to be carried by their friends to backstage. This made me wanna make tunes for the dance floor as a bit of a statement on this. I first tested 'Let’s be Havin u' at Prikið in Reykjavik, sounded mad on the little old funktion one. The moment I knew that I was onto something with the EP was when I was Performing in Bristol at Thekla for my friend Boofy. It was wild, the ceiling started leaking during the show. I Love Bristol, feels like home to me. Most of the percussion and hats on the EP are made with an Elektron Model Cycles, and the synths and pads are from a 80s Yamaha hybrid FM/sample synth I found at a thrift store. It doesn’t have MIDI, so I have to record perfect takes for chords and melodies. I often use pedals afterwards or resample the sounds for more tonal control. I enjoy digging for records with unique breaks to sample, as I feel this is lacking nowadays. I usually make all my drums from scratch but when I use breaks I like it to be something I haven’t heard before. The alien percussion sound in the last track is actually me biting my teeth together, resampled repeatedly and ran through pedals and interfaces. I also recorded myself chewing gum for the second track to give it that hand on the hip feel. Most of the EP is made with hardware, outboard gear, or real-life recordings. I’m not concerned about the EP fitting a specific genre or playlist. Too many artists play it safe by focusing on their Spotify stats and abandoning projects that don’t work instantly. I think also Obsessive nostalgia stifles innovation, keeping things stuck in a loop by replicating to the tee, tunes from 2 decades ago. I get it, but there has to be a middle ground sometimes.

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dBridge & Forest Drive West, doing what they do, together

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Exit 100.3 Part 3 is a return to our DnB roots, with artists who have and will shape the Exit sound

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“I kept this Cat no for me as it was the year I was born but I never had anything at the time. Now I do lol”

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Leftlow’s ‘Distractions’ is a thought-provoking Mini LP which is the London-based duo's largest body of work to date and sees them welcomed to dBridge's iconic label, Exit Records.

Designed to be experienced in a club setting with a focus on low end and intricate percussion, the fluidity of these tracks and underlying theme throughout make for an equally enjoyable and intimate "headphones on" experience.

From the industrial, dystopian hard-hitter "Piston's" to the dreamy, euphoric "Thoughtful," these tracks shine a light on a slightly different production style that Leftlow has not yet explored in previous releases. While staying true to their recognisable style, the drum-fueled "Green Eyes" and mind and body twisting "Queasy" push boundaries in the unexplored territories of their sound. This is a must-listen collection of tracks that will provoke the senses.

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We are pleased to announce a momentous milestone in the history of Exit Records - EXIT 100. To mark this special occasion, we've curated a 4 part album featuring both new and seasoned artists which is a is a testament to Exit Records' commitment to pushing the boundaries of electronic music. It features tracks from emerging talents that showcase the future of Exit while paying homage to the pioneers who have defined our sound over the years. As we celebrate this incredible journey of music and creativity, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, our dedicated supporters, for being part of the Exit Records family. Your passion for our take on electronic music has fuelled our 100 releases, and we're happy to share Part 1 of this compilation with you. We look forward to embarking on the next chapter with you and continue pushing the boundaries whilst keeping it True To The Craft!

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Almost a year ago, dBridge reached out after hearing a self released album I made in the summer of 2020. I’ve been a fan of his work since I started listening to electronic music ten years ago, and still stand by a comment I posted stating that Inhibited LP is the best album of 2020. Naturally, I accepted the offer to work together. Over the following three months we exchanged text messages, often, sending music back and forth in an effortless work flow. He challenged the way I thought about music, questioned what the meaning was behind the music, showed me how to develop a small idea into an evolving track, and most of all, treated me with kindness and generosity throughout. There was no sense of ego, we just wanted to create something new. Our styles couldn’t be more different, I’m a film composer who makes ambient/orchestral soundscapes, while his enigmatic ‘talking drums’ are mechanical, dislocated, groovy and continuously mutating. While we compliment each other through our difference, it felt like we shared a similar musical sensibility. And it was completely unspoken; the entirety of our relationship carried out through text messages, the entirety of the album being made in silence.

The benefit of this silent messaging was that the music felt incredibly personal. I revealed that I was going through a break up which left me feeling liberated and free, after a toxic relationship had shattered my confidence. You Set Me Free began with the dark, heavy beat dBridge had sent to me, which inspired me to vocalize how I felt. The vocal sample is an honest voice memo recording of how I felt at the time. dBridge responded by adding a beat at the end of the track after the break, “to represent you moving on.” The chords are hopeful because I was grateful I had my life back. Sometimes the person you think you’ll spend your life with turns out to be the worst thing for you. It was incredibly empowering to realize that I was grateful that this person in my life had said goodbye.

One Note began with a piano part, a whole track constructed from one repeated note. After sending it to dBridge, he gradually built up this evolving distorted break, as if it was revolving around the note. Similarly with Pulse, the strings have this onward moving journey while the metal bowl sample has a lightness that compliments dBridge’s polyrhythmic percussion and bass. Words I would use to describe Pulse are aspirational, progressive and spiritual.

The music video for One Note is apocalyptic. It was filmed just after lockdown, using places of travel as an indicator for our dystopian ‘new normal.’ The video tells the story of someone going on a journey, to a place she remembers and feels nostalgic for, but is gone when she arrives. It’s that feeling of striving toward a goal in life, only to realize when you get there, the destination is not as expected. The filmmaker likes to remain anonymous but goes under the alias name Ruma, and uses old super 8 family videos to create the feeling of nostalgia and memory, combined with the character’s realtime journey.

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Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project.

There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up.

But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions.

GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm.

In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

Text by Jonathan Dale

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The link up between Mantra and Vivek goes back to 2013 when Mantra used to frequent his System nights at The Dome. Both share similar values in grafting hard, focusing on the music and not getting distracted by the noise surrounding the culture. This EP has been in the making for over 2 years and we’re proud to finally be releasing Mantra’s debut SYSTEM EP. 4 cuts spanning different corners of electronic music - from broken beat, garage, and jungle, all with a heavy dub influence. Chopped up breaks, carefully programmed hits, dub baselines, heavenly pads - this release is raw, weighty & System to the core!

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3xLP+CD Artbook

In the body of work of Cologne artist Wolfgang Voigt – who, like few others, has informed, shaped and influenced the world of electronic music with countless different projects since the early 1990s -, GAS stands out in particular as a saturnine sound cosmos based on heavily condensed classic sequences. Even after nearly 20 years, the sound of GAS doesn’t seem to have lost any of its luster, as shown by the commanding success of Kompakt’s fall 2016 re-release of the essential back catalogue as a 10xLP/4xCD box set.

The overwhelming feedback from a loyal international fan community and worldwide media outlets attests once again to the sheer timelessness of GAS. Which is why it will feel like hardly a day has passed since the release of the last official album “Pop” nearly two decades ago, when Wolfgang Voigt resumes this specific creative path with the upcoming new full-length NARKOPOP.

Even in the here and now, the unmistakable vibe of GAS immediately hits home, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey with the very first sounds, drawing him or her into an impervious sonic thicket, down to the depths of rapture and reverie. From wafts of dense symphonic mist emerges a floating and whirling feeling of weightlessness, before the listener steps into an eerily beautiful forest of fantasy, pulled in by the allure of a narcotic bass drum.

While earlier GAS tracks were often based on the hypnotic effects of looping techniques, the 10 new pieces on NARKOPOP unfold their magic in a more entwined manner, sometimes with the sonic might of an entire philharmonic orchestra, sometimes as subtle and fragile as the most delicate branch of a tree with many. A main characteristic of Voigt’s oeuvre, the coalescence of seemingly contradictory stylistic aspects such as harmonious and atonal, concrete and abstract, light and heavy, near and far is also a decisive feature of NARKOPOP.

In accordance with the transgressive spirit of his collective work, Voigt carries the aesthetic conceptions of his music over to the realm of the visual. Based on his abstract forest pictures, the GAS artwork addresses Voigt’s artistic affinity to romanticism and the forest as a place of yearning. For the first time, a closer look at the cover of NARKOPOP reveals signs of architectural fragments which hint at another, maybe parallel world behind Voigt’s forest. Truth is the prettiest illusion.

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“After releasing my album 'ÖÐRUVÍSI,' which was a very personal and emotionally challenging project, I felt the need to make something weird and energetic for the club. I’m really into tunes that feel both slow and fast simultaneously. The first track on the EP, 'Let’s be Havin u,' was initially hard to place genre-wise, i ended up sending it to Darren, who loved it and wanted to sign it. Releasing on Exit kinda feels like earning a black belt as a producer hah. I never imagined that a decade after buying Exit 12”s in 2014, I’d be releasing my own music on the label. When I started making the EP, I had just begun performing again. I often saw people on the dance floor, too out of it to enjoy the music and often some of them having to be carried by their friends to backstage. This made me wanna make tunes for the dance floor as a bit of a statement on this. I first tested 'Let’s be Havin u' at Prikið in Reykjavik, sounded mad on the little old funktion one. The moment I knew that I was onto something with the EP was when I was Performing in Bristol at Thekla for my friend Boofy. It was wild, the ceiling started leaking during the show. I Love Bristol, feels like home to me. Most of the percussion and hats on the EP are made with an Elektron Model Cycles, and the synths and pads are from a 80s Yamaha hybrid FM/sample synth I found at a thrift store. It doesn’t have MIDI, so I have to record perfect takes for chords and melodies. I often use pedals afterwards or resample the sounds for more tonal control. I enjoy digging for records with unique breaks to sample, as I feel this is lacking nowadays. I usually make all my drums from scratch but when I use breaks I like it to be something I haven’t heard before. The alien percussion sound in the last track is actually me biting my teeth together, resampled repeatedly and ran through pedals and interfaces. I also recorded myself chewing gum for the second track to give it that hand on the hip feel. Most of the EP is made with hardware, outboard gear, or real-life recordings. I’m not concerned about the EP fitting a specific genre or playlist. Too many artists play it safe by focusing on their Spotify stats and abandoning projects that don’t work instantly. I think also Obsessive nostalgia stifles innovation, keeping things stuck in a loop by replicating to the tee, tunes from 2 decades ago. I get it, but there has to be a middle ground sometimes.

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POP – the album that has become widely recognized as the defining moment in which Wolfgang Voigt brought us into a clearing of his deep, psychedelic forest. A landmark release in the GAS odyssey that drew international attention, POP was originally released in 2000 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint MILLE PLATEAUX. POP was heralded by Pitchfork at the time of release as being “an exercise in sonic texture… pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth.”

POP has since been reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX” (now out of print) and finally now, POP is released on KOMPAKT – for the first time in its original artwork.

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KÖNIGSFORST – following the 1997 release of ZAUBERBERG (KOMPAKT 370.1), Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project returned with KÖNIGSFORST, a full length that has stood the test of time as a template for introducing fundamentals of 90’s techno into the principles of contemporary electronic music.

Originally released in 1998 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, and then reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX”, KÖNIGSFORST is now released on his own label KOMPAKT on 180 gram 3LP vinyl in its original artwork.

KÖNIGSFORST brings glimmers of light into Voigt’s dark, magnificent forest. Melodic strings and brass are added to his signature layers of ominous intensity. The forest path is laid out by muffled kick drums as classical music loops incessantly swirl with no direction.

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Deeptrax Records was founded by Chris Roorda in the Netherlands back in 2004. The label focuses on the deeper side of electronica and eclectic leftfield dance jams, exploring those spaces between deeper house and techno, with hints from the past and a strong vision of the future.

After the success of The Vault Vol. 1, Reggie Dokes returns with The Vault Vol. 2.5, delivering a deeper exploration of his signature deep and soulful house sound. With nine meticulously curated tracks, this release offers a continuation of the Detroit-rooted sonic journey that fans have come to love. Dokes' mastery of deep house, infused with elements of soul, is on full display, each track a testament to his unique ability to channel emotion into rhythm and melody.

With over two decades of influential contributions to the house and techno scene, Dokes remains a key figure in the global underground movement. The Vault Vol. 2.5 picks up where Vol. 1 left off, presenting a new collection of beats crafted to evoke both reflection and movement.

Each track is a pulsating blend of lush harmonies, warm basslines, and hypnotic rhythms that transport listeners to the heart of Detroit’s dance floors. This collection also retains a strong visual identity, as the artwork once again comes from Dokes’ son, Nile Dokes, whose creative vision perfectly encapsulates the raw and soulful energy of the music. The Vault Vol. 2.5 is not just a continuation, but an evolution of Reggie Dokes' sound—a deep dive into the uncharted layers of his musical vault.

Whether you're a longtime follower or a new listener, The Vault Vol. 2.5 promises an immersive and soulful experience, solidifying Reggie Dokes' place as a torchbearer for Detroit house music.

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We are pleased to announce a momentous milestone in the history of Exit Records - EXIT 100. To mark this special occasion, we've curated a 4 part album featuring both new and seasoned artists which is a is a testament to Exit Records' commitment to pushing the boundaries of electronic music. It features tracks from emerging talents that showcase the future of Exit while paying homage to the pioneers who have defined our sound over the years. As we celebrate this incredible journey of music and creativity, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, our dedicated supporters, for being part of the Exit Records family. Your passion for our take on electronic music has fuelled our 100 releases, and we're happy to share Part 1 of this compilation with you. We look forward to embarking on the next chapter with you and continue pushing the boundaries whilst keeping it True To The Craft!

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At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.

Quite the opposite. The album GAS - DER LANGE MARSCH once again invites us to follow the deep sounding bass drum, to give in to its irresistible pull into a psychedelic world of 1000 promises. In the process, the journey leads us past stations of memories sounding from afar, from "Zauberberg" to "Königsforst" and "Pop", from "Oktember" to "Narkopop" and "Rausch", back and forth, now and forever.

Way. Destination. Loop. - Forest loop.

No beginning. No end.

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GAS – RAUSCH

Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be / Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames / Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear / The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves / Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end / Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts / Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing / Once upon a time there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago / Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere / Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut / The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head / Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas / A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats / World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite

Wolfgang Voigt 2018

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