IF (and that’s a big, caps-lock “if”) the UK-based techno super-producer/class valedictorian/alter boy/rugby team captain/old folks’ home volunteer Objekt (a.k.a. T.J. Hertz) has a single fault… it’s that he doesn’t provide his club-crazed fans with new pieces of music anywhere near FAST ENOUGH.
His darn-well-regarded LP Flatlands came out back in the halcyon days of 2014, and PR photos of his chiseled-yet-boyish face have been absent from the pages of internet music rags such as this one ever since then (save for when he curated a mix for Tresor Records last year).
Thankfully, the long wait is over, and we can all now FINALLY get back to basking in the delightful glow of Hertz’s warm, welcoming face and genuine house music. On March 27, he’ll be self-releasing his latest white-label-series EP, Objekt #4. Its two tracks comprise “a tribute to the sadly now defunct Basement Q, a formative and beloved haunt in Berlin’s Schöneberg district which quietly but profoundly shaped the musical identities of Hertz and several of his contemporaries until its final closure in 2012.”
“There really was no place quite like it,” Hertz reminisces (presumably dreamily and doe-eyed.) “Even in the later years when Joe [Call Super] and I would go, the sense of vitality was palpable; you had all these regulars who must all have been pushing 50 years old but still had more energy and passion than any 25-year-olds we knew at the time. God only knows what it must’ve been like in the 80s when it opened.”
Both of the meticulously constructed and idiosyncratic tracks on Objekt #4 pay pretty heavy tribute to the legendary space, with A-side “Needle and Thread” endeavoring to condense “several hours of a Thursday night in the Basement into 9 minutes and 26 seconds” and B-side “Theme From Q” constituting his own reinterpretation of a Basement Q owner and and founder DJ Bogdan’s track “Love Inna Basement (Morning Dub),” a jam which often provided the “soundtrack to over 20 years of late morning love-ins in the cellar underneath the Weber & Lang glue factory.” Although, Hertz was apparently PR-savvy enough to still name the EP after himself and not a glue factory…
Either way, though! While we wait for Object #4 to materialize physically at the end of the month, we can always reminisce a little by spinning some of his recent jams on his SoundCloud and looking at photos of him on the internet. You guys with me?
Objekt #4 tracklisting:
A. Needle & Thread
B. Theme From Q
More about: Objekt
