Full Pupp’s blueprint of acid-washed, spacey electro-disco found curious but undeniable elective affinities with Kompakt’s less schranzy/trancey moments. It’s a love that spoke its name by M. Mayer’s insistence on not only including Terje’s mix of “Another Station” on Immer 2, but mixing it with Justus Köhncke’s own “Advance.” What a shame then, that the A-side (Prins Thomas’ “string plucking” diskomikks) doesn’t really work. Elementally, there’s nothing wrong with the arrangement, it’s just that, well, it doesn’t swing. There’s something slightly off about the strings and the bass playing, as if the session was rehearsed and recorded over Skype, with the slight delay that entails. Where Kelley Polar’s playing lends his tracks a magnificent liquidity, the diskomikks sounds lumpy—the bass just doesn’t groove with the strings.

Prins’ version of “Advance” is far better, but it’s just what you’d expect and nothing more—the original, soaked in spacemaking delay and reverb until the whole thing whooshes and churns itself to a giddy climax. “Tilda,” in every apparent way the “B-side,” comes away as the most interesting track on the EP, although it has very little to do with the meeting of the various sound spectrums that the record seems to have been “designed” for. It’s a really pleasant repeatscape, driven by a metallic dulcimer that conceals a strong sense of pop smarts—subtly and quintessentially Kompakt, in other words.

Kompakt / KOM 153
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[Peter Chambers]