Studio 1

Continuing with the essential reissue campaign of long-unavailable Wolfgang Voigt classics from the '90s, Kompakt follows up the massive Gas box set, Nah Und Fern, with a look back on his Studio 1 moniker. Studio 1 began as a series of twelve-inches in the pre-Kompakt years of 1995 to 1997. This, you could argue, is the series that first pushed Voigt into the ranks of those rare few who were up to something different. He'd been steadily producing techno from the beginning of the '90s and by the time he'd got to Studio 1, Voigt had achieved a culmination of art and personality that had not yet been much explored by his contemporaries. The lurching, almost severe minimalism featured on these singles in 1995 had little debt to Detroit, Belgium or any other international scene; it was equally functional and avant-garde at the same time. It was dance music but it was also geometry, a marriage of electronic theory and soundsystem compulsion. It wouldn't be long before other German artists raised their brows and followed Voigt into the intellectualization of minimal techno, just as he left it behind, and though that scene got oversaturated during the next five years and polarized the entire dance community, Studio Eins still stands as a classic of techno development, an era in which Wolfgang Voigt began to flex his potential and all of electronic music reaped the benefits.