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Though by no means a conventional dance music celebrity, Oliver Lieb has earned his place as one of the greats of the techno and trance age, releasing electronic music under both his own name and many pseudonyms including LSG, Spicelab, Paragliders and The Ambush. He is gifted, original and largely uncompromising. A 2004 story in Australian e-zine In The Mix said thus: "He frequently appears in lists of producers respected by peers right across the spectrum of Electronica, across the globe...yet he still remains an unknown quantity to the average punter; possibly due to his refusal to be pinned down to a single style or psuedonym, or not taking the sell-out route of many of his contemporaries, and trading painstaking pad & percussion programming for ad nauseam repetition of presets." Lieb was particularly influential via the first wave of European club trance that emerged in the 1990's, the melodic and more accessible cousin of techno. As an exponent of the commercially popular Frankfurt trance sound his name - as either composer, producer or remixer - was stamped on huge number of club records that came out of Germany for a time, many of them on the now-defunct Harthouse label. On the club trance front, his signature tune will probably always be the spellbinding LSG anthem "Netherworld". It's a perfect marriage of his trademark cosmic textures, techy sounds and celestial melodies with the pumping energy of the dance floor. The distinctive futuristic, techy quality of his trance productions also carries over into his downtempo albums, relatively few in number but exceptionally high in quality. Constellation from 1993 was his first ambient release. The title certainly makes explicit the deep space and sci-fi themes but the music itself is sophisticated and understated. The fourteen minute "Dimension X" is an absolutely gorgeous cosmic hymn with exquisitely layered melodic loops in the best Berlin-school ambient tradition and it's executed with a feather-soft touch. This stunningly accomplished track alone makes the album worth having. The superb Music To Films is a cosmic mixture of ambient trance, robotic minimalism and panoramic melodies based on an unusual concept. Lieb and collaborator Dr Atmo conceived it as an "alternative soundtrack" to the stunning wordless documentary film Koyaanisqatsi which was originally scored by Philip Glass. So well-timed is the music that at home you can start the CD after the title fades on your TV screen and experience the film uninterrupted with the alternative score. The next three albums listed above were all released under his LSG moniker. The sublimely mysterious Into Deep is more rhythmic than the previous two albums and exists more in the realm of downtempo breakbeat. A measured mix of slow percussive tracks, distorted female vocal bytes and beatless deep space chords, its sci-fi tinged compositions are consistently impressive. Five years separate Into Deep and the stylistically similar The Singles Reworked, the latter album's appearance coming as quite a surprise given what happened in the intervening years. By the end of the 90's the commercialism of much Eurotrance signaled the genre's creative decline, its credibility in tatters amongst more intelligent clubbers. Lieb ended up disowning the very genre he had helped create, the trance baton having passed to a new school of Dutch producers who cranked up the cheese factor to new levels of bombast and pop stupidity. True progressive trance went back underground to be championed by DJ's like John Fleming. Lieb's own studio productions remained prolific and fairly varied into the 2000's, but as a DJ he sometimes prescribed his antidote in the form of dark, brutal, mostly atonal techno. The wide-eyed mystery and euphoria that his own music once summoned was rarely glimpsed. But the release of Best Of LSG: The Singles Reworked in 2004 showed that, at least outside a club context, he was still comfortable with melody. The album is a masterstroke, completely fulfilling its potential as a downbeat remix album of LSG club classics like "Netherworld", "Hearts" and "Risin". The album traverses the chilled side of Lieb's tech-trance sound and like Into Deep its arrangements are relatively sparse compared to the ultra-lush (and often good) ambient trance remixes of the period by UK artists like Michael Woods or Solar Stone. The melodies are still layered, the sound still cosmic, but it's a leaner, more experimental sound than his contemporaries, forged with more original machinery and programming. All nine tracks segue together as an episodic but unbroken mix that flows with grace, beauty and perfect logic. Although Lieb has to date not released any more albums of new downtempo material, in 2008 came a big surprise for fans: a free download of a wonderful LSG project of ambient beats called The Unreleased Album. Recorded in 2002 and then shelved to due a distribution issue, it's a spiritual cousin of Into Deep and The Singles Reworked and every bit the creative equal of those albums. It's a stunning listen: complex, beautiful, melodic and alien. Lieb gives free reign to his innovations with textures, syncopations and harmonic progression, all while somehow remaining accessible. If your keen to check out the best of his excursions in dancefloor trance try the LSG albums Rendezvous In Outer Space (1995) and LSG Volume 2 (1996). His darker club techno appears on LSG's The Black Album (1998) as well as anything released under the Spicelab pseudonym. For a fun exercise in exotic tribal electronica look for his self-titled debut album as The Ambush (1994). Finally, his re-emergence in 2011 with lush club tech-house releases under his own name for UK label Bedrock produced the promising e.p. Epsilon Eridani. |
