LP, clear vinyl, ltd. 350 copies
A1 Entropie 1 7:58 B1 Entropie 4 9:22
A2 Entropie 2 7:09 B2 Entropie 5 5:25 A3 Entropie 3 2:07
Musik by Andreas Reihse and Isaac Bigsby Trogdon
Mastered and Cut by Mike Grinser at Dubplates & Mastering.
Artwork by Nadim Vardag
Entropie, the second release by NYT, again is a collaboration. Based on a soundtrack originally composed for a short film of the same title, it is the outcome of a productive exchange between Andreas Reihse from the well-known band Kreidler, and Isaac Bigsby Trogdon, musician and DJ known for his show Dyssembler at Berlin Community Radio.
The film itself, which was directed by Nadim Vardag and Michael Franz and released in 2012, to large parts creates its highly aesthetic and willfully formulaic atmosphere from Reihse's and Trogdon's dark repetitive techno loops. The music shifts from background to foreground while we see people at a private party getting drunk and weirdly conversing in overly clever sounding quotations from canonical literature on techno, art theory, and thermodynamics. It could be anywhere; it doesn't lead anywhere, but looks incredible good. The music thereby is both soundtrack and leitmotiv; Entropie is about techno as sound and experience - an exploration in losing oneself in both structure and place.
Also a player in the film, it is Trogdon's character that is largely in charge of the music as well - putting on records and playing air drums. For the record version of the soundtrack he and Reihse took up the shifting back- to foreground of the film's audio and transfigured scenic shifts into technoid structures. The five tracks, which expand and deepen the cool minimalism of the original material, develop slowly. Remixing and re-working the central motives from the film, the LP evokes a rough atmosphere that is both industrial and tribal - machine music for a common purpose, which at the same time is never much more than a minimal, bass driven beat.
The last track on the first side (A3) is the only piece taken directly from the film, and functions somewhat as the Entropie theme. Ending in a locked groove, it reproduces the endless loop that the characters in the film are caught up in, and that we as listeners now might get caught up in too, before we turn the record and start all over again.
Unlike the generic white label records that Trogdon puts on in the film however, this album is an artwork in itself. Designed by Vardag, the all-transparent vinyl in a transparent sleeve is also adorned with a bubble sticker of a cocktail glass - a reference to the film's poster and a playful symbol for both the party and entropy.
Fiona McGovern