Lapsus Perennial Series Vinyl, CD & Tape 4 Items

Although 30 years after its birth this fundamental electronic gem called 'Reflections' has achieved cult status, it is worth remembering that it all started in 1993 in a small apartment in Waterloo, London, with the help of a mixer and a bunch of hardware synth and drum machines of hardware, with the mastodontic Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer as the main partner. While in the UK the vast majority of kids showed a certain rejection of what came from North America in the form of electro, Kirk Degiorgio, under his alias As One, embraced it openly and incorporated it into his productions along with influences from other genres that he had already adored since he was young, such as jazz, soul or funk, thus becoming one of the true early adopters of Detroit techno in the UK. If we look back, 'Reflections' is a challenge in itself, and even more so considering what the consumption pattern of electronic music was in the early 90s. This timeless album fits into the delicate border between being enough club to work on the dance floor, and still being musical and cerebral enough to be listened to at home. A milestone that, whether premeditated or not, Degiorgio more than achieved. Three decades later Lapsus Records has been able to access the pre-masters extracted from the original DATs to build a special 30th anniversary edition within its Perennial series. For the occasion, this reissue not only offers the tracks included in the first edition, it also adds the songs 'The Priestess' -never released on vinyl before- and Forgotten Memory -until now unreleased and rediscovered in one of the DATs dating back to 1992 from the 'Reflexions' recording sessions. We are therefore facing the definitive edition of an album that, despite coexisting with the explosion of the rave movement, would pave the path for the UK-Detroit connection.

Back in the 1990s video games were still largely seen as nerdy: fun, sure, but basically a guilty pleasure that you'd soon grow out of. The release in 1995 of wipE'out'', a lightning-fast, razor-sharp, futuristic racing game that helped to launch the PlayStation in Europe and North America, changed all that. This was a game that looked and sounded both adult and cool, the kind of game you would put on display in your living room, rather than hide away under your bed. Key to this was the fact that wipE'out'' borrowed unashamedly from the clubbing experience and electronic music, in a way that put it at the heart of progressive mid 90s culture. It soon became a phenomenon. wipE'out'' looked sensational, with Sheffield agency The Designers Republic - known for their work with Warp - creating the visuals, packaging and manual for the game, drawing heavily on the bright colours and excitable geometric shapes of the rave and club flyers of the early 90s. wipE'out'' also sounded like a new rave dream. The European version of the game included music from The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Orbital, the kind of fashionable game syncs that were almost unheard of at the time. Equally striking was the game's original music, which came from Welsh musician Tim Wright, aka CoLD SToRAGE, by this point already a veteran in the video games world, having worked on the music for Amiga titles such as Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast 2. His music for wipE'out'' was, if anything, even more extreme than the big-name syncs, mixing the accelerated beats of drum & bass with the pure synth rush of trance to make music that sounded as breathlessly exciting as playing the game felt. These tracks were burned into the brains of millions of gamers; the soundtrack to a generation of late-night anti-gravity racing, as the sun gingerly rose beyond the curtains. But they haven't, perhaps, quite got the respect they deserve, something that this release will address. In 2023, video game music is finally getting its dues; here, remastered and repackaged -and also remixed by cutting edge producers such as Kode9, ?-Ziq, Brainwaltzera, Simo Cell, Wordcolour, James Shinra, Surgeons Girl and Dattassette- are some of the most important, thrilling, innovative and most fun songs ever committed to game release.

Beautiful seductive modern electronix alert!!! Vector Lovers has remained a firm favourite of the underground electronic music scene and holds a coveted place among the most hallowed of record shelves, and with good reason. Since the early 2000s Martin Wheeler has explored a sparse audio wasteland in order to develop a new sonic palette that looks outward to electro, IDM and ambient. After self-releasing a handful of his own productions on the Iwari label, Wheeler's career defining album was signed by British label Soma in 2005, leading to the first great revival of 90s IDM. Capsule for One' was an unrivalled masterpiece that perfectly synthesised the heritage of the Hardcore Continuum with renewed airs and degree of clarity that ushered in a new millennia and sound. It arrived as a worthy successor to the venerated Warp artists of the time, while embracing new panoramas and technologies. Capsule for One' is a melancholic album, with an almost cosmic spirituality that provokes daydreaming. From its opening track 'City Lights From a Train' it welcomes the listener onto an infinite journey at the speed of light, connecting the past, present and future, folding time and space and painting neon cities populated by cyborgs. The album reaches its zenith with 'Melodies and Memory', featuring Wheeler's very own voice, which has arguably become one of this century's greatest electronic ballads to date. In fact, the impact of 'Capsule for One' was such that Tracey Thorn commissioned him to produce her song 'Easy', from the album 'Out of the Woods' [Virgin, 2007]. For its forthcoming release on Lapsus Records, Martin Wheeler has remixed each and every song on 'Capsule for One', as well as adding two previously unreleased tracks 'A Simulation' and 'Perfect Score', both produced around the same epoch. This extra special release, with artwork redesigned by Josep Basora, features a double marbled vinyl and a limited edition insert print. TIP!!

Dance music has always been grounded in a sense of place. Chicago, Detroit, London, Berlin--a zip code can tell you as much about the music as the year it was made. But beyond the nuts and bolts of the here and now lies a netherzone where some of the best electronic music floats, impossible to pin down. Swayzak's Snowboarding in Argentina is one such record. The title hints at its uncanny placelessness. The music has nothing outwardly to do with Argentina, for one thing. The work of UK producers David Nicholas Brown and James S. Taylor, it was recorded in a number of locations--mostly bedrooms--around London. Yet there is little that is quintessentially British about the music. Instead, Brown and Taylor drew much of their inspiration from, on the one hand, the luminous chords and silky heft of Detroit techno, and on the other, the staccato drums and clipped textures that were then beginning to bubble out of Berlin and Cologne. That brings us to the question of time. For if Snowboarding in Argentina belongs to nowhere, it is equally a product of nowhen. On a practical level, the music took shape in the mid to late 1990s, although it took nearly 10 years for it to come to fruition. Brown and Taylor began jamming on instruments, then machines, in the late 1980s. Then, after Brown suffered a serious car accident, the two musicians began working together more seriously. Trial and error yielded a promising single with a downtempo vibe that a hired-gun studio producer promptly ruined; Swayzak retreated to their bedrooms. They learned about Chain Reaction from a radio show, found new ways to burrow into the circuitry of their machines, and by 1996 they had hit upon their sound. The core of Snowboarding in Argentina appeared on a series of three two-track singles in 1997. (Taylor brought 10 copies of the first to Berlin's Hard Wax, sold them directly to the shop for a fistful of Deutschmarks, and turned around and spent the money on records; that's how DIY electronic music worked in those days.) The album itself appeared in 1998 on London's Pagan label and quickly built a cult following. It was clear that the music was in conversation with its contemporaries: Heard from the right angle, it was possible to imagine it as a halfway point between the proto progressive house of Underworld and the monochromatic minimalism of Kompakt. But it also didn't quite sound like anything else around; it was a dispatch from an unknown territory that needed no special understanding to decipher. A quarter century later, Snowboarding in Argentina sounds simply eternal. Certain hallmarks of '90s production are available--the music's almost murky warmth is a reminder of what electronic music sounded like before software swallowed everything into its digital maw--but there's nothing dated about it. The exploratory nature of these tracks, as the result of experimenting with their machines' limitations, never eclipses their musical or emotional essence. Long since been deemed a classic, Snowboarding in Argentina remains an underdog in the annals of electronic music. Its semi-obscurity was surely not helped by the decision to publish nine of its original 12 tracks on the CD, and seven on the vinyl, with only four appearing on both formats. Twenty-five years after its original release, Lapsus' Perennial Series edition unites, for the first time, all the album's tracks as a single triple-vinyl package, rounding out the 12 original songs with previously unreleased material. Working off the original DAT premasters, Swayzak have created new edits of all the tracks. The result might be considered the definitive edition of the album as it was meant to be, after a 25-year journey. It seems fitting that an album so timeless would continue morphing throughout its lifespan. For fans, it's the chance to hear a beloved album as never before. And for newcomers, it's the perfect introduction to a record that, in its own quiet way, reshaped the sound of electronic music, opening up new frontiers unbound by cartography or calendars.