- No one does wacky funk and weirdo chuggers like Detlef Weinrich.
- One of the founders of Düsseldorf's famed Salon Des Amateurs, Detlef Weinrich AKA Tolouse Low Trax helped spur a quiet dance music revolution. Alongside residents like Lena Wilikens, Vladimir Ivkovic and Jan Schulte, the art-school cafe turned club has had an outsized influence on clubland. From festival line-ups to Dekmantel Selectors compilations, the venue's 100 BPMish Kraut-rock-meets-techno is no longer a local secret. Weinrich himself became synonymous not just with the space, but with the city on the Rhine.
Things changed for Weinrich in 2020. He left Düsseldorf for Paris and soundtracked this move with a new sound. Stern and austere, he released Jumping Dead Leafs?, a pivot from his usually playful, prankster's approach to production. These tracks were his most ascetic to date, drawn-out and sluggish, requiring a certain amount of patience from listeners. But lest this signal a new darker era, his newest LP, Leave Me Alone, is bright and buoyant by comparison. Don't let the title fool you: Leave Me Alone is an inviting record filled with chuggy drum tracks somewhere between hip-hop, techno and new wave. Even from his new homebase in Paris, the record captures the spirit of the Salon to a T, channeling what Jorge Velez once called "the elegant lunacy of it all."
Take the equal parts beautiful and frantic "A Great, Strange And Moving Work." It's a symphony in under three minutes: muffled horn lines, choral vocals and hissing synths unfurl over its syncopated, stuttering swing at 105 BPM. This is what Leave Me Alone does well: hopping between ideas with a restless sort of cheekiness. Listen to the straightforward darkwave pop on "Impure Nature." The vocals ruminate on love and spirituality with the vigor of a first-year philosophy student, but the flatulent synth lead pokes fun at the Foucault-and-turtleneck intensity. A track like "How to Beat the Sea" likewise seems designed to torment DJs. Each drum line comes in at a different tempo and will surely send a number of selectors back to the mixer to see which channel they accidentally left up.
The silliness of the record makes it feel like pitched down Perlon-style minimal at times. The Melville-riffing "I Would Prefer Not To" is loopy techno with a melody that sounds like a modulating didgeridoo, while the squishy chords and k-hole trip on "Non Giudicare" would work in a Margaret Dygas set. Ever wonder what it would sound like if Lunice released a record on Workshop? Look no further than "Yellow," where grandiose synth is scaffolded by a staggering, skeletal hip-hop template.
Leave Me Alone is the sound of a producer still excited by his machines. While he's built a niche aesthetic over the past two decades, he isn't pigeon-holded by it. The issue with being at the vanguard is that it isn't the vanguard for very long. Before you know it, the admirers, copyists, and everyone else arrive and even the most out-there aesthetics are commodified and recirculated in more palatable ways. But despite his art world background and notoriety for strangeness, Weinrich has always been able to embrace an ethos of openness and fun. Leave Me Alone is both challenging and exciting, without being overly stuffy or self-serious.
Tracklist01. Albatros
02. How To Beat The Sea
03. Gates
04. Impure Nature
05. I Would Prefer Not To
06. My
07. Non Guidicare
08. Yellows
09. A Great, Strange And Moving Work
10. Ossia
11. White Flicker
12. Muddy Floors
13. Bianca From Rome