Premiere: Benedikt Frey – Phrack

Music

The Serious Trouble co-founder lands on R.i.O., the other label he runs alongside friends in Berlin.

“When British Airways got privatized and listed on the London Stock Exchange, somewhere in Canada the first Starbucks outside of the US opened, and the Walt Disney Company signed an agreement with the French Prime Minister to construct Disneyland Paris. In the sky above southern Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, northern Somalia, and the Atlantic Ocean a hybrid solar eclipse materialized for 7.57 seconds, whilst Margaret Thatcher performed for 45-minutes on Soviet television.

Some days later, The Simpsons cartoon first appears as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, Diego Maradona wins his first Italian soccer championship with Napoli, and Eighteen-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow. In the mists of the world’s first conference on artificial life at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mainland China opens in Beijing, and Prozac gets approved for use as an antidepressant in the United States.”

A lot happened in the year 1987 – the year that Benedikt Frey’s latest mini album takes its name from. Coming out via R.i.O, the label he runs with a bunch of friends in Berlin, the six tracks balance light and dark; the past and the future; otherworldly dreams and harsh realities. Sonically it sucks you in and pulls you under, ushering you into a trance-like state that sees dub, trip hop, industrial and downtempo coalesce in perfect harmony.