- Traumprinz drops three hours of uplifting, utopian techno under a new name.
- I have a reminder set once a month to check the website run by the artist formerly known as Traumprinz. I added the reminder shortly after he dropped The Phantasy and DJ Metatron quadruple packs last year in hopes that I might get lucky and stumble upon a repress. Although my hope for those reissues has long passed, I've kept the calendar event. The reminder popping up on my computer screen monthly feels very on brand for the German producer, a glimmer of hope in increasingly woeful times.
For a producer who, as Will Lynch put it, maintains "an utterly uncool pureness of sincerity" in his output, "utopian" feels like another good descriptor. His work has shifted from a steady stream of 12-inches to a colossal undertaking of world-building. He now exclusively releases either monster vinyl packages or mega-mixes of original material. To introduce us to his latest alias, irini, he opted for a huge SoundCloud upload that stretches over three hours and hops between his established styles. Across these 20-plus songs, there's a little something for everyone (or every Traumprinz fan, anyway): the ravey breakbeats of The Phantasy, the broken hymnals of DJ Healer, the deep techno of Prime Minister Of Doom, the stargazing house of DJ Metatron and the dub techno of Golden Baby.
Like the previous mixes that have materialized on his SoundCloud channel, there's a rawness to the mix. The tracks here are, with very few exceptions, unmixed. Andrew Ryce noted that in last year's purge of mixes, this off-the-cuff approach didn't always land on the mark, as the tracks jarred with one another, "often cutting off before they make an impression." Traumprinz doesn't run into that issue on lost in dreams, where he lets each track play all the way through. Letting the songs stand on their own, we get a complete picture of the music, full panoramic vistas rather than fleeting snapshots.
The majority of the mix is focused on deep, functional techno with cavernous kicks and taut, ropy synth work. There are even moments bordering on the menacing. The percussion on the third track comes crashing in with growling delay on the snares. At around 90 minutes, sirens wail across anxious synth bleeps. But in true Traumprinz style, we get trance melodies (check out the chord progression in the song that starts at 27 minutes or the hands-in-the-air euphoria at 101 minutes), soft dub pastels (the suite of songs that start around the two-hour mark) and kaleidoscopic bursts of psychedelia (tracks at 23 and 46 minutes remind me of Terrence Dixon with their Cheshire-grin arpeggios).
While the SoundCloud comments suggest that Traumprinz's DJ Healer spirituals are the fan favorites, I keep coming back to the times when he's tried new sounds. Just over 60 minutes into lost in dreams, the four-on-the-floor kick drums give way to breakbeats and, before we know what's happened, a meaty speed garage bassline and razor-sharp breaks slink under vocal samples (from Sophie Marceau) and his distinctly melancholic pads. I also can't get enough of the bleepy minimal track at around two hours and 37 minutes—it's the closest thing I've ever heard to Traumprinz getting goofy.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story people tell about the poet William Carlos Williams. Williams, who worked as a medical doctor his entire career, would write poems between patients, plopping a typewriter onto his examination table in the ten minutes between appointments. I like to tell myself a similar story about whoever is behind all of this music. The image in my head is of someone quietly and anonymously tapping out emotional masterpieces on their lunch break or on a subway somewhere. It's the sort of myth that's easy to imagine for someone whose career seems to be about making their own little myths. With lost in dreams, we get a glimpse into another one of his possible worlds, this time full of trippy, wistful, hopeful techno.