Bleep

Nick Höppner gears himself up for some shift work with his new album. Arriving via Ostgut Ton, a label he has been at the centre of for over a decade through his former role as label manager and now as one of the imprints resident producers and adjacent Panorama Bar/Berghain club DJs.

While his previous recordings have focused on the sort of sleek and stylised house sound that has come to define his marathon DJ sets within the confines of Berlin's near mythical nightspot Berghain, Work finds Höppner taking full advantage of the album format's extended recording landscape to build tracks that tell a much more detailed story than your average house and electronica artists' LP offers.

Sharing the same sort of cross-genre techno/bass personified space of the recent Livity LP from Peverelist, Nick Höppner's 'Work' features an astounding arrangement of different takes on the traditional house sound. Adding to the mix a certain slinkiness, our guess is that he has been spending a lot of afternoons hanging at the counter of Berlin's famed Hard Wax listening to the latest variety of the house, techno, dubstep and everything in-between. Much like Pev's album does for the Bristol bass via Berlin techno axis, Höppner has expanded his more trademark sound of straight up 4x4 with the playful oddness of Plaid's classic 'Double Figure', this is none more evident than in the makeup of each record. That they are both essentially house records, at their core the experimental arrangements act as building blocks for a rave maze that mirrors the endless hours of pounding beats and cosmic club dynamics of Nick Höppner's other work as a resident within the Panorama Bar.

For anyone expecting a straight up club album please leave your assumptions at the door, this one really does go in deep.