Tax included, Shipping not included
Answer Code Request returns with his sophomore album Gens on Ostgut Ton,
entering darker but equally bass-heavy territory.
Answer Code Request’s 2014 debut LP Code was an exciting moment for electronic music
in Berlin – one that offered a break from the eternal hall and monolithic 4/4 kicks that ruled
the city’s club landscape. As a hybrid gesture, the album’s spirit recalled an especially
fruitful era in the German capital from the mid-90s to early 2000s, when dub and paddriven
Detroit techno cross-pollinated with Berlin’s industrial aesthetic to create one of the
city’s most exciting musical chapters.
Today the musical vision offered by Berghain resident Answer Code Request, real name
Patrick Gräser, has proved far-sighted. While at first glance electronic music in 2018
seems increasingly balkanized, borders between genres have once again become fuzzier.
Now, on his follow up LP Gens, Gräser looks beyond the bass euphoria of Code toward
darker horizons and a desolate atmosphere befitting of current global circumstances.
In a sense, Gens (Latin for tribe or lineage) reverses the notion of the hardcore continuum
as proposed by music journalist Simon Reynolds: embedded in a tradition of US and
continental European techno, Gräser seeks its disruption through hardcore outgrowths,
from ambient jungle to later variations of British bass music and IDM. It’s an interesting
twist when seen in the larger biographical context of Gräser who, born and raised outside
of Berlin in early 1980s, jumped from East German youth radio DT64 to American hip-hop,
acid and early UK hardcore – a radical shift of musical interest born of a radical shift in
political circumstances.
On Gens, the unsettling atmosphere is established early on with the fading rave opener of
the album’s synonymous title track, and continues through the scrambled military
communications and post dubstep rhythms of “Sphera”. From there, sci-fi pads, heavy
phasing and alien syncopation lead explorative third track “Ab Intus” out into space. A
glimmer of otherworldly positivity arrives with the warm, distorted breakbeats and
interwoven synth melodies of album standout “knbn2”, while Gräser’s most dancefloororiented
melds jungle and techno, Amen and 4/4 kicks, on “Cicadae”.
Tracklist
Track 1
Track 2
Track 3
Track 4
Track 5
Track 6
Track 7
Track 8
Track 9
Track 10
Track 11
Track 12