Berlin Undercover
Label: Sound of Berlin
Cat: SOB 023
Format: Digital / Streaming
Genre: Electronic
Release Date: 2nd June 2023
When you see the word ‘compilation‘, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? 2-hours of artist-curated auditory bliss? Showcase by a trendy new label you’ve just discovered? Or that hard-to-find exclusive banger you can’t wait to get your mitts on?
Inspired by everything a compilation can constitute, Sound of Berlin has come up with their very own concept: ‘Berlin Undercover’, a tribute of cover versions spanning over four decades of music, all brought into the 21st century and turned into one-hour sonic roller-coaster ride – with:
CYRK – Tubular Bells (Mike Oldfield Cover)
Low Volume – Greece 2000 (Three Drives Cover)
Namito – Café Del Mar (Energy 52 Cover)
Northern Vector – Jazz Is The Teacher (M500 & 3MB Cover)
Olin – All That She Wants (Ace of Base Cover)
Marc Houle – Computer Madness (Steve Poindexter Cover)
Cleymoore – Schism (Tool Cover)
Anton Kubikov – Café de Flore (Doctor Rokit)
Dan Curtin – Der Klang der Familie (3 Phase Cover)
BB Deng – Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order Cover)
The goal of the original project was simple enough – to celebrate the Sound of Berlin roster, each with their unique sense of aesthetics and musical heritage as rich and vibrant as the city’s underground dance music scene itself. Until someone at Sound of Berlin HQ thought: Why stop there? Why not use this opportunity to investigate
the musical origins of the intricate sonic tapestry that these producers are part of?
Essentially giving the artists carte blanche, they put a call out and invited them to pick a track that has either had a huge impact on them, or they consider the most iconic, and then produce their own cover version of it – ‘a cover’ being defined as a new sound recording of a previously released song by an artist other than the original one with the lyrics and the basic melody left intact but with a different key, tempo, time signature, and instrumentation.
What they received back was different styles of covers spanning over four decades from the 1970s prog-rock and 1980s new wave to the 1990s trance and the noughties downtempo – all brought to the 21st century and turned into one ginormous dose of big-room grooves, pulsing electro-funk, glittery synth-pop, smoky deep house, and throbbing techno. Berlin underground style.
