On the journey through the bowels of the city, Basic Channel inadvertently cut the clogged veins of the old Berlin underground and let flow whatever lifeforce was left in that venerable corpse into the electronic bitsreams presently connecting Berlin and Detroit Techno. In this sense, the Basic Channel CD is as much a Berlin landmark as the highly influential Liaisons Dangereuses disc from the early 80s, or the famously over-valued, if extremely appealing E2-E4. Yet its creators seem to have only very grudgingly brought it into being. They have let it out unprotected in a coarse cardboard postal envelope, stickered with a photocopied label containing a minimum of information; while on the back the only indications of its source are a barcode, a Berlin fax number, brief publishing details, and another sticker listing the catalogue numbers of the nine Basic Channel 12" singles from where the music has been lifted and reconfigured anew. The communique concludes with a terse instruction: "Buy Vinyl".
If Basic Channel is suspicious of the enthusiasm shown for its activities by music journalists, it is not without good reason. When I meet the two men behind the label, Mark and Moritz (single names only, please), in Berlin's Cafe Einstein, they stare blankly with stoneface expressions as I gush forth praise for their activities (and they ask me not to tape our conversation). That's all very well, they say, but we think you ought to know where we really come from. The CD is a precis from some four and a half hours of vinyl and represents a home-listening edit of records intended for DJ or dancehall use. The following evening they invite me to the Hard Wax record shop in Kreuzberg. For three hours I am blitzed with a brief history of Chicago House and Detroit Techno: the early Chicago Acid trax of Phuture, Armando and Armani, and then moving onto Detroit for Cybotron, Model 500, Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Juan Atkins. (ironically, the blind reverence they display for this music mirrors the enthusiasm that is directed at their own releases and of which they remain so suspicious.)
This is the key to Basic Channel. Where Techno hurtles blinkered into the future, Mark and Moritz have turned their backs on it. This is an archaeology of Techno, almost, which burrows beneath the future-shock debris to work up new geometric shapes from the music's original architectonic ground plans.
It's a kind of Techno classicism, on best heard on vinyl, sure enough. The duo are so committed to vinyl that they have established their own cutting plant to ensure their records obtain the desired dynamic range. And on vinyl Basic Channel's minimalism does work a wholly other kind of magic. But the CD works well as an entity because Basic Channel has worked a singular groove over the nine records released since the label was founded in 1993. But what you don't get on compact disc is the same dynamic sense that the musicians are exploring every possible rhythmic permutation. Early tracks lock distorted, needle-dirt blocks of noise into hypnotic rhythm loops that gradually push out of phase, compelling minor changes that trigger seismic shifts in the sound layers. Over the course of the label's releases, some of them running longer than the average LP, the sound materials grow cleaner, the outlines more sharply defined. For example, a minimal dub enhancement accords a concussed clarity to their latest and most beautiful single yet. Titled "Phylyps Trak II", it perversely centres an impaired skank, lit from behind so as to cast distorted shadow rhythms dancing at its feet.
Since its inception Basic Channel has become a byword for a certain kind of minimalism, where tracks evolve from the basest of sounds, and the records themselves continue to draw attention to their format by dissolving the distinction between recorded and realtime scratches and distortions. They remind you that these records are to be played, not archived and cherished.
Basic Channel's modus operandi is governed by the DJ culture in which it is steeped. Mark and Moritz don't do interviews, not because they are into self-mystification, but because they don't have to. Their music circulates through dance music's own distribution and communications networks. Everybody who wants to gets to hear of a new release somehow.
In DJ culture, labels more than the artists define the music. So music that does' t fit the basic channel narrative is channeled through parallel labels: chain reaction for more avantish releases from the likes of Porter Ricks (Thomas Koner and Andreas Mellwig) Main Street for, to these ears, uninspired House-y vocal tracks; M for Moritz s earthshaking Maurizio releases; and finally, the CD label Imbalance for more self-consciously experimental projects such as Wieland Samolak's soundscaping Steady State Music. To these can be added the Burial Mix label, which houses their newest 10" release, the attractive, if slight, dub-enhanced "Never Tell You" by Rhythm & Sound.
The geneaology of Basic Channel-related labels is complicated by the elaborate miscegenation of particular projects that holds the family together. For instance, the deep, reverberant Kodo thump of Vainquer's "Lyot", a real depth-charge of a track, repeats through Maurizio, Basic Channel (BC03) and Chain Reaction releases. And "Reduce", which also carries a Vainquer credit reprises the "Lyot" method of setting the whole dancefloor trembling to a rumbling military roll beaten out on a giant bass drum.
If there is any conclusion to be drawn from the Basic Channel family's way of working, it is
that, in dance as in any other popular music form prone to be despoiled by the raging egos of
its participants, a state of grace is best achieved and sustained by pursuing an aethetic of
disappearance that preserves its makers from the distorting gaze of the media and its public.
In the process, the label has released a succession of records hallmarked by the kind of beauty
which characterized the aregacts produced in utter anonymity by the craftsmen of antiquity.
copied from http://home.snafu.de/circonium