After witnessing Berlin producer Recondite perform in Melbourne back in March during his debut tour of Australia, Sonia Miles-Khan came to the conclusion that he is one of the must-see live shows of 2014.
Despite little more than a few years on the international touring circuit, Berlin-based Recondite is one of the world’s most sought after underground artists in 2014. After seeing his incredible live show in Melbourne courtesy of Novel Touring, I can attest to the excellence of his craft. Before taking you through the show, it’s interesting to uncover how Recondite shot to prominence so quickly in the first place; a name that came from literal obscurity to being on so many artist and journalist’s lips.
Lorenz Brunner is hard working by nature. Maintaining his profession as a personal trainer whilst being a touring electronic musician, the work serendipitously lead him to wider acclaim when he realised that Paul Rose – a.k.a. Hotflush head honcho Scuba – was a client at his gym. One of Scuba’s 2011 Sub:stance parties at Panorama Bar became his debut performance and the rest, as they say, is history.
The relative duality between the physical and the emotional features heavily in Brunner’s compositions as Recondite, so too do many of his subconscious and conscious ponderings on other things. The nature of Bavarians, longing for natural surrounds, and the translation of melancholy through the electronic music medium are all subjects that Recondite has explored. This existential take on his music, very separate from club and common music culture, is what makes Recondite stand apart from so many other producers and is possibly the source of his success. He only uses his own stems and whenever he feels that his set needs something new, he relies on making it himself. This pushes the creativity of the self-sufficient artist even further, inspiring him to make things that stand so independent from the majority.
When looking at Brunner’s entire discography to date right up to his most recent EP, attempting to describe his tracks by genre is pointless. His live sets are just as diverse and each is largely exclusive to a genre his music has favoured. In a similar fashion to Donato Dozzy, sometimes it’s a techno set, another ambient.
With that in mind, I didn’t know what to expect when I went to witness his live set for myself. Would it be ambient, with favourites like ‘Riant’? Would he bring a darker styling with the ferocity of ‘Cleric’? Would everything magically appear?
The upstairs of Melbourne’s Brown Alley was as good a place as any to fit such a solid crowd. The brand new Outline rig fitted into Blights Bar that day was well tuned and made all the difference when penetrating the wall of bodies. While Recondite did begin on a slightly ambient note with some immense pads and stems from his downtempo work woven in, it was definitely a techno set. ‘Cleric’ practically set the room on fire and new beat structures worked over epic chord progressions made sure that emotion was still in the air.
It’s quite amazing that despite how commercial his sound can be (and often meandering in the tech-house sphere), Recondite still gets the chinstrokers seal of approval. Well-deserved too, because Recondite understands how to appeal to our sonic needs as human beings; our longing for conventional melodies, interest in unusual rhythms and subconscious love of classic form in composition.
‘Felicity’ was his encore and worked limbs as much as heart strings. When it was over, all I wanted to do was see him perform again to see what new magic it might hold.
https://pulseradio.net/articles/2014/05/recondite-a-must-see-live-show-in-2014