Wolfgang Voigt - Kafkatrax

Well this is a total godsend for folks like myself that missed out on the super limited art edition 12”s that were only available directly from Kompakt. Three different 12”s and just 199 copies of each. Thank fuck though the tracks have not vanished into the ether and are now available for us who were either too skint or too slow off the mark to snaffle the vinyl editions. The concept here is fairly simple: Almost all of the audio/sounds except for the kick drum have all been created via samples of a Kafka audiobook. For those blissfully unaware then it's worth mentioning that Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language novelist whom the term Kafkaesque refers to in modern language - you know like just in the same way Ballardian is a proper word. Anyway by snatching these words and fragments of dialogue and looping etc. Wolfgang creates a mesmerising brand of minimal techno with the resultant atmosphere created being totally “Kafkaesque”, that is paranoid/ psychotic. The overall effect is fantastic, I especially like the pitched down vocal parts and the way the tracks still manage to be really groovy and floor friendly. But then Voigt has always been a master of displaying how an artist can still be wildly experimental and conceptual on the dancefloor. I think 'Kafkatrax 3.1' is probably the darkest, with a brooding atmosphere reminiscent of The Advent's 'House Seed' track. I'm reminded of a post-dancefloor narcotic state where real or imagined words and phrases play through your mind and eat away at the subconscious, questioning whether you in fact had heard that phrase on the dancefloor or whether it is just post-drug psychosis at work. Of course it would have been ace to score these on vinyl but a CD release gives these tracks the wider audience they deserve.