Vainqueur – post-apocalyptic dub

I’ve been listening to a lot of minimal techno again lately, by far the majority of it is the Berlin stuff. I’ve never really clicked with majority the Detroit axis – the exceptions being Drexciya/UR – I miss the texture, the sounds generally sound a bit cheap/pre-set. Hands up – I confess: I have cloth ears. I never really got the Carl Craig comment about Kraftwerk and Funkadelic in a lift. Kraftwerk (years before Detroit) always more than sufficed for me. And along come some more bloody Germans in the person of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus and add something significant to the template. Actually that undersells it entirely. They reinvent the template – downright minimalism, cloud form, textural emphasis, a memory-less physical space for dreaming – and they accumulate a number of like-minded individuals and put them out on Chain Reaction and Basic Channel, married to a brilliant, similarly minimal visual aesthetic. Sigh.

So to the subject in hand – one of Chain Reaction’s pivotal figures, Vainqueur, is an artist who applies his minimalism to his rate of output as much as to the music itself. Vainqueur’s only album to date, Elevations (1997) – a collection of his CR 12″s – establishes the parameters of his particular brand of post-apocalyptic dub. Over the duration of the CD’s 66 minutes, Techno’s brutal pulse is gradually reduced to vapour. It’s music for after the fall, once the fuel’s been exhausted, the air’s thin and the skies are occluded. Vainqueur’s synthetic sound scaping sketches a deracinated future that’s simultaneously scary and fascinating to behold. Conditions reach an extreme on the seventh and eighth tracks, Elevation I (Version 3) and Solanus (Extracted): the wound wasn’t cauterised in time, the bass has seaped away through the failed air lock. All that’s left is a sense of exhausted lassitude. This is entropy incarnate and such a long journey from the pulsing, leaping freefall of opener Antistatic that once the end’s reached, it’s different to recall the original point of departure.

I’m making these observations now because I’ve been listening to Vainqueur’s remix of Rhythm & Sound’s Rise and Praise (from the See Mi Yah Remix CD) which reduces Koki’s vocals to a wraith-like mist floating atop a similarly fugitive rhythm.

It’s an extension of Faith, a 12″ released by René Löwe (Vainqueur’s real name) in 2003 and featuring Tikiman on vocal duties. It appears on the latter’s False Tuned an affiliate label of Chain Reaction/Burial Mix.

Probably Vainqueur’s highest profile release to date is the remix collaboration with Substance (Peter Kuschnereit, CR label-mate and also a rare but brilliant recording artist) under the name Scion. Scion Arrange And Process Basic Channel Tracks (2002) is a 9 part mix which layers and strips and edits much of the Basic Channel catalogue into a new, less minimal, more eventful form. It’s a more than viable counterpart to Richie Hawtin’s reconstruction projects (DE9 Closer To The Edit, Transitions, etc.) Scion’s Emerge was also the the inaugural release (CR-01) on Chain Reaction in 1995.

The duo reappeared unexpectedly late last year with the mandatory Surface/Immersion 12″ (crunchy, minimal, extended, timeless) as Substance and Vainqueur on a newly created sub-label, Scion Versions. Given the concentrated brilliance of each of their releases, it’s very much to be hoped that there’ll be more from each of them.

Useful link: Vainqueur discography