it's my pleasure Patrick
hope you don't mind me sharing the liner notes
==
Florence / Wladimir M. Eevo Lute Retrospective liner notes by Oliver
Warwick
“Discover how to dance. Discover how to move. Explore yourself. Move
yourself. Use all of your skills. Use all of your energy. Move yourself
in the music.”
The message couldn’t have been clearer to anyone dropping the needle on
the very first transmission from Eevo Lute Muzique. In 1991, it was a
useful guide to have (from an Atari ST speech synthesizer, no less).
From the Detroit flash point to the early European adopters, techno was
changing month on month, and reaching uninitiated ears with every new
outpost and iteration. A little advice from our electric friends made
clear this was experimental music that required a little cognitive
interaction.
Of course all those tentative steps towards a European take on Detroit
techno manifested in the shadows of the pioneers, so it was significant
that both EEVO001 (aptly named U.S. Heritage) and EEVO002 received
explicit approval from the source via a licensed US release on Planet E.
Carl Craig’s label had only put out one single prior – his own seminal 4
Jazz Funk Classics 12”, before opting to showcase this emergent sound
from Europe.
That sound was the work of Stefan Robbers and Wladimir Manshanden, who
were embarking on a new adventure into electronics with Eevo Lute
Muzique. Florence was a new alias for Robbers, who was already one of
the undisputed pioneers of Dutch techno. His releases as Terrace
inaugurated Eindhoven institution Djax-Up-Beats, Saskia Slegers (Miss
Djax)’s seminal troublemaker of a label. The feeling from Eevo Lute was
different though, less indebted to gnarly Midwestern jack and more in
thrall to Detroit’s loftiest dreamscapes.
Much like the Detroit pioneers though, the inspiration behind Eevo Lute
went back further than the late ‘80s. Robbers and Manshanden were
drawing on the synth-fuelled, lyrically-charged soothsaying of Anne
Clarke, Trisomie 21 and Pet Shop Boys as much as the pure machine
messages of the Belleville Three et al. It’s a quality that became one
of the defining factors of Eevo Lute’s early run, and in particular
Manshanden’s techno poems. This embrace of verbal expression lent a very
human heart to the music, and afforded them the chance to carry more
overt political messages in the music too. It’s a quality that carried
through to the records themselves – hand-drawn illustrations and
graphics channeling the counter-culture street energy of graffiti rather
than the often-faceless mystique of conventional techno aesthetics.
Eevo Lute provided early support for many of the artists who would go on
to define Dutch techno in the ‘90s – Jochem Peteri (as Ross 154), Dylan
Hermelijn (as 2000 and One), Erwin van Moll (as max 404), David Caron
and more besides. There were others lighting the way too – it would be
remiss to ignore Jochem Paap releasing on Plus 8 Records as Speedy J as
early as 1991, or some of the other Djax-Up alumnus such as Random XS
and Like A Tim. But just as important was the growing international
techno scene, which Eevo Lute was naturally patched into. Beyond the
aforementioned early link with Planet E, Robbers and Manshanden were
also exchanging ideas, remixes and releases with the likes of Baby Ford,
Kirk Degiorgio, Underground Resistance, New Electronica and General
Production Recordings.
There were plenty of other styles that took shape as techno culture
spread throughout the world – some harder, some softer, some dafter,
some sterner – but this particular interconnected swirl of artists and
labels holds true to the original vision the Detroit pioneers had for
the music they were making. It wasn’t just music as function, but a
vessel for expression. Listen to any one of the tracks gathered here
from the early run of Eevo Lute’s archives and you’ll hear the synths
speak as lyrically as Manshanden’s vocals. The beats often skitter
around the 4/4 meter, but rarely feel beholden to the rigidity that
could be found in other iterations of techno. It’s also worth stressing
this music had its own particular slant. It would be hard to name a
particular precedent (or indeed descendent) of a track like “Robotica”,
a veritable mess of crunchy drum break samples and erratic monophonic
blips that wrestled its own groove out of the grid.
Having these works gathered in one consolidated release across 10 sides
of vinyl, it’s easier to marvel at the coherence of what Robbers and
Manshanden were pursuing. The sound is joyous at times, moody at others,
but always rooted in the human experience. It’s a well-worn trope that
the best science-fiction is about people more than technology, and so it
goes here. Even at its most intricate, the emphasis is on composition
and narrative rather than sound design and studio trickery. That’s
precisely why the message reaches across the decades and still
resonates. The same goes for Manshanden’s poetry. The monologue at the
beginning of “Planet E” is a chilling case in point – a damning
indictment of the state of the world that feels even more grimly
relevant in 2020 than it was in 1991. The human race has been grappling
with its own future since the industrial revolution, and it’s up to
artists like these to try and make sense of it all with a necessary dose
of compassion.
“How can I live in a world where ‘to have’ seems to be more important
than ‘to be’?”
On 04-Mar-20 20:30, Patrick Wacher wrote:
Hats off to Mr Delsin for getting these two releases together...
music, packaging are just spot on.
https://www.delsinrecords.com/release/6266/wladimir-m/leaves-fallin-recklessly
https://www.delsinrecords.com/release/6268/florence/analogue-expressions
Thanks,
⌘⌥P
