About

Shitkatapult reissues the first three Apparat albums from 2001 to 2003 as a 3-LP package.

Hardly any other musician at the interface between electronic and pop is as greatly cherished and passionately admired as Berlin-based Apparat. He merges the inexhaustible sound worlds of electronic music with the emotional depth of Indie. He makes music to rock out to and to drift away, to sing along to and to dive into. With Moderat, his collaboration with Modeselektor, he has commanded the festival stages over the past several years. He has just completed the soundtrack for the movie “Equals,” and the third Moderat album is in the works. He is also collaborating with theatrical luminary Sebastian Hartmann for the second time.

Most people got to know Apparat through his albums “Walls” and “The Devil´s Walk” and don’t know much about his early, quintessentially electronic music dating back to just after the turn of the millennium. In his early twenties at the time, Apparat created an autonomous, radical sound universe on those albums – long since out of print – that even today has just as fascinating an effect on its listeners as it did back then. Shitkatapult is now bringing the three albums together in a beautifully rendered special edition. Produced between 2001 and 2003, the music has been painstakingly remastered by Mike Grinser. Carsten Aermes, a comrade-in-arms from back in the early days in Quedlinburg, designed the cover based on Apparat’s own original graphic design.

You have to think back to the time at which this music was made and where Apparat was back then. He is born Sascha Ring in Quedlinburg, former East Germany, in 1979. As a teenager he is swept up in the techno revolution and plays as a DJ in the abandoned hangars of the Soviet army. At 19 he moves to Berlin, where techno is still all the rage. But Sascha already knows that he doesn’t want to listen to club beats all day long and continues to explore the innovative music technology MaxMSP in greater depth.

Apparat’s debut album is released in 2001 with the geeky title “Multifunktionsebene.” With its intricate grooves and floating soundscapes, it is conceived from the sound of the time and does its own thing with its differentiated, tuned-down emotional spectrum. It is a recorded moment from another era entirely, which is exactly what makes it so powerful and captivating. “Tttrial and Eror” from 2002 is his electronic opus magnum. Apparat mangles the grooves and develops rhythms with a complexity that makes Aphex Twin seem dull in comparison. And yet from within these tremendous, brutish tracks emerge minute, cautious sounds.

On his third album “Duplex” (2003), his world of sound explodes as he adds acoustic instruments to the electronic ones. Throbbing basses create an absurd contrast with saxophones and clarinets. He defines his acoustic space, which is reminiscent of classical chamber music, intimate and tactile. This is where Sascha lays the foundation for Apparat as we know him. The tracks fade softly away and the needle is lifted up carefully from the record. At that age, most guys are only thinking about girls and parties. We can only marvel at the consummate and broad understanding of music that Apparat had already achieved in his youth. - Shitkatapult

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