Thomas Brinkmann – Studio 1 – Variationen

[Profan CD2] 1997 / download

Today, Thomas Brinkmann is seen as one of the leaders of the German minimal electronic music scene.
It is confirmed fact that back in ’96 he had been experimenting with a number of techniques to change and mutate the recorded sounds he heard on vinyl into something altogether different. Brinkmann would carve his own grooves into the vinyl with a razor, resulting in endless, littering loops, cracks, and pops, which he would then run through various filters to achieve sounds totally different from what was actually encoded on the record. More relevant however, was the invention of his famous dual-armed turntable, which when played on long, dubbed-out techno pieces from the likes of Germany’s Basic Channel crew and Wolfgang Voigt (aka Mike Ink) would result in whole new levels of musical hypnosis.

Brinkmann applied Voigt’s color-coded series to his dual-armed turntable, slowed the material down considerably, and simply hit the record button. Ink loved what he heard, releasing the 13-track Studio 1 – Variationen CD on Voigt’s Profan label.

The results are quite different than you might expect, given that Brinkmann is essentially just playing someone else’s records, but the dual-arms and left-right separation of the mutated turntable create whole new rhythms and riffs even more dubbed-out than the originals, with a built-in phase thanks to the delay between the arms. Even the surface noises and pressing variations from the records themselves are taken in, adding a gritty edge to the proceedings. They wouldn’t work on a dancefloor in a million years, but in chill-out rooms and basements around the techno community, the shot was fired and the influence was felt.

Posted in download on March 19th, 2009 by fresh good minimal | 3 Comments