The Get Physical label have almost single handedly produced the blueprint for a particularly successful stream of electrohouse: built upon the pop skeletons of Cologne minimalism and the beefed up sounds of French and Chicago house, it's so lush and direct it is nigh impossible to dislike. Reliant on simple but effective synthesized melodic cells, often unvaryingly repeated, one might have thought these structures would grow wearisome, but as Booka Shade's excellent 'Movements' LP demonstrated, this formula is both adaptable and engaging over longer durations. On 'Played Runner' Booka Shade's Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger are joined by fellow Get Physical regular DJ T (Thomas Koch) for two sides which, while offering no revelations, are reliably tough and energized.
A regular 16th-note rattle opens 'Queen Lucid' as straight-up drums and reverberant pinging hats keep time at a restrained tempo. A swollen bass pulse throbs like MRI before a simple yet effective melodic pattern, as dumbly straightforward as Donnacha Costello's colour pastiches, is introduced. From here all else remains relatively static as this central pattern is tweaked, twisted and stretched into ever more interesting formations before breaking up into staccatoed chunks. There's little here aside from formulaic rhythms and knob twiddling, but it's expertly done and funky as hell.
More immediately aggressive yet also more playful, 'Played Runner's initial bright skittishness recalls Sascha Funke's early Kompakt days, but the repeated single-chord blast which takes over owes more to The Field. While this central block is regularly hammered throughout, the rest is less stable: low-end bass blobs, spat from a paint gun, become sustained drones; soaring sci-fi pads sweep in from the arctic amidst other electro motifs; the lot finally jostles, shakes, then disperses. Neither track is particularly euphoric but that is hardly the point: what you get are consistent, persistent stompers which will energize all manner of minimal house sets.
Tracklist: Booka Shade & DJ T - Played Runner
A Played Runner (8:14)
B Queen Lucid (7:41)
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