Forty Five Minutes Of Kruder And Dorfmeister

Kruder and Dorfmeister, a trip hop/ downtempo duo from Austria, first found acclaim in 1993 with their G- Stoned EP. Their late night hazy, blunted tunes and remixes are the stuff post- club nights are made of, head nodding, drawn out tunes that slip by in a beautiful fug. The got phone calls and remix requests came in throughout the 90s, from Depeche Mode, Madonna, Roni Size, Alex Reece, David Holmes, Bomb The Bass and Lamb. In 1998 they compiled many of their remixes with a selection of their own tracks as The Kruder And Dorfmeister Sessions two CDs, four pieces of vinyl), an album which last year got the full re- release treatment. The pair, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, are touring in May to promote it. The mix below is a forty five minute selection of some of that album. Any of the tracks in the mix could have been substituted for any of the other twenty eight tracks from the album without any discernible dip in quality. They found a sound, refined it and  brought it to bear on whoever's music they touched. Rattly, slowed down hip hop drum breaks, subsonic bass, snatches of vocals, one or two words max, found sounds, an aural smoke filled haze flecked with jazzy organ fills, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... hovering close by. Sunday sounds for early February. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Kruder And Dorfmeister

• Lamb: Trans Fatty Acid (K&D Session)
• Bomb The Bass: Bug Powder Dust (Dub Remixed By Kruder and Dorfmeister)
• Kruder And Dorfmeister: Lexicon
• Strange Cargo: Million Town (K&D Session)
• David Holmes: Gone (K&D Session)
• Rockers Hi- Fi: Going Under (K&D Session)
• Roni Size: Heroes (Kruder's Long Loose Bossa)

Lamb were/ are a duo from Manchester, producer Andy Barlow and singer/ songwriter Lou Rhodes, jazz/ hip hop/ trip hop/ drum and bass, best known for their single Gorecki. They split in 2004 to pursue solo projects but reformed a few years later and have performed intermittently ever since. 

Bomb The Bass is the musical outfit for the legendary Tim Simenon, the man who made one of the first British acid house/ sample based records, Beat Dis. If you're looking for origin stories, Beat Dis is hard to beat. Bug Powder Dust came out in 1994, a powerful piece of mid 90s hip hop (from the third Bomb The Bass album Clear) with Justin Warfield on vocals. There were remixes aplenty- Dust Brothers, La Funk Mob, DJ Muggs (from Cypress Hill) and Kruder and Dorfmeister. 

Lexicon is a short interlude piece of music, one minute of Kruder and Dorfmeister from the Sessions album.

Strange Cargo was one of William Orbit's solo aliases, resulting in four albums- Strange Cargo, II, III and Hinterland. Strange Cargo III is the pick for me, 1993 ambient/ downtempo/ global/ dub classic with Beth Orton on vocals on the superb water From A Vine Leaf. Million Town was on Strange Cargo Hinterland from 1995.

Gone was a single from David Holmes' 1995 debut album, This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats, with Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell on vocals. It's a gloriously low slung trip hop torch song and was remixed by Two Lone Swordsmen as well as Kruder and Dorfmeister. K&D strip it right down to the bones. 

Rockers Hi- Fi are an electronic dub outfit from Birmingham, starting out as Original Rockers in 1991 and changing their name in 94. Going Under was from '97, deep and dubbed out. 

Roni Size famously won the Mercury Prize in 1997 with his album New Forms, drum and bass entering the mainstream (a move first made by Goldie in 1994 with Inner City Life). Bristol had already cemented its reputation with Massive Attack and Portishead, and Roni Size had attended house parties run by The Wild Bunch Soundsystem so the torch was being well and truly passed on. New Forms and the single Brown Paper Bag especially became festival favourites. The Mercury Prize became a bit of millstone around Roni's neck I think and he continued to plough his furrow with further albums in 2002, 2004 and 2014.