Re.You Puts on a Party Hat for Mobilee's Tenth Birthday

Tenth birthdays are weird. For all intents and purposes, you're still a child, but there's a part of you that's aware that entering the double digit stage of life signals a change in things, an ever-encroaching, ever emerging descent into the throes of adulthood. Still, there's jelly and ice cream on the table so life's not so bad.

Anja Schneider and Ralf Kollmann's minimal institution Mobilee Records hits the big 1-0 this year, and rather than wolfing down cocktail sausages till they puke, they've decided to celebrate by letting one of their finest, Re.You, get his hands on the entire back catalogue for the ninth installment of their long running Back to Back series.

Unsurprisingly, given that he's been able to work with material from the likes of Schneider and Sebo K, the result is a fantastically driving, trippy take on the label's renowned stripped-back sound. His carefully calculated experiment in deft-cutting and hyper-manipulation is best demonstrated on the album's second set, and we here at THUMP are super psyched to give you a chance to check out how a decade of fantastic releases can be condensed into a superb snapshot of a set.

Working on a micro level, with layers taken from individual tracks to create a cohesive whole, the mix hums with productivity and inventiveness. Re.You explained his method: "The first thing I had in mind were the bongos. I worked a lot to find the groove… I wanted to create a journey to a jungle and added some more background stuff like birds chirping and noises from the woods."

There's a rarely found attention to detail at play in the mix. "The bass drum is really special to me as I layered it 3 times and worked with several plugins to have it like the final result," says Re.You. "I just experimented with the files and parts I got from the artists. Some sounds were just perfect."

That kind of perfection on a sonic level, the crispness and deftness, is symptomatic of the Mobilee sound as a whole. That strictness of aesthetic is something that appeals to Re.You, but he's also aware of the importance of working around it. "My sound doesn't quite fit into that. There are a lot of releases you hear and immediately know is a Mobilee record. I never made stuff with them directly in mind, it was more of a case of working on something and sending it over to them." Well, this one in particular is a definitive, pure Mobilee release. Soak it up.

Back to Back Vol. 9 is released on February 27 on Mobilee Records

Catch Re.You and some of the rest of the Mobilee gang at Egg, London, on March 28. Tickets available here.

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