Quit Smoking Monday

Deary me, check this for a lineup of artists and remixers : intricate, person, solotempo, bitstream, skanfrom, team doyobi, plastique de reve, plaid, made+ad vanz, phonem and loads more! Switzerland's Spezial Materials imprint has amassed a huge following in the course of its 3-year lifespan to date. Friends of the label, including Autechre's Rob Brown & Sean Booth, Gescom's Rob Hall, Plaid's Ed and Andy, Mark Broom and countless others have served to illustrate the label's ability to inject a freshness of attitude and aesthetic development to a genre that has always cut itself close to the edge. The music has spread its wings to encompass the most advanced form of digital electronic composition, while the packaging has evolved from hand-stitched fabric vinyl sleeves, to orange-dyed hand-carved and assembled wooden CD boxes.This is the third compilation on the label so far, and the first to be given a full commercial release. Split impeccably between a showcase of forthcoming attractions and a catalogue of remixers to die for, the emphasis lies from start to finish on innovation and collectability. A full line-up of core artists is present, from the developed complex crunch of Intricate's "Tinizong" and "Hund", to Softland's delicate piano and bass modulation, to Person's twisted digital hip hop grind and Solotempo's killer squashed beats and malfunctions - leaving you with a good idea of how and why so many key artists volunteered their remixing skills for a project of this scale. And on to those artists - we start with a blistering scratch-attack, a bass-heavy mashup of beats and twists courtesy of the mighty Bitstream, before Skanfrom's 8-bit drum computer gears itself up for a distinctly Bochum-Weltian affair, creating a plastic electro vibe for the kids. Team Doyobi deploy all known forms of Atari presets for a crunchy construction of weazing synths and heavyweight beats, spastic styles, while fellow Skam agents Made & Advanz (Advanz was last seen on one of our all-time favourite 12"s four years ago going head to head with Gescom on one mighty mutha of a track for Fat Cat's split series), carefully place sections of metallic beats alongside pure sci-fi melodies and textures - blinding stuff. Plaid, meanwhile, unleash one of their tuffest, most complex tracks for a long while, complete with shards of DSP skins and transposed melodies, if only they made tracks like this more often! Plastique de Reve, meanwhile, pull out the stops for an all-out appregiated future-disco number in darkest Italo fashion. All housed in ultra-luxurious SM packaging, you know what to do! Killer.

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