Trentemøller — The Last Resort (Vinyl Edition)

Trentemøller

The Last Resort (Vinyl Edition)

Released
2006
Format
Vinyl, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, Album, Remastered, Stereo
Label
Poker Flat Recordings · PFRLP18
minimal-techno
Electronic AbstractIDMMinimal
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The Last Resort (2006, Poker Flat) sits at the bridge between two aesthetics its moment was connecting for the first time. Poker Flat is Steve Bug’s Berlin-by-way-of-Mannheim label, adjacent to the minimal techno world, but what Trentemøller was building here had more in common with film scoring than with dancefloor minimalism: drowned, melancholic, wide spatial arrangements, a deliberate slowness.

2006 was the year European electronic music collectively figured out it could be melancholic without being chillout-fluff. Burial’s debut appeared the same year. The Last Resort arrived at the same cultural moment by a different route — minimal techno slowing down and going inward, discovering that the negative space had a mood in it. The connection forward to the Italians Do It Better aesthetic is direct: this record is one of the things that showed it was possible.