Review
Genre and Mood
Codec & Flexor caught a moment and a feeling on Time Has Changed (Original). It is electroclash with a synth-pop heart and an electro backbone, a club track that looks back as it moves forward: nostalgic, hypnotic and faintly melancholic, cool on the surface and wistful underneath.
Song Summary
The title says it plainly, and the music answers it. A tight, mechanical beat and pulsing analogue-style bass drive the track, while cold synth lines and a detached, almost emotionless vocal repeat the central idea that things are not what they were. It is a dance record about change and loss, and that tension, a body that wants to move and a mind that wants to remember, is what has kept it alive for two decades. The duo wrote, performed and produced it themselves.
Musical Breakdown
The original runs for nearly seven minutes and unfolds like a long, slow-motion memory, with layers added and removed rather than verses traded.
Intro
A stark drum machine pattern and a ticking hi-hat open the track, minimal and precise.
Build-up
The bassline enters, pulsing and insistent, and the first synth line slips in on top, giving the groove its chill.
Main Section
The vocal arrives, cool and distant, delivering the title phrase almost as a mantra over the locked machine groove.
Bridge
The beat drops away and the synths hang in the air, the melancholic core of the track exposed for a moment.
Climax
The groove returns at full strength with every layer in place, the most hypnotic and danceable stretch of the record.
Outro
The arrangement strips back to the drum machine, ending with the same cold precision it started with.
Concepts in Focus
The drum machine is the first and last thing you hear. Its pattern is stiff and exact on purpose: electroclash prized the mechanical feel of early-1980s machines over the swing of a human drummer, and the long stretches where the beat plays alone show off that hardness. The track lasts almost seven minutes, and the drums barely change in all that time; everything else comes and goes on top of them.
The synthesizer parts are where the melancholy lives. A pulsing bass and cold, sustained lines in the style of early synth-pop and electro move against the beat rather than with it, so the track feels both driving and frozen. Listen to how each synth part enters alone in the build-up, as if the record were being assembled in front of you.
“Time Has Changed” is also a document of club culture around 2002, when electroclash briefly made the club ironic and fashionable again. Within a year it sat on Tiga’s DJ-Kicks mix alongside the scene’s other anthems, which is how many listeners first heard it. The same scene produced Miss Kittin – Frank Sinatra: deadpan voices, cheap-sounding machines and a cool distance from the party they soundtracked.
Artistic Context
Codec & Flexor are Sven Zalac (Codec) and Matthias Freund (Flexor) from Cologne, who played together in rock bands from 1992 before turning to electronic music and signing to Forte Records in 2001. “Time Has Changed” first appeared in 2002 on a split 12-inch with Michael Mayer on Art of Perception, the label of a Warhammer 40,000 music series, and was added as a bonus track to the American edition of their debut album Tubed on Emperor Norton. Television Records released it as a single in 2003 with remixes by Zombie Nation and Northern Lite, reissued as Time Has Changed (The Remixes) in 2004.
Impact and Reception
“Time Has Changed” became the duo’s signature track and an electroclash club staple, mixed by Tiga, Swayzak and many others on compilations in 2002 and 2003 and still dug out by DJs who lived through that era. It is here because it sounds exactly like its title: the past and the present in the same groove. Put it on when you feel nostalgic for a party you can only half remember.
