- Music that drifts in a hazy zone between ambient and club.
- D Man is Dirk Mantei, an OG of '90s rave in southwest Germany, especially Heidelberg, where he ran the club HD800 and made music with people like Move D. Aside from one digital EP in 2016, all of his records came out in the mid-'90s. Based on the tape hiss and analog sounds of Workshop 25, you get the impression these tracks were made around then, too. Either way, they are precisely the kind of thing Workshop exists to release: music that drifts in a hazy zone between ambient and club, and that likely would have gone unheard if not for Even Tuell and Lowtec's label.
A few tracks here are, on a basic level, DJ-friendly: the cold piano house of the A1, the muffled techno of the B3, the dreamy, slow-building acid of the A3 (as with most Workshop releases, all tracks on the record are untitled). The others have a more ambiguous time and place. There may be a party where the sleepy, 103-BPM groove of the B2 would work, but you can't imagine what it would look like. An electro beat appears in the B1, but with just one minute left to go in the track. The A2, a quasi-hip-hop groove under a twinkling synth melody, is the squarest peg of them all, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the best.
TracklistA1 Untitled 1
A2 Untitled 2
A3 Untitled 3
B1 Untitled 4
B2 Untitled 5
B3 Untitled 6