As a member of Kompakt since the early 90s, Reinhard Voigt has been a key player in the development and subsequent success of this legendary Cologne-based record label. Taking early notes from his infamous older brother Wolfgang Voigt (aka Mike Ink), Reinhard has refined and re-tooled his sound in a direction that has become unmistakeably his own in it's dirty, subversive (yet charming) minimal techno pop.
Mark Fell and Mat Steel formed SND in 1998 and were quickly placed at the forefront of new digital minimalism. With a series of influential releases on their own label SND and on the now defunct Frankfurt Mille Plateaux, SND pioneered a sound that combined the linear minimalism of Ryoji Ikeda and Oval, with the rhythmic geometry of techno artists such as Thomas Brinkmann or Derrick May. SND promote an approach to the organization of sound, space and form that owes more to origami than any time based medium.
Technology and imperfection. The raw and the processed. Curator and curated. Solo explorer and gregarious collaborator. The life and work of Taylor Deupree are less a study in contradictions than a portrait of the multidisciplinary artist in a still-young century. Deupree is an accomplished sound artist whose recordings, rich with abstract atmospherics, have appeared on numerous record labels, and well as in site-specific installations at such institutions as the ICC (Tokyo, Japan) and the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (Yamaguchi, Japan).
Jan Jelinek (whose monikers include Gramm, for Source Records, and Farben), is a Berlin-based producer of electronic music drawing influences from jazz, dub, funk, soul, and house. Prior to releasing on the ~Scape label under his own name, he had put out albums as Farben (for Klang Elektronik). On 2001's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Jelinek manipulates fragments of sound from old jazz recordings, transforming them beyond recognition into completely new pieces of music. On la nouvelle pauvrete, he joins forces with the imaginary band The Exposures, which he himself fabricated.
Monolake was formed in 1995 as the duo of Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke, although on later albums the group consisted of Henke alone, with Behles focusing his time on running the Ableton software company. Their sound can generally be described as minimal techno filled with nice touch of fine tech dub, although the 1999 Gobi. The Desert EP, which contains a single 37-minute atmospheric piece, is a notable exception. Monolake first released an album and several 12"s on Berlin's Chain Reaction label, then on Monolake/Imbalance Computer Music, which is operated by Robert Henke.
Now that his work with The Orb has earned him a place in electronic music history, Fehlmann is afforded the artistic license to transcend all previous boundaries. His musicality and experimentalist drive converge with exceptional grace and system-bumpin' appeal. Granular hip-hop grooves and exotic chord structures interface with bold, synthetic finesse, while his housier inner child locks down some precision dance-floor cuts immersed in fluidly manipulated filtration.
Thomas Brinkmann (born 1959) is a highly regarded German producer of experimental minimal techno music. Although experimenting with records since the early eighties, he gained wide reputation with his re-workings of material by fellow artists Mike Ink and Richie Hawtin released in the second half of the 90s. These productions were made by playing physically modified vinyl records on highly customized turntables with an additional tone arm.
CoH is the musical alias of Иван Павлов (Ivan Pavlov), a Russian-born sound artist and engineer.
He has lived in Sweden since 1995. After Pavlov moved to Sweden, he adopted the alias COH which can be read in Cyrillic as well as in Latin and means in Russian 'sleep' or 'dream'. CoH was once a collaborator of Coil and also worked with Annie Anxiety, Richard Chartier and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Side projects include oxy and SoiSong (a band with ex-Coil member Peter Christopherson)