Wednesday 22 September 2021

Bite-sized Bits 07

Bernd Luz - Dakar 86 (2015)


Proper flashback for this entry. I still have a lot of love for that golden eras of Electro House of the late 2000s, one that is definitely tinged by nostalgia - after all, that's the time I started seriously writing on here. But for all the love I have for it, there are for sure a couple of tracks I used to be mad about that have lost a bit of their lustre over the years since.

I mention all that to lead into this, I had a Kavinsky tune come on the other day and man, is it as good as ever. OutRun might have been a mixed bag of an album, but I can't argue that the singles from it were all proper belters. It's odd that he just dropped off the map afterwards and hasn't really done anything since, especially considering the massive explosion in Synthwave stuff around that time, Kavinsky was a real trailblazer in that area after all. For my money though, the earlier Kavinsky EPs are still fantastic to this day - at the risk of sounding like a teenager again the SebastiAn remix of Testarossa Autodrive is a straight banger (as is the original, which would even go on to make an appearance on OutRun as well).

Kavinsky's first EP from 2006 Teddy Boy is home to both of them, along with some other oddities like an Arpanet remix of Nightdrive and a chopped up Mr. Oizo remix of Autodrive, but then again this was just before the massive electro house explosion of '07 so a little weirdness is to be expected. I've gone with the original Nightdrive this time - partly because I love an underdog and feel like it gets overlooked but also because it's a damn fine demonstration of how locked in to his style he was from the get-go. Coming back to it, its still a great debut and worth checking out - especially if this is your first hearing of Kavinsky due to his release drought.



-CVF

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