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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 music under both his own name and many pseudonyms including LSG, Spicelab, Paragliders and The Ambush. This creative and highly versatile DJ/producer 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. Some were brilliant, some were not. At any rate techno and electro snobs who despised the genre for its crowd-pleasing melodies chose his tackier Eurotrance productions to justify outright dismissal of his work. Looking back now it's the purists who look shallow; Lieb's discography is stylistically very 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. Constellation was his first ambient release, originally appearing on 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. 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 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 title fades 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 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 listeners. In the ensuing years 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. Meanwhile, while Lieb's own studio productions remained prolific and fairly varied, as a DJ he prescribed his antidote in the form of dark, brutal, mostly atonal techno. 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 a downbeat remix album of LSG club classics like "Netherworld", "Hearts" and "Risin". The album traverses the chilled side of Leib's tech-trance sound and like Into Deep its arrangements are relatively sparse compared to the ultra-lush (and often good) ambient trance productions of 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, formed from more original machinery and programming. All nine tracks segue together as 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 appears on LSG's The Black Album (1998) as well as anything released under the Spicelab pseudonym. For a fine exercise in exotic tribal electronica look for his self-titled debut album as The Ambush (1994). |
