Two years ago Berlin-based Get Physical was belatedly recognised as the label for voluptuous, hook-heavy electro-house, but by this point it was already moving on. Booka Shade's "Mandarine Girl", issued last May, announced a paradigm shift, its sheets of noise and spiralling synth riffs reaching out to both the most stentorian minimal and the most epic trance. Other artists have followed in the duo's wake, crafting records that perversely treat "minimal" as a license to create grooves of impossible largesse. In the process, Get Physical has become a byword for arty-but-populist records with crossover potential-- from one genre enclave to another and from cult status to mass consumption.
Booka Shade are perfectly placed to capitalize on this unexpected ubiquity, and while their 2004 debut Memento surprised many with its noirish, claustrophobic vibe, Movements is the gregarious corrective: not only the better record, but friendlier, larger, and more epochal in its survey of the varied delights of German house and techno. And at times it does feel like a survey, moving from rumbling Metro Area disco ("Night Falls") to fluttering Isolée falter-funk ("The Birds and the Beats") to beautiful Kompakt techno-pop ("Wasting Time") with an unselfconscious grace the belies the album's range.
If Get Physical increasingly resembles early Warp in its elevation of club dynamics to a steely artform, Movements might be its equivalent of LFO's Frequencies-- a record whose state of the art grooves were equally suited to sweaty dancefloors and the close intimacy of headphones. Indeed, while some grooves are more physical than others, everything about Movements seems deliberately designed to subvert the usual inverse relationship between a dance record's club-readiness and home-friendliness: "Darko" might boast heart-tugging synth melodies worthy of Boards of Canada, but its cavernous, bass-heavy production begs to be showcased over huge speakers in a rammed warehouse. Likewise, the duo's "interpretation" of "Body Language", their 2005 hit with M.A.N.D.Y., begins with a meandering guitar and reggae lilt intro perversely playing cat and mouse with a mnemonic bassline hook, but it soon builds into a sultry house groove whose brazen physicality leaves the original resembling a wallflower.
But Booka Shade's dab hand with a groove should hardly surprise-- after all, as backroom producers for DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y., they've been partly responsible for most of the music on the most reliable dance music label of the past four years. Rather, it's the unexpected emotive quality to the music on Movements that entrances. "In White Rooms", the album's simplest moment, is also its best: A succession of ascending trance-like riffs over a straightforward house groove, with no other purpose than to lay claim to your heart and your tear-ducts. It feels intensely nostalgic, even if, like me, you're too young and/or too far from Germany to actually appreciate its evocation of early 90s trance parties. The nostalgia is not merely for a particular sound or moment, but for the youthful conviction that music can change the world, can change us, merely by its astonishing power and newness. But I swear there is a moment only 30 seconds before the end of this (rather cruelly foreshortened) track where it feels like the duo are actually inventing new emotionsÉso maybe their nostalgia is premature.
Booka Shade will never achieve the auteur status of figures like Ricardo Villalobos, and I suspect they prefer it that way-- after all, these are the guys who ghost-produce records for their labelmates, and make their money from writing nifty tunes for commercials. Rather than seduce with ostentatious artistry, what they offer is a superlative functionalism: Dance music so perfect it can't help but move you.
