The eMusic Dozen: Kompakt

Koeln Kompakt 1 first appeared on NTA as a four-track single in 1997; it became the launching pad for Kompakt proper when it re-appeared in expanded form on January 2, 1998 as a 13-track sampler of Cologne's minimal-techno scene. Thomas Brinkmann, Juergen Paape, Pentax (Reinhard Voigt) and Wolfgang Voigt (as both Studio 1 and M:I:5) establish the label's reductionist baseline with cuts about as effusive as a fistful of marbles. "Minimal" may have blossomed in the decade since, but it's rarely been as restrained as this, with dry, curiously cut samples rocking back and forth within the confines of rigid drum-machine patterns. But the roots of Kompakt's pop inclinations are here as well, namely in the brightly colored bounce of the Modernist's punchy synthesizer workouts. Even at its most restrained, the disc offers plenty of sentimentalism, from Mayer and Thomas' minor-key loops to future Traum founder Triple R & Emanuel's lilting string leads.

Olaf Dettinger's 1999 album Intershop was only Kompakt's second CD, but it remains one of the label's finest moments. Like Oval's Systemisch, Dettinger uses samplers as a sieve, straining gentle drones of uncertain provenance into misty, fizzy clouds. While nominally "ambient," Dettinger's viscous compositions don't lack for a rhythmic backbone: several of the tracks find a compelling pulse in seemingly haphazard arrangements of tumbledown drum hits -- especially the hip-hop/dub crossover of the sixth untitled track, which anticipates Dabrye's later experiments in crumpled-styrofoam syncopation. The album is named for East Germany's government-run retail shops, bazaars that were initially intended as a way to tap into West Germans' tourist dollars, but it's hard to ascertain any directly "political" content here, unless perhaps the music is intended to evoke Marx's dictum that to be modern is to inhabit a universe in which "all that is solid melts into air."

While vinyl singles are arguably the essence of Kompakt's aesthetic, the label began making its material available to the CD-buying public in 1999 with the launch of the Total series, a title that neatly summed up the label's expansive aspirations to unite the world -- or at least, unite a totality of musical styles -- under a thudding kick drum. Rabid Kompakt fans can argue various installments' competing merits, but there's no denying that 2000's Total 2 is a highlight of the catalogue, summing up a span that ranges from blistering, acid-scarred dance (Reinhard Voigt's "Zu Dicht Dran") to spiky, hyperactive pop (Gebr. Teichmann's "Aus der Ferne") to moody, soul- and goth-tinged comedowns (Superpitcher's "Shadows," Jimmi Moon's "Lovelane"). In the record's most complete statement, Closer Musik's "One Two Three (No Gravity)," sullen synths and guitar come together with Matias Aguayo's cool whisper to create as weightless a vision of techno as you'll ever hear.

The title of Markus Guentner's debut album translates as "in minor," but while the music is accordingly hushed, even somber, the record's hardly an unmitigated brood. Like Dettinger, Guentner (who bills himself as "the inventor of pop ambient") revels in sensuous washes of sound, whipping sampled drones, airy synthesizers, brushed percussion and bell tones into billowing shapes. That all the album's tracks, like those on Dettinger's Intershop, are untitled shouldn't surprise; Guentner's ephemeral forms are abstract in the extreme, and if it's tempting to compare them to the Aurora Borealis, or the green flash of the setting sun, Guentner's refusal to tether the music to anything specific adds to their air of reverie. Only one cut, the second, hews to the boom-tick beat that's so central to Kompakt's techno aesthetic; the rest of the album rolls with a pulse as subtle as the tide.

The duo of Germany's Dirk Leyers and Chile's Matias Aguayo, Closer Musik, only lasted for two singles and one album, but the latter is rightly regarded as one of Kompakt's shining moments. There's never been anything else quite like it on the label, or anywhere else for that matter: spindly synthesizer melodies twine like plastic ivy around economical drum-machine rhythms that are as dry-as-a-bone as they are bare-boned. Equally informed by early electro-funk and vintage Detroit techno, the album feels like the only vestige of an alternate future that never came to pass, of low-riders fueled by sour milk and Autobahns that roll up into sticky tubes of fruit wrap. Aguayo's voice, anchoring "Closer Dancer" and "You Don't Know Me," is the very model of downcast sexuality, a perfect fit for the battered bump and grind of the duo's dueling drum and melody lines. The instrumental "Departures," meanwhile, is probably the single most yearning moment of Kompakt's entire catalogue.

When the Japanese artist Kaito's starry-eyed house/trance full-length Special Life appeared in 2002, not a few critics called it cheesy. It's still possible to find a fringe of fromage in the yearning melodies and pumping rhythms on display here, and it's also likely that Kompakt's cred gave the record a critical boost where similar releases on less reputable labels languished in their niches. But a funny thing about Special Life is that in the years since its release, it's actually come to sound a lot less eccentric; as European dance music has loosened up and looked back, Chicago house-inspired tracks like "Release Your Body" and dreamy arpeggiator fests like "Intension" sound less like tongue-in-cheek throwbacks and more like models for unabashed abandon. It doesn't hurt that these are among the prettiest songs that house and techno have ever produced.

Thomas Fehlmann boasts a career that's as wide as it is deep. A member of '80s post-punks Palais Schamburg, the Swiss musician helped inaugurate European techno (and introduce Detroit techno to Germany) with the Teutonic Beats label, which he founded in 1988. His first album for Kompakt, 2002's Visions of Blah, is a perfect marriage of the label's sound and Fehlmann's singular style, kitting out its polychromatic chug with the artist's unique flair for texture. Employing carbonated synthesizers and diamond-crusted beats, Fehlmann achieves a pneumatic sense of bounce with dub-influenced chord progressions that favor attention to detail -- porous, gritty, feathered -- over elaborate song-form. "Rainbow Over Stadtautobahn," the album's most colorfuly named track, is also its greyest, with rickety rhythms evoking the back-and-forth clatter of a sun-bleached rocking horse.

Anyone who derides Kompakt's music as unnecessarily sterile has most likely never listened to Superpitcher. The label's resident dandy, Superpitcher favors titles like "Sad Boys" and "Traume" ("Dreams"); his music is awash in strings, guitars and melancholic bell tones; his low, dusky voice wraps around his cuts as silkily as the scarf that's knotted around his neck. Fusing dub depth with disco's horizontal reach, many of his best cuts -- "People," "Lovers Rock," "Happiness" -- have the curious effect of seeming at once lush and desiccated. They're also masterful fusions of muscular rhythms with unabashed sentimentalism. Swooning over a dreamy/gloomy world of his own making, Superpitcher generally takes himself too seriously to be considered camp, but he sometimes comes close -- particularly on his swinging cover of the torch classic "Fever." But the swirling bliss of the 15-minute closer "Even Angels" is simply too gorgeous to countenance even the suggestion of a wink.

Anyone who persists in calling Kompakt a minimalist label would do well to spend time with the double-disc collection Total 7. By 2006, the label was no stranger to club success, and many of the best tracks here -- Gui Boratto's percolating "Arquipelago," the Field's yearning "Over the Ice," Wighnomy Bros' stormy (and silver-lined) "Wombat" -- were bonafide smashes on dance floors across Europe. Nevertheless, and unusually for a genre where success is often predicated solely upon the ability to move massed bodies, virtually every cut here is suave enough to seduce one-on-one, in virtually any context. Among the standout cuts are Triola's "Leuchtturm" (with the Wighnomy Brothers doing their usual pneumatic drillwork, to predictably grand effect) and Gui Boratto's "Like You," in which Michael Mayer and Superpitcher (as Supermayer) apply sandpapered chords to lovelorn vocals until you can feel your heart peeling away in rosy strips.

Several of Kompakt's divergent strains come together in the work of Brazil's Gui Boratto: anthemic trance, singalong pop and lean, powerful techno. No wonder 2007's Chromophobia was such a hit, garnering rave critical reviews and drawing crowds around the globe to Boratto's expert, energetic live show. Despite the album's title, the music bears far more in common with its brightly hued cover: Boratto's chords and counterpoints practically explode with tone color. Despite his straight-ahead rhythms, he's not afraid to confound now and then: "Gate 7" tilts like an angry pinball machine, beginning on a false downbeat that's surely trainwrecked more than one cavalier DJ. With its aching ostinatos and matter-of-fact lyrics, "Beautiful Life" ("What a beautiful life/ What a beautiful life/ What a beautiful world") is the album's emotional-overload centerpiece -- the kind of electro-pop statement of purpose that comes along once in a generation.

Whereas so much contemporary electronic music makes do with synthesizers, drum machines and software, Kompakt's roots lie firmly in sampling. Sweden's Axel Willner, aka the Field, takes the idea of stretching pre-recorded sounds to extremes: "A Paw in My Face," for instance, loops a smidgen or two of acoustic and electric guitar from Lionel Richie's "Hello" into a slow, ecstatic exhalation. Only at the song's end does it uncurl enough to reveal its source (and even then, only if you really, really know the song). All the tracks on the album proceed via the same conceit: find a juicy morsel hidden in a pop song's elbow crook, then loop and smear it until it takes on the dimensions of a mother-of-pearl Montana sunset. Backwards guitars trace arcing shapes in "Silent"; shuddering repetitions prod unabashed yearning on the unabashedly trancy "Everyday." "Over the Ice," meanwhile, is a perfect marriage of sound and image.

Emphasizing affect over structure, the Pop Ambient series owes more to Brian Eno's vision of aural wallpaper than to any conceptualist pursuits: every album is essentially a collection of silky throw pillows, and even within a given record there's little to stick in the memory. Synthesizers and string samples swell into billowing, flickering harmonies, from placid, sunlit tones to shadowy dissonance; beats are blurred into slow, tidal pulses. Occasionally, a track stands out: Fehlmann's "Camilla" is among the strangest things he's ever done -- true hypermodern jazz comprised of brushed ride cymbals, oily leads and a mist of bell tones. But for the most part, this is music to fall asleep to, as a related title from Pop Ambient contributor Klimek nakedly proclaims.