As heard on his debut album, 1977, Rune Reilly Kölsch's style of house and techno—melodic, colorful, emotive—closely adheres to the values the Kompakt label holds dear. It was an important record for the producer, bringing the kind of credibility he never found making more commercial house as Rune RK. He titled the album after his birth year, and it was also a means of working through complicated childhood memories. Born to a German mother and an Irish father, Kölsch's upbringing was split between Copenhagen's anarchic Christiana district, a hippie commune, and his grandparents' upscale digs in Germany. He frequently felt like a fish out of water, and he responded by creating an imaginary world; 1977, he says, was based on "these weird ideas and concepts I had on my mind at the time."
From its title, we can guess that 1983 also mines childhood for inspiration. Like Kölsch's previous album, this one is primarily instrumental, but there are clues to incidents in his past. The lyrics to "Bloodline", a bittersweet anthem sung by WhoMadeWho's Tomas Hoeffding, sketch the outlines of an unspoken trauma. In "Papageno 30 Years Later", vocalist Waa Industry channels Antony's fluttering falsetto as he admits, "It feels right to be falling apart"—a nod, Kölsch has said, to an incident in his youth when he was made acutely aware that he didn't fit into polite society. And then there's "Die Anderen", a wistful fusion of gliding tech-house with classical piano whose title translates as "The Other".
Kompakt co-founder Michael Mayer is fond of saying that the label is "pro-sadness on the dancefloor," so Kölsch is clearly right at home. But despite its melancholy undercurrents, 1983 looks to dance for catharsis. To achieve these ends, Kölsch has a specific formula down pat, and his songs tend to feel like variations upon a single structure: stately eight-bar chord progressions fleshed out with cycling arpeggios and yearning, contrapuntal melodies. He's fond of fat, meaty keyboard sounds, rich with harmonics—supersaw leads, organs, pianos—and he's got a way of stacking his sounds so that they colonize the entire spectrum, from the rumbling bass in your gut to the shimmering stars in your eyes. While they're unabashedly emotional, the tracks are also marked by restraint. A typical Kölsch song comprises no more than a handful of moving parts, and there are no choruses or bridges, just hypnotic phrases that gently rise and fall. Unusually for main-room dance music, he goes light on the drums, letting his synths do most of the heavy lifting.
A sense of déjà vu permeates much of the album. The driving string melody of "Talbot"—it's one of a handful of songs featuring Gregor Schwellenbach, a classical musician who has re-recorded a number of Kompakt classics for chamber instruments—echoes Rhythim Is Rhythim's iconic "Strings of Life". The ascending synthesizer line in "Paces" is reminiscent of the rising-and-falling melody of Octave One's "Black Water". And the pumping pianos of "Cassiopeia" could be an homage to Westbam and Nena's "Oldschool, Baby (Piano Mix)", a feel-good piano-house anthem that Michael Mayer included on his Fabric mix CD in 2003.
- Produced At – Ipso Facto Studio
- Pressed By – MPO
- Artwork – John Harten
- Mastered By – Jörg Burger
- Music By – Rune Reilly Kölsch
- Photography By – U. Herten
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