Thomas Fehlmann - Gute Luft
Label: Kompakt – KOMPAKT 211
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, CD
Country: Germany
Released: March 29, 2010
Genre: Electronic
Style: Dub Techno, Tech House, Ambient
Gute Luft arrived in 2010 as Thomas Fehlmann's third solo album on Kompakt — and it carries the particular quality of music made under unusual circumstances, shaped into something deeply personal in the process. Born from months of work scoring 24h Berlin, the longest documentary film in history, the album is Fehlmann's own ideal version of that soundtrack — the hours of material created for the film re-tweaked, edited and distilled into fifteen tracks that ask a simple question: what holds Berlin together? His answer is the air itself. The good old Berliner Luft, touching everyone and everything in equal measure.
The music moves with the unhurried, open-eyed quality that has always defined Fehlmann's best work — classic Detroit house and techno woven through with the submerged beauty of Berlin dub, themes and sounds recurring in various forms across both records like a city glimpsed from different angles at different hours. From his early days in Palais Schaumburg and 3MB alongside Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald, through his work with The Orb and his long relationship with Kompakt, few producers have synthesised Berlin's electronic music history with more fluency or more warmth. Gute Luft is that synthesis at its most expansive and most at ease.
