Faitiche presents the album Exq I by Berlin underground techno legends Muellie Messiah & Punk not Punk, mainly known under their 100Records moniker. Weighing in at 36 minutes, the track was recorded in 2010, effortlessly intermingling dub, drone and collage, a blend achieved thanks to the duo’s jazz-inspired approach to improvisation. 100records is one of the last undiscovered treasures of the Berlin underground of the 1990s and 2000s. Like Elektro Music Department, 100records is unthinkable without techno and the club scene, but with a few exceptions the duo’s tracks are not aimed at the dancefloor. With a claim to universality and a broader frame of reference, 100records developed a more extensive understanding of sound that rests on three pillars: the understated analogue drums of the Roland TR-808, a blurred, dubby sound, and improvisation. On first hearing, Exq I has little in common with the groovy, detailed, variation-rich sound usually associated with100records. Recorded at the end of a highly productive decade, it is an echo speaking of exhaustion in which dub, drone and collage converge to form something whose jazz sensibility makes it readily identifiable as the work of 100records. 100records was founded in 1994 by Muellie Messiah (Dirk Budde) and Ekki 808 (Ekkehard Rau), who were joined in 1999 by Punk not Punk (Martin Osti). Around 2002, Ekki departed, leaving Budde and Osti to continue as a duo. Since then, their relationship has shaped 100records: Budde is the driven lone genius doggedly pursuing sounds, Osti the pragmatist who turns ideas into music. (...) Atari Cubase sequencing became their speciality, with Budde and Osti sometimes working several days on a single sequence. The counterpart to these prepared sequences was live improvisation – on stage and in the studio. The recordings were edited by Budde, circulating as a weekly series of CD-Rs among friends and fellow musicians. In 2010 they stopped making music because, as Osti says, “we couldn’t do it any more”. From then on, the material was edited into final versions. In 2020, they completed their “legacy” in the form of 101 tracks. A number of these tracks have been released on SJ Tequilla’s Shot of T label, on Dynamo Dreesen’s Acido Records – and now on Jan Jelinek’s faitiche. The faitiche release Exq I was made in the late period, in 2010, referred to by Osti as the New Music phase, when their productions became sparser and simpler. “This track is special for us. It made itself in the production process while we fought a weeks-long sound battle. The analogue equipment got warmed up over a few days, it wanted to keep going. We were like: Wow!” In the decade-long process of editing the track, the focus was on reduction and deceleration: heavy dub. “Once we took some strong ecstasy. That heightened the effect, giving us a direct experience of the hallucinatory impact of the extended modulations.” Alexis Waltz, 2023