drumcell: sleep complex

The debut album from Drumcell is an emotionally-profound, open-minded approach to current techno with a variety of influences and a complete disregard for any limitations musical genres could possibly represent. A few basic facts about the life of this dedicated techno activist will help you understand the absorbing atmosphere of this exceptional record even better. To cut a long story short, Drumcell was still just young Moe Espinosa, a local East L.A. kid who was heavily into listening and playing rock and industrial music, when he coincidentally found some of the heroic synthesizers of the first hour of techno in the closet of a recording studio where he had been hired for a job. From this very minute on, things just gelled. If you imagine a technology geek/science-fiction-movies-loving teenage-outsider with a yearning, punk rock soul, together with a TR-909, a TR-808, and a TB-303 in the back room of an old Latin house label in Hollywood, then you are pretty much imagining the humble beginnings of the man who started calling himself Drumcell around the year 2000 and who has dedicated his life to the search and creation of mind-expanding, glorious sounds. His first vinyl record was hand-pressed and hand-wrapped in an L.A. garage, and when he handed out some copies of it on the following Detroit Electronic Music Festival, it was played on various festival stages the very next day. This immediate enthusiasm gave him enough power and endurance to go all the way and follow his dream uncompromisingly. On the one hand, Sleep Complex pays respect to the root-element of techno, the raw, dirty and hypnotic vibe that goes back to early Detroit techno; on the other hand, it almost has some kind of a rock attitude, especially when it comes to the beats, making it stylistically independent and impossible to pigeon-hole. It also makes very little sense to talk separately about individual tracks on the album, as each single piece of music is a sophisticated, complex sonic landscape, which is interconnected with the others and ultimately forms part of a bigger entity. As it was meant to be a bass-heavy record, and he thought that no one could treat a bass like Chris Liebing, his dear Frankfurt-based friend eventually had the great pleasure to do the final mixes, giving the tracks a beautifully-shaped bass sound and incredible presence and clarity. The album is an experimentation with analog modular synthesizers and a variety of digital tools. By working within the limitations of an individual instrument, it inspired each single song to have its own unique feeling or sound.