- Given the outsized proportions big singles sometimes take on in dance music's hive mind, it's easy to forget that so much of it is the product of one person alone in a bedroom tinkering with machines. Lifetrax, the first transmission from a Wiesbaden-based producer named Florian Kupfer, is just this sort of record.
Lifetrax sounds like its ostensible creation process: in the dreamy chug of the title track, you can practically hear the dust settling on the weathered machines churning it out. Kupfer's electro drums sputter to life after a brief introduction and fade away in under six minutes, but there's an endlessness to the moment he creates. A second version achieves a similar feel, though Kupfer's knob-twiddling becomes more manic and lends the track an urgency entirely absent in the first take. The noise floor is almost oppressively high on the slower and chunkier "Feelin," but the peculiar vocals and wandering melodies that push through the morass make it a club track against all odds. A "Dubb Micx" sharpens the original's teeth, recasting "Feelin" as a minor-key stomper. In all, Lifetracks sounds less like a big debut than the remnants of a few late and lonely yet magical nights.
Tracklist A1 Lifetrax
A2 Lifetrax (Version 2)
B1 Feelin
B2 Feelin (Dubb Micx)