- Plenty of releases stir up excitement, either because of the artist responsible, the tunes they convey or the label that pressed them up. But it's that rare 12-inch that obsessives can't quite decide what to wet themselves over first. A humble slab of remixes bearing little beyond a few lines of red text is just that sort of release. First off, there's the source material—two tracks from Tobias Freund's rightly praised 2011 long-player Leaning Over Backwards—and the choice of remixers: sound design doesn't get much better than that of Efdemin and Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer. But more than any other factor, the white label's Ostgut Ton parentage is likely to get this thing flying off the shelves.
These two remixes comprise the first release on Unterton, a new series from the dance music powerhouse that opens up the Ostgut vaults to producers not typically in the label's orbit. Efdemin takes tobias.'s "Leaning Over Backwards" into the shadowy part of his soundworld. But even the Dial mainstay himself seems obscured, as if he's sending out distress signals from a dark cubbyhole deep in Berghain: trippy in form and subtly developing, it recalls some earlier form of the club and label's mythology (think Panorama Bar 01) and is all the more succulent because of it. Villalobos & Loderbauer take "Girts," strip it apart, and tape it back together in superbly weird form. It's pretty great, unsurprisingly, but the element of exchange we hear on Efdemin's remix—the merging of one artist's usual practices with the physical and psychological space of dance music's most famous club and label—doesn't quite carry through.
Tracklist A Leaning Over Backwards (Efdemin Remix)
B Girts (Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer Remix)