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Though by no means a conventional celebrity Oliver Lieb has earned his place as one of the greats of the techno age, releasing music under both his own name and many psuedenoms including LSG, Spicelab and Paragliders. This creative and highly versatile DJ/producer was particularly influental on the first wave of European club trance that emerged in the 1990's, the melodic and more accesible 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. Some were brilliant, some were not. At any rate techno and electro snobs who despised the psychedelic and uplifting nature of the genre chose the tackier examples to justify outright dismissal of his work. Looking back now it's the purists who look shallow; Lieb's discography is extremely large and stylistically broad. 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. A word of warning though: all albums listed above are out of print and will take some finding. Constellation was his first ambient release, appearing on the iconic German ambient techno label Recycle Or Die. The title certainly makes explicit Lieb's deep space/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. It's stunningly accomplished and for this track alone the album is worth having. The panoramic and deeply hypnotic Music To Films is not only a fine melodic album on its own terms but is also based on an unusual concept. Lieb and collaborator Dr Atmo conceived it as an "alternative soundtrack" to Godfrey Reggio's 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 credits roll on your TV screen and experience the film uninterrupted with the alternative score. Recorded under the name LSG, 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 consistantly impressive. Five years seperate this and the equally fine The Singles Reworked, its appearance coming as quite a surprise given what happened in the intervening years. By the end of the 90's the cheesy excess of much Eurotrance signalled the genre's creative decline, in the process turning some people off these melodic dance sounds for life. In the coming years Lieb would end up practically disowning the style he helped create. The genre had always been a crowd-pleaser but as the trance baton passed to a new school of Dutch producers many of them cranked up the cheese factor to breathtaking new levels of bombast and pop stupidity. Someone dubbed it "epic trance", while true progessive trance went back underground to be championed by DJ's like John Fleming. Lieb's own club productions remained prolific and varied - check the mad Klaus Kinski rant on the storming LSG single "Jesus Ist Da" - but particularly as a DJ he prescribed an antidote in the form of dark, brutal, mostly atonal techno. Admidst all this, the wide-eyed mystery and euphoria that his music once summoned was rarely glimpsed. Thankfully by 2004 he seemed altogether more comfortable with his legacy. The Singles Reworked is a masterstroke, completely fulfilling its potential as an ambient beats remix album of LSG club classics like "Netherworld", "Hearts" and "Risin". Most immediately striking to newcomers will probably be its sparseness, quite different from the lush (and often good) ambient trance productions of UK artists like Michael Woods or Solar Stone. Like Into Deep the album traverses the chilled side of the tech-trance sound with which Lieb is now often associated. The melodies are still layered, the sound still cosmic, but it's a leaner, more experimental sound formed from more original elements. All nine tracks segue together in the form an episodic but unbroken mix that flows with grace, beauty and perfect logic. 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 techno can be found on The Black Album (1998) as well as anything released under the Spicelab pseudonym. |
