One thing you’ll notice about the promotional iconography flaunted by Kurt Knispel for his alterego, production outfit Ein Kleiner Schelm, is a fixation on Mexican wrestling masks.
I first became aware of the obsession when I saw him perform live in Tokyo in 2004, going head to head (or in this case mask to flesh) with Little Nobody.
There he was, clad in a gold-lame mask, gesticulating and hamming it up like DJ Rush on steroids, while his more down-to-earth partner looked on, grinning.
“I have about 300 different masks,” Knispel told me, via Skype, just last week – and he was wearing a brightly colored red and black one throughout the course of the interview as well. “I go to Mexico ever year especially to acquire new ones.”
These days, Knispel admits to living in relative seclusion, sharing space with his mask collection and a horde of retro analogue gear and computers, in his tiny hometown, Füchse, in Germany. He returned home in 2004, after a stint of several years in Japan, to run the family business – a Bavarian beer brewery that goes back to his great grandfather’s time.
If people assumed he’d retired from techno and retreated into obscurity, however, this year he’s proved everybody wrong. He recently released the collaborative ‘Live In Tokyo’ EP, with Little Nobody, through Hypnotic Room; he’s also thrown himself into some fantastic remixes, for people like Dale Baldwin – and is performing live again with Helmut Schmidt, better known as O.
“I love beer,” he demured last week, “but I love making music even more. This is a recipe of my own creation, rather than one handed down through the generations from a distant family member.”
As if to prove the point, Knispel has now unveiled his latest EP, the first real record he’s made in almost 4 years, and it’s been worth the wait. “I’ve been concocting ‘Your Move’ for quite some time,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to release the record until it was truly ready to be drunk.”
So, ignore for a moment the penchant for masks that this enigmatic German producer tends to dabble with in his scintillating live sets – in the studio, it’s his music that grabs hold of your attention, and sustains the iron grip up to the final moments of every single track – even at its more serene and laidback. This brand new EP is no different.
‘Your Move’ kicks off proceedings with a lazy, swirling patter of deep, minimalist techno breaks and an equally mesmerizing chime, ever deepening, until they finally unravel and remake themselves into crisp tech-house dubstep and subtly cut-up breaks at the 3:20 mark. With the journey only half-way complete, the track winds on from there in serenely beautiful fashion.
Dedicated to Ein Kleiner Schelm’s late lamented pet poodle, herself named after a character in his favorite novel, ‘Nikita Nezvanova’ is playful, funky, eclectic tech-house that weaves in and out of moments before finding a scorching club groove at 2:20, with no sense of a rush whatever.
‘Caesar’ goes all dark, melodramatic and orchestral, shades of Isao Tomita – sustained by restrained breakbeats, and an undercurrent of jazz/electro inflections. Thinking person’s techno under any other name, it’s assured and hypnotic stuff.
The final track, appropriately a Little Nobody remix of ‘Oddly Automobile’, is also the most up-for-it – a funky, simple, jazzily banging number that could be called a post-modern take on Detroit techno shaken and stirred with disco, but in reality otherwise defies classification and teases the listener as it slowly settles into a wonderful locked groove.
The ‘Your Move’ EP is techno house music that’s been constructed outside the confines of the contemporary dance music ring, then unmasked for all to see, hear – and feel.
Knispel’s own mask, however, remained through the course of our chat. Some things never change.
© 2008 Angela Fox
