"Green, the colour of the trees stands for life, vitality and renewal. Sometimes when you look into people´s faces and consider the global situation, you will have the impression as if over thousands of years, all the green in humans has fadded. Some people look like dead trees, withourt leaves, no blossoms, no sap flows anymore. For the planet´s future I wolud like to see mankind dancing, full of joy and rotted in the earth again, so their sap rises and that luxuriant leaves and green can flourish." Philip Gubelmann is the guide and leader of sax o' conga, born 1978 in Zurich, learned at the age of 10 years, playing the saxophone along with his twin brother, and later flute. Musical experience he earned at the "Swiss Jazz School in Bern and played in various funk bands and jazz groups," lead-alto at "ETH Big Band", live acts with DJs, gospel choirs, studio musicians, etc. International, he performed with Big Bands (France, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, China) and the band of DJ "Minus 8" (London, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Mastricht, Munich, Basel, Bern, Zurich, etc.), in which he also played the sax on the albums of DJ Minus 8 "Minuit" and "Eclectica". Currently Philipp plays e.g. with the singer Jillene Luce (USA), which could relase her own song on the latest "Cafe del Mar" CD. Finally, he is also saxophoneist in the "Swiss Army Big Band" directed by Pepe Lienhard. In addition to the performances is expanding his musical work on composing and producing music. Green Groove is Chill-Out and Jazz in one. Wonderful melodies and saxophone solos make this album a unique treat for the ears. "Life is a gift and wonderful!"

Sound-design from a far-away galaxy, functional and intelligent arrangements, tricky elements somewhere between "handmade" and "cinema-scope" and continuously surprising ideas - this is the music of an extraordinary talent: Boris Brejcha. He's one of the most productive creative minds of this time segment and while constantly releasing a great amount of tracks, his music does not sound like the work of a mechanic following a certain formula. Boris' force roots from a unique style that has a focus on diversity and still you recognize his hand-writing while listening to his tricky arrangements and breaks that are different as they can be. Some years ago Brejcha suddenly entered the international club-league and announced his goals by tracks as "Ich zeige es euch" – no exaggeration at all when looking at the development of his career, he quickly messed up the establishment and his extraordinary live performances and costumes caused more and more public interest. Harthouse signs responsible for several of Brejcha's releases - two albums and many maxi singles stand for a successful cooperation between artist and label. They grew together and Boris got one of the central artists on Harthouse. It's clear that Brejcha’s third strike is presented by Harthouse and will spread the word of a better tomorrow concerning quality dance music. His third long player "MY NAME IS" might set up the question whether he continues emphasizing his definition of Science Fiction Techno. You can answer YES and NO: his fans will immediately recognize his unique style in the opener "Express myself" and they will be thankful for that! "MY NAME IS" carries on the spirit of the preceding long players but at the same time announces a new definition of his stylistic varying, state of the art produced and well thought work. You find every single element exactly at the right spot - these tracks frightening precisely aim at the huge summer events - crisp, fresh and always wearing a tiny smile - this would be a satisfying conclusion of his album, but there's several tracks spreading a wider stylistic landscape - harmonic and dreamful "Flockentanz" for example provides listening comfort in the suburbs of the dancefloor, too. The compilation of Brejchas compositions develops into different styles and atmospheres. "Ich zeige es euch" declares the borders between functional, minimalistic club-sound and neo trancy melodies to be torn down. Endless reverberated spheres are cut into pieces, reversed they rush into emptiness or break into a thousand pieces by crashing into the suddenly appearing grooves. The name-giving track "My name is" raises the bar for straightforward club music: Brejcha is more than capable of driving the masses to insanity. The unforeseeable changes are pure pleasure and draw a clear picture in front of your inner eye: Crowded dance floor, peaktime, raging masses go nuts! Bravo - somebody knows how to carry something to extremes! "You will rise" is a 10-minutes-hypnotic device that combines hard and direct elements and gentleman-like sound design. Never ever it gets boring - alternating effects and tiny tricky sounds create the style Boris Brejcha is famous for - "My name is" underlines and steels his position! The music of “MEIN NAME IS” is more grownup and this album presents stylistic deeper and wider stuff than many of contemporary music's productions - thus with great cause we announce a real highlight for this summer!

The British star producers Xenomania (Pet Shop Boys, Sugababes) recently asked Naomi for a sample (they got it); Naomi's three year old fan favourite "Needle On The Record" is a constant seller in the US iTunes Store; their Myspace and Facebook pages are brimming with love letters from Russia, Mexico, Texas or Taiwan. In their native Germany they are still something of a best-kept secret, regardless of consistently euphoric press reviews, but this might well change with The Big Shapes, their new, fifth Album on Mole Listening Pearls. The abundance of ideas, the songwriting, the attitude – everything has grown bigger, louder and sharper in the Naomi universe. Bernd Lechler and Nico Tobias still show the odd fit of incurable melancholy, but this time any world weariness comes clad in choruses that make you want to shout "Holy Kylie!". The overall sound of the album reminds one of... well, nothing else, really. Massive backbeats carry scratchy guitar riffs, buzzing synths cut through gentle electric piano lines as the Berlin duo digs deep into the pop vocabulary of the past four decades. "Fujiyama“ is an electro blues with elegiac Melodica and a downright symphonic final, “Candy Floss“ is a lazily stomping contemporary funk pop monster, and what happens in “Hello Fever“ after a soaring cosmic intro could almost be labeled as prog rock. The thing is, Naomi never play it safe here. They seem to intentionally provoke the coolness police, casting away any tasteful cleverness of comparable indietronic acts and, smiling quietly, they lay it on thick. The Big Shapes draws on the forbidden side of the Eighties (the Phil Collins drums on “Morning Belle“), mischievously quotes heavy metal guitar lines (as for a few bars in “Dragon Tree“), and makes nods toward Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode as well as Chic and the psychedelic Beatles. Still, like any great fun, The Big Shapes is propelled by great seriousness. “First Things First“ gleefully exaggerates the disillusioned pragmatism of the noughties, “Hello Fever“ sounds like a feverish dream about the financial crisis, “Sleep“ ponders the fact that only those who don’t act at all make no mistakes. Behind the stoically grooving psychedelic pop of “Don‘t Die Again OK“ there lurks a childhood nightmare, and the vocoder-based final track “I‘ll Be The Past“, possibly the most touching song of the album, is a humble, obviously autobiographically inspired meditation on mortality, almost a prayer. Reviewing their last album, Aquarium, Rolling Stone magazine described Naomi as “wondrous“. They still are. Just this time with a bang.

If Audio Lotion's new album were the soundtrack for a crime, then the latter would have been committed out of love and passion in self-defense: our hero was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, too often – well, "Bad Timing" – and he knows too much... Mr. Gamma is on the run, in a silver-grey Jaguar XKR, racing along the Côte d'Azur from Nice via Eze sur Mer towards Monaco. At the wheel there's a cross between Jason Bourne, 007, and Ethan Hunt, betrayed by friends and foes, hunted by his past. Escape, start anew somewhere, or face his pursuers and wipe them out? In a speedboat across the rough Mediterranean Sea to Algier. There, those dogs almost get him! Through the deadly Sahara into the orient. Waingro, an old contact in Beirut, provides him with the necessary gadgets. The chase continues with 140 BPM! Run, hide, or die! Such scenes are being conjured up before the mind's eye when hearing the album. But Audio Lotion add a good measure of irony to their play with the spy movie genre. The title "Bad Timing" and the visual design of the album showing the spy who didn’t "come in from the cold", but "tripped at the most unfortunate moment", already suggest that there’s not always an invincible hero à la James Bond behind the wheel, but sometimes a Maxwell Smart or an Inspector Clouseau. One is reminded of a likeable, but slightly awkward, protagonist who, at the decisive moment, lacks the necessary quantum of luck – and, well, timing. Every once in a while, the music picks up that theme, too, and produces a rhythmical hiccup, an odd melody or a not completely serious bit of movie dialogue. And although all this is served with the necessary touch of "amusement", deep inside, one never really doubts that the hero of the stories the album tells is the coolest guy in the business.

For more than ten years, Audio Lotion have been inspiring the press to storms of superlatives: "The perfect lounge sound", "Music that belongs to the daily needs like eating and drinking", "Absolutely necessary for heart and ears", "Refreshing", "Pleasant", "Relaxing", "Sensual", and "Sexy". And as the icing on the cake, Audio Lotion's music found its way into the queen of lifestyle TV series: Sex and the City. However, their fifth album "Bad Timing" deserved even more superlatives: the duo from Zurich puts into motion a one-hour power plant of feelings. A musical thriller that sends a neuronal firework from the brain stem into the cortex and produces fantastic images and stories. "Bad Timing" is eustress with its most positive (scientifically proven) effects on body and soul. The album motivates and stimulates.

"Café International" was one of the most successful board games the late 80s. The guests of different nationalities must be placed at the tables of a café. Just playfully John Huppertz sees on his first album "Eternal Change" for Mole Listening Pearls Lounge, Downbeat and Chillout to place in various sound environments. On his second album "Café International" he swirls the table orders of genres from song to song confused voluptuous. So by this musical "get-together" it is like creating new friendships in a uncomplicated way. Unobtrusive friendly small talk, always create harmony in the search for new variations and interesting sound structures, the rhythmic and melodic always find the "the perfect moment". The songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John Huppertz has published in the last few years a lot of tracks on several project names (including Area 42, Newton) and his tracks are present on many popular compilations. John Huppertz is a tireless composer and artist, whereby his harmony structures always seems more important than simple "factory preset sounds".

Actually, it was long overdue: The first own album of Greg Parker, who has always had his home at Plastic City. Everything begun with his friendship to Terry Lee Brown Junior, who brought him to produce own tracks. At this time, Greg Parker was already a local hero in and around Darmstadt and inspired his followers with intense and deep Tech-house sets. In 2006 he co-produced the Terry Lee Brown Junior track "I Feel Lost" which was released on Terry's Album "Karambolage". Since then, the tracks by Greg Parker get an enormous popularity. Be it on vinyl (2009 with the great "All The Good Things EP" and the three digital EP's "Dreams", "Drop Out" and "Understanding" on the sub-label Plastic City. Play), on compilations such as "Plastic City Radio Show, Season Two","Terry's Café" or "Zurich Session" or as a remixer for Terry Lee Brown Junior, The Timewriter, nor elle, Smalltown Collective or modified Tojami Sessions. Greg Parker also experimented very successfully with Terry Lee Brown Junior in the fields of electronica, dub, lounge and as the remix team "Elephants And Lollipops" (for example for the track "Alex Flatner feat. Lopazz - Perfect Circles" on Circle Music). At the latest it should be clear here: The creative output is based on a source of inspirational creativity. The album "10 Solutions" therefore will be his debut album. If you read the title of the album and the tracklisting before self-confidence, you will feel maybe the positivism, brightness and the later at once quite dark musical instincts and you will discover how you click unabashed anticipation of playing the tracks in the beginning of the album. Since then it roars to a past all the mystical, dark, driving, dubby, melodic tracks with "Like My Self", "Feels Good" and "You Know" and learns to half actually a clever reversal of disarming directness in bright shining light. By "September", "Future", "My House", "Vacuum" and "Cheerfully Days" achieved that the album is a playful lightheartedness in contrast to the first half of the album and it is sometimes futuristic that you may think that you've to take off. On the end you will find the dub version of the first single "Get High", which will be released as vinyl as well (including remixes by Terry Lee Brown Junior and Volkan), which will bring you back to earth. And then you will recognize: "Yes! 10 Solutions are for your feets because they dance. 10 Solutions are for our breath and for which we're grateful".

Being the sixth album from Jean F. Cochois, this latest one is a fresh surprise in many ways. First and foremost, he has chosen the German title “Tiefenschön”, wich could be translated as 'beautiful depth', but really it is a more poetic way of saying that in the German language. Secondly, he has positioned himself in an altogether different way on a musical basis but still continues in his unmistakeable Timewriter style, and once again proves as a producer his fine feeling for sound and musical arrangement. After a long musical journey beginning in 1994 with his first single and subsequent albums, he now melts together his continuously developing sound with the sound of the good old days. The results are deep and tech house tracks which have a warm old school twist and flavour to them at the same time as totally hitting the zeitgeist.

Although there are vocals being used in parts of this album, they have nothing in common with typically known vocal house tracks containing verses and choruses. It’s mostly a maximum of four lines being repeated and used in a very rhythmic and hypnotic way. In the cracking intro “Einatmen”,The Timewriter opens with the words “In the beginning there was nothing but a sweet sound - so tiefenschön” followed by “Broken Spell” which brings back the vocals of the incomparable Theresa Baltimore who has already featured on The Timewriter’s Club Classics “Reachin’ Out” and “Lion Steps”. Also Ven Lizard, a new Vocalist, features on the very pushy deep house gem “Ten Strut” riding on the track like thunder with a repeating fourliner. As on his last albums Jean F. Cochois himself is featured, this time with rhythmically spoken words instead of a singing voice on the massive “Creatures Of The Night”. “Back in School” with its overwhelming chord and drum programming and well chosen vocal snippets is a killer track and definitely one of the highlights. . “Superschall” rolls over you with the same power by unveiling it’s magic slowly throughout the complete track without using a direct bassline. It is also remarkabe that even with his interlude “Atemzug” and the outro of the album “Ausatmen” where he gives the listener time to breathe with a chilled out athmosphere, he manages to keep you in the flow by using subtle background beats which keep up the tempo and rythmic feel. Especially “Ausatmen” is emotionally loaded with this pleasant kind of pain that just hurts in the right places.

Tiefenschön as an LP is a complete whirlwind having a raw and dirty feel to it, albeit without losing focus on the original and well-known Jean F. Cochois sound. This is an extremely strong club album with a powerful recognition value – not only musically, but also visually thanks to its album cover. It stands out as it has an overall concept and, throughout it, a sense of continuity from beginning to end.

DJ Feedbacks: The Timewriter - Tiefenschön

Cool Million have become a solid rock in today's tumultuous barren musical desert. The sands shift very regularly. Everything is in flux. Yet Rob Hardt and Frank Ryle, who comprise Cool Million, stand unnerved and unwavering. The reason, dear reader, is very simple. These guys KNOW about music. They are not following trends, jumping on bandwagons or even trying to create a trend. Both well known and respected in the radio and song writing fields, these gentleman are simply creating real music with real feeling and doing so with all the knowledge, love and respect for what we can affectionately call the groove! Bursting onto the scene in 2007 with “Naughty Girl” that was featured on the popular Soul Togetherness series and then followed by the essential “Going Out Tonight” album soul fans and music connoisseurs all around the world have eagerly awaited new product, and various songs remixed by the legendary Tom Moulton on have whet our appetite ever since. The new album, the aptly titled “Back For More”, is here and boy are you going to love it! The bar has been raised, the gears shifted higher and the scene set for future greatness. These cats have laid down a series of party grooves with a seriously tasty guest list of soulful and funky vocalists to make you sit up and pay attention. Now, that's something a lot of today's R&B cannot do! The vibe is very much in an 80s setting, yet the sensibility is very much today. These boys understand the basics and know that great soul music is timeless...this is the Cool Million sound. Helping create their sound are a star-studded guest list Meli'sa Morgan has been a favourite of ours since she burst onto the scene with Alyson Williams and Erick McClinton as High Fashion. Her powerful, no-nonsense vocals grace the first lead single, “Sweet Baby”. Cool Million meet the As sassy and sexy as ever, Cool Million are a perfect match for her rip-roaring style. The wonderfully soulful Broomfield family are very much included on the album with Al Broomfield, Eugene Wilde and sister Dee Dee all gracing the songs “Loose”, “Back For More” all of which are going to become firm favourites on the quality modern soul scene. Cool Million have this knack of taking our favourite artists, giving them the groove that suits them, and to top it all drawing out and emphasising the best facets of that artist. The results are astounding and if in any doubt check out the killer duet “Loose”. Enough said! The UK's Noel McKoy is a point in fact. His smooth approach pitted against a slamming mid 80s Jam & Lewis type groove is simply sublime. Genius abounds on this CD. Yes, the album oozes class, and no-one is better to assist on this than Peggi Blu. Known for her 1980s sets for MCA and Capitol, and later Expansion in 2002, this Lady captivates us with the stylish and classy floater “I See You”. This will be a firm favourite on the quiet storm circuit for definite. The legendary Leroy Burgess woos us with “Cool Million”, his unique style perfect for the Cool Million sound, and helping to make today's music scene ever more vibrant and meaningful. The wonderful Rena Scott is also to be found with her sensuous yet boogie flavoured “Come 2 Me”. Newer names are also embraced and these artists fully carry the musical torch that is so important to the Cool Million ethos. The integrity of the past meets the talent of today and breeds hope for the future...and no-one can fault the brilliance of artists such as Jahah, Paul Mac Innes, Jeniqua, P.A.C.E., Laura Jackson, Yvonne Gage and Clare Evers. Combining the best vocal talents from all over the world, raising the musical bar and constantly setting the agenda and setting trends, Rob Hardt and Frank Ryle are set to dominate radio, dancefloors and CD players the world over. Years of experience, love for the music and creative skill are perfectly forged together in this CD project. We, as they, are definitely “Back For More”.

About a year ago we were fortunate enough to hook up with the legendary remixer and godfather of disco Tom Moulton for a remix. To our great surprise Tom was very much into our sound and style and quickly he went on and did 5 remixes for us (released in February 2009). The response to that 12 inch maxi was immense and we promptly talked Tom into doing another five, so we would have enough tracks for a full album – containing exclusive remixes from the legend himself only! The result is what you now hold in you hand and we hope that you like us will enjoy and appreciate the skills from this true gentleman and our good friend Tom Moulton. Cool Million would like to say big thanks to Tom, because without him we wouldn’t be here with this album today. We love what you have done to our tracks.

LoZee,* alias Raphael Zweifel: his debut record, of 14 songs, “Tell it to the sea”, takes you into a world of amorous hope and of sunsets and questions, in songs of peace and melancholy about the blue planet. His unique vocal timbre is a delicate counterpoint to this classically trained cellists, piano, guitar, and, of course, his cello sounds. LoZee brings together jazz harmonies and solid songwriting, using traditional and classical voicing, and musical dynamics that have no direct comparison. Having lived in Barcelona and Paris “Tell it to the sea” is a musical journey through musical dreams about a summer soul sister in “But you” — “... what it means to me, when you open your eyes.” Sleepwalking through town, in “Moonshine," trying to comprehend the meaning of time, “...The years passed by so incredibly fast, … the time made out of tales.” Or questioning power and the environment in “Blind,” “The Kyoto protocol could help us all, but there is a big country that quit the call. Are they blind, so blind?” Musical cosmopolitics: “Tell it to the sea” was recorded in Paris, Brooklyn, and Barcelona, in collaboration with musical friends, Peter Scherer, Caspar St. Charles, Jessica Custer, Gorka Prieto, and many others. And having toured and recorded with bands like DIE TOTEN HOSEN and GLASHAUS, LoZee feels naturally at home on small stages as well big ones.