On Monkeytown, Modeselektor is introducing a town with suitable districts for everyone’s individual taste. Friends of classic dubstep, dancehallheads, indie-listeners as well as ravers will find what they’re looking for in Monkeytown. And still, it’s actually impossible to match even a single track with a certain genre. It was in 2007, when the second album by the producer-duo Modeselektor, Happy Birthday, was released. Four years and countless remixes and collaborations later, the two lads from Berlin – Gernot Bonsert and Sebastian Szary – present a mixture of everything that the international club-scene has to offer these days. In doing so, they are supported by Thom Yorke, Miss Platnum or the breakcore-expert Otto von Schirach. The track Pretentious Friends deserves special mentioning: Busdriver’s rough vocals are looking for their place between a thumping grime-beat and unleash an intense energy, which is not to be achieved by any of the following tracks. Despite the many different ideas for compositions, Modeselektor actually deliver a surprisingly homogenous record. This might be due to the fact that Monkeytown was recorded in a continuous recording session of ten weeks, which, according to the Berliners, hadn’t been the case in the previous productions. Within those ten weeks, the maybe most interesting Modselektor-record so far came into being.
Monkeytown
