Rewind: Roman Flügel - Tracks On Delivery

  • As Roman Flügel revives one of his most cherished projects, Andrew Ryce looks back on the 2000 EP that rekindled his love for no-frills, on-the-fly dance music.
  • Share
  • "The idea behind Tracks On Delivery was like a pizza delivery—like I would just deliver tracks all the time." "I would sit at home or in the studio with four machines and record something right away. I wouldn't think too much about arranging something," Roman Flügel tells me over the phone from Berlin. "I did it completely unheard—it was more like just muting the bass drum here and there and going back to it, adding another hi-hat pattern, keeping things quite simple. Tracks that are supposed to put people into a trance, maybe—but nothing more." By the year 2000, Roman Flügel was one of the most accomplished artists in European dance music. If you can name a form of house, techno or trance—even jazz—he probably tried it on some record under some alias. He and longtime musical partner Jörn Elling Wuttke turned heads in the early '90s with Acid Jesus and pivoted into IDM as The Primitive Painter. Flügel's Eight Miles High project wowed critics and his long-running group Alter Ego, also with Wuttke, was well on its way to mainstream success. He ran three era-defining labels: Klang Electronik, Playhouse and Ongaku. In the middle of all this, understandably, Flügel craved simplicity. So he went into the studio with a few pieces of gear and made some of his most career-defining tracks just by jamming. "The idea was to do some quite minimal, quite fast techno and electro tracks, where there there weren't too many ideas, but there was still a quirkiness," Flügel says. "I basically wanted to produce some tunes, because that was something I really hadn't done before. It was pure energy." For the first few Tracks On Delivery records, Roman Flügel holed up with a Korg Electribe drum machine, a Novation Drum Station, a Yamaha TX802 FM synthesizer a Korg 707 ("a very cheap synethesizer," he says). He's name-checked labels like Andrew Weatherall's Emissions Output and Jay Denham's Black Nation as inspirations, but as he told me, his background was so different that the music came out totally differently anyways. The first Tracks On Delivery record was released on Ongaku Musik in 2000 with four tracks merely called "Patterns," as if to drive home the point that this wasn't music to listen to at home. Instead, these were percussive patterns made for the DJ to use at work. Tracks On Delivery was among the first records that Flügel released under his given name, and it was more minimal than anything he had done before—though we're talking Robert Hood minimal, not scarves and micro-sampling. That would come later. Leave it to Flügel, though, to make barebones techno that still sounds loaded with personality. I kept coming back to that idea of "quirkiness," a subtle (and perhaps uniquely German) sense of humor that defines most of his records. You can hear it from the get-go in the lopsided bounce of "Pattern One," whose strange, skronky melody sounds like a wounded version of hard techno from the late '90s. The sound is more akin to a sniffle than an alarm. Flügel uses "Pattern One" as a blank canvas for his deft percussive touches, like the flattened snares the dot the matrix across the track's unusual six minutes. "Pattern Three," too, has an impish quality, with a squiggly melody that reminds me of some of the best records on Playhouse from that era. It's full of cartoonish sounds—squeaks, square-wave bass—that seem to predict the rise of microhouse in later years, where surgically sliced samples served the same function as big chord stabs or catchy hooks. Then there's "Pattern Two," Flügel's favorite, which inverts the rhythm section: "There's a strange melody, only one note, from the TX, so the synthesizers is used as a rhythmic element," he explains. "And there's an off-beat clap from the Korg 707. That's everything I liked about the project in one." "I liked to use certain sounds that were a bit more, say, unusual, when it comes to techno. Some weird little synths here and there—maybe a sound that would annoy you if you had to listen to it for a full five or six minutes," he sats, without a hint of irony. "It does the job, absolutely." It certainly did the job. Flügel would release four parts of Tracks On Delivery for a total of 15 "Patterns," but as much fun as the records were for him to make, they also kind of came and went. A couple years after part four finished the series off in 2002, he would score big hits with "Rocker" and "Geht's Noch," and the days of pizza delivery records would be long in the rearview mirror. Still, the foundations for so much that would come later still sounds so obvious, so ready, in these records' simple grooves, though of course he's modest about it. From Flügel's perspective, his music was totally different—Tracks On Delivery could go up to 140 BPM, whereas the minimal that would take over the world later was slower, more effects-heavy. It was driven by the powerful processing of Ableton Live, whereas Flügel had just a few boxes around him. If the records weren't an enormous success, they are close to the hearts of many Flügel fans. and techno conoisseurs in general. It felt like an overdue bit of revisionism when he launched his new Sister Midnight label with a full reissue of all four parts of Tracks On Delivery, complete with two more unreleased "Patterns." Listening to the compilation (that's the artwork you see on the right), it's striking how current it sounds. The pulsating, ultra-fast techno of "Pattern 5" could feed today's BPM-hungry crowds, while the queasy sub-bass spelunking of "Pattern 10" wouldn't be out of place on a Timedance or Hessle Audio Record. Of the original Tracks On Delivery cuts, "Pattern Four" might be the most impressive of all, a piece of traditionalist electro that nails some of the tics of the genre's early '90s heyday: a wobbly two-note pad pattern in the background, the delayed-out rattling sound, white noise patches that feel like a blast from a water gun. In its mix of revivalism and cut-and-dry simplicity, it's an almost eerie prelude to the electro revival currently in full swing. Since that time, and brushes with mainstream success along with the release of wonderful, almost delicate records like Fatty Folders—or the near-ambient Eating Darkness—Flügel got the itch again, and returned to Tracks On Delivery with a new EP for Rekids called Yes People. "I was totally ready again to do some quick jams—with only a few edits, keeping things rough and as they were," he says. "Whenever I do this kind of music, somehow I always go back to Tracks On Delivery." One listen to the new EP's lead cut shows that the wacky side of the project is as alive and well. "Yes People"—the tracks have titles now—centers on a kick-snare pattern that feels wrong, as if Flügel accidentally threw in an extra kick drum. It stumbles in a staggered, elliptical motion, the snare and the kick matching up at the wrong moment. "Yes People" is, frankly, kind of annoying, just as Flügel said. You might not want to hear it for five minutes straight, but throw it in at the right moment and it's kind of genius. Roman Flügel has been putting his subtly inventive, often funny touch on dance music for decades now, and even his most basic of tracks, 30 years later, still sound impressively strange, almost innovative. Maybe in another 20 years we'll be hearing more bizarre kick patterns like the one on "Yes People," and someone else will be writing an article just like this one.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Pattern One A2 Pattern Two B1 Pattern Three B2 Pattern Four
RA