Thursday, December 22, 2016

The Other People Place's Lifestyles of the Laptop Café vinyl reissue


Get ready for the best news a Drexciya fan could have wished for! Finally, the vinyl reissue of The Other People Place album, Lifestyles of the Laptop Café, is upon us. It's available at this link on pre-order from Bleep right now, estimated to be shipped on the 9th of February 2017. Bleep have written some lovely words (some of which are below) about this now 15 year old classic album and Warp have even made a short trailer on their YouTube channel to promote it. 

It's fantastic that this album has built up such a passionate audience and has gained in demand over the years, with vinyl copies having sold for up to 220 euro according to Discogs. One fan even got over 1000 people to sign a petition to reissue the album on vinyl over a year ago and I'm sure all of these factors helped Warp make their very welcome decision. Back in 2005 I wrote an extended article about the album and its place in Drexciya's Storm Series. Hopefully Warp will reissue Elecktroid's Elektroworld album on vinyl next!

"Like all of the very best techno and electro, The Other People Place yields some of the most beautiful sounds to emerge from the D with a limited sound pallette, stripping everything back to the essentials to compose an incredibly important yet delicate album that still to this day continues to fascinate and seduce with its strikingly subtle flow and elegant mystery."

On YouTube at this link there is a beautiful unreleased Arpanet track which has been looped by the uploader to over 11 minutes. The track actually comes from Futurity's Soundcloud (one of Heinrich Mueller's booking agents) which has a 10 minute sample of 10 tracks from Arpanet's live set from 4 years ago.

The first high quality video of Dopplereffekt playing live in Montreal, Canada inside an Olympic sized swimming pool (23rd October 2016) has been uploaded.

"One of the most extraordinary and most influential instances of sonic fiction comes with the music of Detroit techno music pioneers Drexciya...they manage to express and communicate something unspeakable, delving into areas which have been forgotten and suppressed by the hegemonic discourse of White and Western Cultural Memory. The performance of purely instrumental techno music becomes an extremely effective political tool, even a weapon." - from an academic paper by Peter M Boenisch, “Make World”: Archaeology as Alienation in Contemporary Performance (2008), which includes Drexciya in the discussion. I shared this here back in 2008 but the original link does not work anymore.

As this will probably be the final post here of 2016 I'll leave you with a link to my first public DRL themed mix from a month or so ago (track list below). Here's to lots more Drexciya and Heinrich Mueller music and news to write about and share in 2017!

1. Arpanet - The Analyst (2002)
2. Dopplereffekt - Scientist (1995)
3. Arpanet - Infinite Density (2006)
4. Drexciya - Hydro Theory (1995)
5. Abstract Thought - Bermuda Triangle (2002)
6. Elecktroids - Silicon Valley (1995)
7. Lab Rat XL - Lab Rat 1 (2002)
8. Transllusion - Transmission of Life (2001)
9. Drexciya - Journey Home (1995)
10. Dopplereffekt - Infophysix (1995)
11. The Other People Place - Sunrays (2001)
12. NRSB 11 - Market Forces (2013)
13. Der Zyklus - Formenverwandler (2001)
14. Black Replica - Black Feathers (2006)