Photo by Thomas Lohr.
Many of us are guilty of falling into a YouTube rabbit hole at one point or another when we're supposed to be working, but Paul Kalkbrenner managed to turn his hours-long distraction into something worthwhile.The German electronic stalwart has shared the first of three parts in his new mixtape series, titled Back to the Future, a collection of songs he remembers as a young teenager listening to youth station Radio DT64 with his friends in East Berlin during the late 80s and early 90s. It also serves as a time capsule of electronic music's introduction to what would ultimately become one of the world's techno meccas.The project is the product of a break Kalkbrenner took while recording his latest album, 7, over Christmas 2014. What was supposed to be a brief YouTube pit stop for a song from his youth turned into an 18-month-long extended listening session upwards of 5,000 tracks, many of which he could finally pin to an artist. From these tracks, he made his own edits and crafted three hour-long mixes."I could not include every song, nor indeed even the entire tracks from this small period until 1993, so this is my personal history of electronic music arriving in Berlin," Kalkbrenner says. "This trilogy will not be sold, it was a labor of love, born of nostalgia and made for sharing."Listen to Back To The Future: Part 1 and scope the tracklist below, which features Aphex Twin, 808 State, LFO, Todd Terry, and more.