Electrorash

I have no end of love for German electronica maestros Modeselektor, and am at least moderately fond of German minimal/IDM don Apparat, so when I heard that they were rekindling their German collaborative project Moderat (geddit? It’s a portmanteau!) I was very, very excited. So excited that I may have actually fallen off my chair. Although I was pretty drunk at the time, so it may have been that too.

Either way, the album (also called Moderat…) has dropped and it’s pretty great. I must admit that it is is perhaps not as nut-bustingly amazing as I had secretly hoped, but even so the album is most definitely a worthy addition to the vaunted halls of both Modeselektor and Apparat’s discographies. As you might expect given their relatively disparate production styles, the album veers back and forth between walloping drums, hazy synth washes, dreamy vocals and rumbling bass with an almost reckless fervor. Which may sound a little difficult on paper, but to my mind it is this wilful eccentricity that is both Moderat’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. Ooh, a paradox. Pretentious. At its best though (this is a blog, let’s focus on the positive) Moderat sounds precisely how a collaborative album should sound; an exact synthesis of the most iconic parts of each artist’s individual productions. And with these two, that synthesis is an almost overwhelming merging of Apparat’s throw toward IDM-tinged shoegaze and Modeselektor’s dark and dirty bass-driven glitch-tech. God I love making up genres.

Standout track ‘Seamonkey’ is a perfect case in point. For the first minute or so the track gradually emerges from silence on the back of pounding, ominously building drums that are 100% pure Modeselektor. Then at the 1:40 mark they are joined by a creeping, echoing and very Apparat-y synth line that slowly expands until it dominates the track. But then the breakdown kicks in and the track swells and pulses with nervous energy, until finally it drops into a blistering and perfect amalgamation of the two elements, all kicking drums, driving bass and phasing melody. True, most tracks on here don’t come close to being this good, but even being in the same ballpark makes for a fairly impressive album.

Moderat – Seamonkey Tracks removed on request.

Also included for your perusal is a bonus track from the deluxe edition of Moderat, the strange and unsettling Shackleton remix of ‘Rusty Nails’. I guess you’d call it minimal, but really it’s an almost unrecognizable recasting of the original that spends most of its nine minutes skittering idly through a ghostly soundscape rather than laying down heavy techno beats. Curious and oddly compelling.

Moderat – Rusty Nails (Shackleton Remix) Tracks removed on request.

Moderat’s Moderat is available now and can be purchased through all good retailers. Thoroughly recommended.

/Luke