Pentax was an alias — as best I can tell, now dormant — of the prolific Cologne-based producer Reinhard Voigt; Das Album should probably be considered a classic of the more uncompromising end of minimal techno. Music so pure and obdurate is hard enough to find.
Das Album seems to be constructed entirely in the unfolding of its own endless undulating surface, its rhythms — sometimes with a brutal (Schaffel-ish?) swing — all but stripped of reference to any approximation of acoustic instrumentation. Especially at the right volume (loud!), the whole thing feels like it’s occupying every available space with an almost-oppressive presence, wholly opposed to the crisp precision of certain other strands of techno. As tracks progress, they are often interspersed or overlaid with sounds reminiscent of malfunctioning, decomposing machinery, introducing an unpredictability that has nothing to do with human impulsiveness and that does nothing to disperse the immediacy of it all. Even as it feels as though its lack of clear hooks, melodies, track titles, etc. might render it remote and inaccessibly abstract, Das Album is utterly concrete in its unadulterated devotion to the pulsing mechanics of its sound.
It’s slightly surprising, then, to find that, in the briefest of one-line descriptions typical of the sparseness of information available about it, Kompakt’s website suggests that Das Album is a concept album. For my part though, I’m damned if I can figure out what the concept actually is — there’s barely a concession to the cerebral or emotional life of the listener (not that this means the majority of the time it gives the impression of being geared toward dancefloor euphoria!). But maybe, rather than being in conformity with some misplaced stereotype of “Teutonic” directness, the amusingly blunt title of the album might be the best clue. Perhaps the concept is simply that it is an album at all — a coincidence of form and concept, so to speak, noteworthy in a genre that often might seem to revolve around 12-inch singles intended to be slipped into someone else’s mix. But I speculate. And, mysterious concept notwithstanding, Das Album certainly does feel like an album — if that implies the coherence of the tracks, and particularly if it implies their progression from one to the next. Das Album develops in its own peculiar and arresting way, from its leaden, almost inert beginnings, through the unremitting throb of the second untitled track — a personal highlight, the mechanistic heartbeat of the album — to the slivers of atmosphere and hints of depth and layering that breach the endless repetition later in the album.
It may be that the reason for Das Album’s relatively unsung status is its having been overshadowed by more celebrated contemporaries. It came out, after all, on Profan, a label founded by Wolfgang Voigt prior to the important Kompakt label. Reinhard Voigt is also, of course, brother of and collaborator with Wolfgang Voigt, whose work as Gas, as Studio 1, as M:1:5, among numerous others, is (rightly) acclaimed — in fact, Profan’s entire catalog is pretty much composed of releases by one of the two. Das Album shared a place with a number of projects that laid down a template for German minimal techno — a template in my view barely surpassed inside or outside the constraints of the genre. Yet Das Album strikes me as being at the very least the equal of any of these in its stark single-mindedness.
