Techno Nonsense: Turbo Records

As you’ve probably gathered by now I enjoy contrast. Traversing the musical spectrum from disco Permanent Vacation style, to Night Slugs’ grimiest bass music in the space of a fortnight has set my stall out nicely I think. This week I introduce to you: Turbo Recordings.

Unlike new boys on the scene Night Slugs, Turbo Recordings has been releasing music for over a decade now. The label, founded in 1998, is run by two brothers from Montreal; Tiga and Thomas Sontag, and is widely considered one of the most influential labels in electronic music. Tiga is most commonly known for his 2001 cover of Corey Hart’s ‘Sunglasses at Night’ and his strange sense of humour, while Thomas (a.k.a. Thomas Von Party) scouts out the best new talent to bring to the label and makes bizarre YouTube videos (see the video to ‘Peanuts Club’ by Noob & Brodinski). This combination of eccentricity and impeccable music taste has helped bring the likes of Chromeo, Boys Noize and the Soviet Empire’s devil child, Proxy, to dance floors the world over.

Turbo Recordings’ greatest success however has been in melding the flash-in-the-pan hysteria for electro in 2006 with the long-established but often under-appreciated genre of techno. The result is a breed of dark, acid-tinged techno, championed by the biggest names in the scene. This is not to say that Turbo Recordings has become a one-trick pony. The exact opposite is true in fact. Sure the likes of the Dahlbäck Brothers, Jori Hulkkonen and new boy Gesaffelstein form a backbone familiarity to the (now nearing 100) Turbo releases but output from Proxy, Boy 8-Bit and remix packages covering the likes of Fever Ray and Chromeo mean that you never know what Turbo have got lined up next.

Many of you will probably be aware of Proxy and his destroyer-of-worlds outlook to making music but if not check out ‘8000’, a song that somehow came to be my soundtrack to boating through the Amazon during the summer. For a textbook example of how sampling should be done refer to Kolombo’s ‘Sniff’, the sample used is pretty self-explanatory but brings the track to an almost orgasmic climax.

I’ll admit that this style of music isn’t for everyone but at 5am on a Sunday morning in subterranean London, there’s nothing I’d rather hear.