living004
releasedate: July 2007

A1: 1914 Rework
B1: 1914 Original
B2: 1914 Random Man RMX

FREE: Sometimes (right click, save as)

1914 is a grass roots minimal techno record deep in grooves and deep in imagery.

1914 was an important year in human history. Pain, suffering, wars, heroic events. People and their politics. But nothing has changed. 100 years later the wars and suffering continue.

The starting point of this material is a child’s love and nostalgia for war’s forgotten, discarded heroes. Battleships died just like people did. Close your eyes and visualize that battleship struggling with the seas. In darkness, fighting the war and feeling its cold face intimately boyant against the abysmal depths of the black sea. In some mysterious way Taylan has used the Techno form to soundtrack this dark, lost, melancholic abstract tale of forgotten heroes.

The original is uncompromising in this expression. Throbbing, bleak yet somehow at home with itself.

The rework is aimed squarely at the dancefloor. Tight, harsh and crisp clubby beats are nicely counter played by the battleship lost at sea atmospherics.

While Randoman’s remix is paced somewhere in-between. All at once classy and slick and moody and gruff.

quote:
Taylan’s 1914 EP is a great example of new electronic music: the rhythmic foundation is deft and incisive, but additional sounds and textures create different and more complicated rhythms in tension with the main beats: rationality counterpoised with irrationality, reality with fantasy, tragedy with ecstasy. And in his choice of harmonies, pacing, and texture, Taylan brings a genuine artistic sensibility to the music that makes it some of the best I’ve ever heard.

Rob Haskins
Assistant Professor of Music
University of New Hampshire