- Sweden’s Minilogue come up trumps again with their fifth 12” on Traum, a seventies retro space-themed pair of tracks crafted from a rich palette of analogue sounds. There is definitely a hint of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on the EP, but not a single tweedy boffin nor cliché in sight. Rather, the two tracks have a sense of adventure, going straight from Malmö to where no man has gone before.
The title track is the more symphonic and progressive of the two, hovering like a flying saucer over its beautifully rounded and rolling bassline. But once the hyperspace engine has warmed up through a series of rising tones, the melodic journey begins, riding the lightly inflected beat through different sonic galaxies and bass densities.
‘Star Command’ is more linear and heavy and, overall, a little less renegade and more determined. The thicker and more stable bassline is like the nerve centre of a mothership, processing the data arriving back from the echoes of deep space tone probes and chiming melodic transmissions. The underpinning beat is more forcefully constructed in an almost retro Detroit style and is thus the more obviously dancefloor-targeted of the two tracks. You can almost imagine the good old outer space days of Model 500 if it all wasn’t somehow sounding a little slicker with modern production.
A nice EP with plenty there to keep coming back to.
TracklistA Space
B Star Command