Samples: http://www.wordandsound.de/article/79606
For Hello? Repeat’s 21st release, label head Jan Krueger turns to Vera, a longtime friend and fellow Berlin-based DJ who shares his taste for understated grooves. Vera’s production catalog is short but sweet: she’s always been a DJ first and foremost, a skill she honed at Frankfurt’s legendary Omen club and during residencies at Robert Johnson and Monza Club (both in Frankfurt and Ibiza), but the records she has released show an incredible knack for deep and sophisticated club sounds, informed by innovators like Maurizio and Wolfgang Voigt’s Studio1 project. Over the years she’s put out a few solo EPs on labels like Oslo and Cargo Edition, while also teaming up with Maayan Nidam as Mara Trax, a hotly-tipped duo whose last EP, Sensibilia, was one of Perlon’s best in years. Her Hello? Repeat debut shows her doing what she does best, with two cuts of smart and elegant deep house. “Attachments Of The Past” is the kind of track the creeps up on you. At first it feels like a nicely crafted DJ tool-crisp drums, snappy driving rhythm, small textural flourishes-but soon a weird tension emerges, first with with a nervously climbing melody, then the vocal bit that forms the hook: “let go of the attachments to your past.” Suddenly it’s reflective and dead serious, a mood that’s offset by its perfectly funky rhythm. “Now Not No” experiments with composition a bit. Here the bass is thicker, but the four-four pulse is broken, falling into a lurching, slightly stepping motion while delayed snares flutter in and out of view. Abstract vocal bits and hovering pads make make it all the more hypnotic. This is precisely what makes both Vera and Hello? Repeat stand out: a production style that’s at once subtle, propulsive and slightly mezmerizing.
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