Homesickness or Nostalgia

'Sven Laux presents his first full-length album, after several EP's and remixes, and his first works with Microcosm. Sven's material is a fitting, rich and compelling addition to the catalogue, as his sensibilities are aligned with the label's manifesto while stamping out his own approach to these ideas. Moody at times, freshly uninhibited at others, Homesickness or Nostalgia ponders dance floor music that tethers you to its origins. Equal parts mid-tempo funk and heady found house, Sven uses tropes of the ultra-modern electronic landscape towards his devices, along with a more classic sense of bass tone and forward momentum, of the history of these arenas of 4/4. Quirky and bouncy with a heart that drives through each track, the titles suggest the motivations. Infusing his music not just with an array of non-traditional sound sources, but ones with memory associations, Sven is filling the album with a personal story, even if it is one that only he knows. Truncated vocals befriend street sounds and warm pads. Playful grooves make measured use of beeps, scrapes and static-inflected hooks. Rhythms stutter over themselves in some moments while remaining completely true to form in others. At times it can feel like you're walking down a street, passing scenes of sounds emanating from people's windows, all the while keeping a steady pulse in your headphones that ties the thread through it all, identifying it as one object that has several tangents. In this fashion it is able to cover the bases of a sweaty warehouse, an evening at home and the morning after a late night out. Homesickness or Nostalgia is an excellent mark in the continuum of dance floor influenced sound that straddles categories, that wants to remain part of its inspirations while not getting too bogged down in function. Sven would agree that house, techno and all its mini subdivisions require treating the whole as an art form to be pushed and pulled and occasionally reinvigorated in order to be kept living, to never forget where it came from and some of its more overt purposes.' - www.microcosm-music.net _______________________________________________________ 'Microcosm is, without a doubt, the perfect label home for Sven Laux’s first full-length Homesickness or Nostalgia. With its nine quirky tracks animated by jaunty rhythms and adorned with oddball samples and found sounds, the digital-only set possesses all of the earmarks of the New York-based imprint’s style. Prior to the album, Laux issued several EPs and remixes, so it’s not all that surprising to discover that the album’s material is polished, even if the tracks’ skeletal techno and house rhythms are relentlessly besieged by a never-ending stream of sound fragments. [...]' - www.textura.org _______________________________________________________ '[...] ‘Homesickness or Nostalgia’, the debut album from Sven Laux is no exception to this rule, and while the beats are prominent and pronounced throughout, the melodic content is more comparable with Shuttle 358 or even Tim Hecker (under his Jetone moniker). Just flip over to ‘Jackson’s Modern Bakery Coffee Shop’ and you’ll hear what I mean, while the pulse and urgency of minimal techno is present there is an emotional core that defies the initial sound and buzz. [...]' - www.boomkat.com _______________________________________________________ 'Homesickness or Nostalgia might be Berlin-based Sven Laux’s first full-length album, but with steady releases on Archipel, Multi-Vitamins, spontanMusik, Tropic, and Leporelo labels, to name a few, Sven has already introduced listeners to his personal world of music. Upon first listening, it is clear to tell that he takes great influence from techno and house music from past and present. However, Sven’s chiselled and refined sound remains refreshingly tight throughout the course of its productions. [...]' - www.infernaltechno.com _______________________________________________________ 'With a title straight out of the hauntological handbook one might have expected Sven Laux’s Homesickness or Nostalgia to be an exercise in Burial-esque crackle and sadness, but the nostalgia seems to point closer, back a mere ten years or so, to the height of glitchy microhouse. Since then CPUs have gotten bigger, enabling Laux to stuff his tracks with greater amounts of digital fizz and clamour, but these nine tracks remain lithe and limber, like the Perlon of yore. [...]' - www.cyclicdefrost.com _______________________________________________________