2024 repress with original artwork.

The original version of this gorgeous schlager techno track, released in august 2001 on Kompakt's Total 3, would put a smile on a lot of people's faces. Apart from the reworked original version, you'll get two sensational remixes: The one from Frankfurt's high-aesthete, super hipster, club- and label-owner with a three-letter name: Ata. Since the very beginning, his Playhouse label has always been a guarantee for finest German House music. It's his first (!) remix ever and his first studio work since the legendary first Playhouse release 'Holy Garage' in 1993. The 'Playhouse Mix' turns the original version into a mega-hip, late-night monster and reminds a bit of the great Larry Levan and Metro Area's congenious adaption of early-80s disco music. The 'Robert Johnson' club is going down on its knees. Wonderful. The other remix comes from one of Kompakt's in-house pioneers of pop ambient: it's Olaf Dettinger. Who didn't want to miss this chance and has interrupted his creative pause only for doing this wonderful 'Moonlight Mix'. Dettinger's cosy hi-tech sounds and Sonja Luebke's seraphic voice, both singing a duet to the moon. Very, very beautiful, indeed.

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Repress!

In February 2021, Jan Jelinek's seminal album "Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records" turned 20. The anniversary repress, a double LP with two bonus tracks (B-sides from the Tendency EP, 2000), is a little late to the party.

What the press said about Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records:

“Don’t be misled by the title, though for there isn’t a finger-snapping rhythm c bebop lead anywhere on the album. Instead, Jelinek chooses to explore the visual effect moiré - two shifting patterns creating an implied third dimension - in the audio realm.” (Alternative Press)

“The title acts as explanation for the studio technique that provided the basis for this album, snippets of other people’s arrangements deconstructed through a sampler into loops and then splashed onto an audio canvas.” (ATM)

“Jelinek’s sound evolved out of his dislike for (and inability to play) keyboards.” (RPM)

“Jelinek has abstracted his sources beyond recognition, looping his millisecond samples into flickering patterns of sonic moiré laid atop a dub Techno framework. (...) Jelinek might as well have sampled a horn player’s hissing intake of breath – it would have been ‘jazz’ enough for his purposes.“ (The Wire)

“It’s a perfect inversion of conventional music, a sonic negative. Everything that would typically be foreground is moved back or pushed off the screen altogether, and the flecks of sonic debris that would normally be covered by other sounds are left to carry the melody and rhythm.” (Pitchfork)

“All you need to know is that these onomatopoeic non-specific songs (...) are warm, paradisical creations”. (NME)

“Listen carefully and you’ll hear textures slowly unfolding and mutating. Presuming you’ve not fallen asleep of course.” (iDJ)

“At times, it’s all a bit dripping tap Japanese water torture; so sedentary it drowns in its own motionlessness” (DJ)

“Loop Finding Jazz Records' is a genuine modern classic whose re-release is anything but a cynical mortgage repayment exercise. Consider this a second chance, then pretend you had it all along.” (Boomkat)

PS:

“I’ve been fortunate enough to see Jan Jelinek live once, at Tonic NYC (...). Wearing a black and white striped shirt, he looked like a nihilistic Charlie Brown.” (beachsloth)

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DJ Support: Peggy Gou, Prospa, Special Request, Annie Mac, DJ Seinfeld, Kolsch.

Pink Vinyl Limited Pressing

One of the biggest, breakbeat channelling stompers out there, courtesy of the in-demand duo Borai and Denham Audio, finally gets an official release with three fiery remixes via Room Two Records. A track that’s ripped through airwaves and club dancefloors alike, ‘Make Me’ has all the hallmarks of a future classic. Doused in Amen breaks, rattling subs, rave stabs and an instantly recognizable mid ‘80s Donna Allen sample. Together the track feels like a long forgotten rave anthem from the ‘90s with its mix of high intensity breaks and soulful vocals.

With the original sample cleared, three producers step up to remix this undeniable anthem. First Sheffield’s Big Ang with her Rave To The Grave remix, playing homage to her hometown with a bassline and bleep flavoured rework. Mani Festo then hits hyperspace with his glitched out, jungle warper, before Paul Sirrell closes out proceedings serving up a huge slice of piano house heat

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Repress coming beginning of February.

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In late 2013 I was trying to take a disconap before djing a New Years party in Glasgow. All I could think about was finally getting in touch with Ata Kak. I decided to book a oneway flight to Toronto and I was not going to leave until I found some family contacts. It turned out Yaw's son Jeffrey still lives there and we had this incredible meeting in a townhouse complex on the edge of town.

I couldn't believe it when I finally spoke with Yaw and explained to him how well-loved his music had become. ATFA the label had been operating for several years by then but the tape that really started the whole thing couldn't get reissued. Once we got in touch all the complexities of how to actually do that came into focus.?It always irked me that our reissue of Obaa Sima didn't sound excellent. Nevertheless, it has a sonic charm that endures. Obaa Sima was a kind of manifesto for the whole Awesome Tapes From Arica blog project when it started. That sound and approach embodied something I wanted to further explore.

After years of enjoying his music, it was thrilling to finally meet Yaw and hear his story. I wanted to let everyone hear the music in the highest resolution possible but we couldn't make it happen.?In early 2024, by some cosmic coincidence, I made a new friend in my Berlin neighborhood who causally introduced himself by saying, "I have a clean copy of Obaa Sima, you can have it if you want." Not just wildly kind but also serendipitous as we reach the 10th year since the cassette's reissue.?

This new remaster, lovingly rendered from an almost impeccable source, is a revelation for anyone who wished to hear more of how this music was meant to sound. Our longtime collaborator Jessica Thompson carefully restored it with updated tools in her state-of-the-art studio.?

Over the past 15 years or so, as I DJ these Ata Kak songs at almost every show, I still feel a sense of wonder upon listening. You can go deep into the crevices of the very audible audio artefacts and hear a lot. Maybe it's a little sad to part ways with the wows and flutters whose contours I'd grown to know like the back of my hand.?When I visited Yaw in Kumasi a few years ago for a documentary shoot, it was shocking to learn that his brother had actually sold quite a few copies of the tape. As we moved through Kejetia market one day we encountered a handful of folks who remembered hearing Obaa Sima back around its release in 1994. More recently, thanks to a few Ghanaian-made viral TikToks, I've learned how many people of a certain age heard these songs as staples at funerals and other local dance parties. The music reached a lot more people despite what Yaw had reported. ?

I was also surprised to learn that the album was originally recorded at a slower speed—we have included a slow version download here.?In the years since, the concerts that Ata Kak has performed have been one of the absolute joys of my life to experience. It couldn't have been achieved without the intense dedication of Ata Kak's booking agents at the time QuJunktions and his London-based bandmates, including Esa Williams, Pax Nindi, Binisa Bonner and Tim Tapsell. Hearing Obaa Sima live is astounding and thousands of people all over the world have been there too.?

—Brian Shimkovitz, Berlin 2025

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LB0097LP-NDC (Non Die Cut) Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra "Promises" will be the new standard product moving forward

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Plastik People keep it deep once more with a new outing of their ongoing Collections series. There is plenty of ol' school nostalgia in the opening cut, Ricky Montanari's 'Back To Love', with its US garage snares and dusty piano stabs making for a great mix of drive and soul. There's a pared-back dub version too plus an amped up and sweaty Dave Charlesworth dub of Aurora B's 'Good Love.' Last of all is the hurried and soulful house whomp of 'Hard Times' (original 96 mix). Four very useful jams.

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Repress!
Reymour packed their bags in the pre-Alps of Switzerland and left to start a new life in Bruxelles. This debut album finds originates in this transition, again in a bilingual environment, by now a Knekelhuis theme. Leviosa documents the emergence of a kind of dance built from chansons, synthpop and cute minimal wave. Luc Bersier’s wide musical spectrum reaches great heights while staying small. He creates the musical bedrock on which Reymour’s cabinet of musical curiosities rests, allowing us to drift away on the unctuous fumes of Lou’s vocals. On these tracks she covers a wide array of feelings, of doubt, sexual orientation, play and melancholia. And it all comes together in the reflection of life. Close friend and family guy Low Bat contributes vocals and gameplay on 2 of the album’s tracks.

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Repress!

The latest by Chicago trio Purelink unspools an alchemical suite of fractal ambient, dusted dub tech, and interstitial electronica, born from a spirit of unity and flux: “All hands on the mixer, forever finding the sound.” Since forming in 2020, Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka Kindtree), and Akeem Asani (aka Millia) have convened regularly in a shared studio to workshop, swap samples, and hone their collective muse via “the endless possibilities of a laptop,” seeking “something different than we would make on our own.”

Distilled from extended compositions prepared and performed across 2022 in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Los Angeles, Signs captures their chemistry at its most liquid and immaterial, mapped in mutating systems of glitch, glass, rhythm, and space. It’s music alternately subdued and subterranean, elevated and remote, attuned to the flickering sentience of outer spheres.

Cover art by Ezra Miller.

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- Spec: 2 x LP in paper inners, in 5mm outer sleeve with download card insert.

Tucked away in the great depths of the Warp catalogue is this elegant, liquid heartache of a record. An album credited to the late James Stinson, one half of cult-Detroit techno unit (alongside Gerald Donald) Drexciya, Lifestyles... stands as one of the remarkable records of the genre. Stinson died a year after release, lending this already beautiful work endless resonance.
Where the dystopian aqua-tronics of previous Drexciya were often jet-black, cold, brittle and abrasive this is a yearning soul music, played out down rain soaked streets, the buzzing lights of industry flickering in the darkness, the warm blue of a new day ready to break. This is a record where techno reached its raw, most emotive peak... Sustained pads paint minor-key melodies while electroid-vocals are buried deep in the hydrothermal mass of squelching bass-clusters and funky-filtered bleeps. At its skittering percussion core, a stripped back 808 tapestry, sequenced into myriad jazz-inflected shapes, a pulsing kick drum the snapping heartbeat, ticking hi-hats bursting from every angle.

All this tingles with the ghosts of records past, of Kraftwerkian humanoids, of first-wave Detroit, of refracted Hancock and Ayres, but as Stinson intones on the fifth track, ‘let me be what I wanna be’, Lifestyles is a creation all of its own special making, a sound that would inspire the latter day deep-house machinations of Omar S, Jus-Ed, Moodymann and influence –however indirectly- a wealth of current UK/US bass operators including Actress and Kyle Hall. More importantly it remains a beguiling epitaph to Stinson’s sadly distinguished life.

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