Various Artists - Clicks + Cuts (Full Album 2000) Minimal Techno//Micro House//Glitch

[Celerity]

Label: Mille Plateaux – mp79, Mille Plateaux – _mp 79_, Mille Plateaux – mp 79
Series: Clicks & Cuts
Format:
2 x CD, Compilation
Country: Germany
Released: Jan 2000
Genre: Electronic
Style: Abstract, IDM, Experimental

A truly visionary release, Clicks & Cuts rounds up an ensemble of Europe's most forward-looking minimal techno producers in an effort to both investigate and define the glitch aesthetic that was in its formative stage at the time of this compilation's release in 2000. Conceived by Mille Plateaux, this double-disc compilation ambitiously looks beyond the label's own stable of artists, licensing tracks by non-Mille Plateaux producers as well: Wolfgang Voight (as All), Thomas Brinkmann (as Ester Brinkmann), Pansonic, and Pole. Given these characteristics, along with its glossy packaging and conceptual liner notes, the album impresses you even before the music begins. The inaugural listen proves to be an insightful experience full of surprises: Frank Bretschneider begins the album with stark ambience held together by a intricate yet remarkably fragile rhythm; Farben injects sheets of crackling static into his thumping track; Vladislav Delay crafts a lumbering, rambling dub-techno excursion; Pansonic toys with the reverberating silence; Dettinger presents a dizzying aural whirlwind; Kit Clayton pulls at sounds, stretching them beyond recognition; and so on. Obviously, with so many experimental artists and this much conceptual ambition, the results will be varied, and Clicks & Cuts indeed seems like a mixed bag at times. Regardless, this collection's breadth and the underlying concept make it so monumental. More than any other such collection, Clicks & Cuts is clearly the official genesis of the early-2000s glitch movement, the touchstone upon which later volumes and successive generations would build.