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Alic - Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory

2024-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

The phrase “Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory” describes a final act of defiance: facing the end, literal or figurative, boldly and on your own terms rather than quietly. It is a phrase of energy and fiery determination, which suits music built to be intense and climactic.

Genre and History

Alic call what they make psychedelic techno: techno’s steady, physical beat combined with the layered, mind-bending atmospheres of psychedelic trance. Discogs describes their style as merging techno with trance elements, and Ektoplazm, the free psytrance and techno portal that later presented their debut album, sums it up as “intelligent psychedelic techno for mind and body”, with powerful techno beats, old-school acid and electro influences and refined psychedelic atmospheres.

Techno itself goes back to Detroit in the 1980s, to Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. The psychedelic strand grew in the European underground, Germany included, where producers took techno’s repetition and dressed it in the evolving textures of trance. Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory sits on the darker side of that strand: the label tagged the EP techno, dub, techtrance and psychedelic techno, and its own note promised “a superdeep tour” into Alic’s “well known world of punching and atmospheric layers of sound”.

Symbolism and Connection to the Track

The title is a promise the music has to keep without words. Over almost seven minutes the track does it the way techno usually does: the beat stays, and tension comes from layers arriving, thickening and pulling back. That steady accumulation is what makes the final stretch feel like an ending worth the title rather than just the point where the track stops.

Influence of the Phrase in Music

The phrase has a famous predecessor in Jon Bon Jovi’s 1990 single Blaze of Glory, written for the film Young Guns II, where it belongs to an outlaw who lives and dies by his own rules. Alic’s track takes the opposite route to the same idea: no lyric, no narrator, only rhythm and texture. What rock tells as a story, techno can only build as pressure.

Mood and Atmosphere

The mood is dark but driving. The kick keeps the body moving while the higher layers, pads and effects, carry the eerie and haunting side, so the track works both as dance music and as late-night listening. The immersion comes from length and patience: nothing is rushed, and the changes are small enough that you often notice them only once they have already happened.

About the Track

Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory is the title track of the Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory EP, catalogue number DigitalDiamonds025, released for free on 13 April 2012 on Alic’s own netlabel Digital Diamonds under a Creative Commons licence. The original mix runs 6:50. The EP also carries a remix by Brian Burger, which the label said “is knocking you down once more”, a remix by Excizen that “helps to rise again”, and a fourth track, Holy Clap, described as “a smooth groover to compensate the loss of your braincells”.

About the Artist

Alic are a German duo, Volker Jakubzik and Adam Zawadzki according to Discogs, and the founders of the free netlabel Digital Diamonds. Besides their netlabel output they have released on labels such as Horns And Hoofs Entertainment, Boshke Beats Records and Nachtstrom Schallplatten. Their debut album Close Distance came out on Digital Diamonds in 2014, and the EP series continued with titles such as In The Heat Of Delight, Sliders, Last Man Standing and Ostkreuz.

Song Summary

The track is built on a steady, minimal techno frame: kick and bass give constant forward motion while the upper register shifts, twists and swells. Its strength is restraint. Instead of big drops or sudden changes of energy, it relies on gradual evolution, never quite standing still, and keeps the listener locked in for its full length.

Sound Breakdown

Intro: The Haunting Begins

The track opens with pads and faint, unsettling effects before the rhythm establishes itself. The beat arrives as the frame for everything that follows, not as a hook.

First Build: Hypnotic Groove

Once kick and bass are steady, new synth layers and echoes are stacked on top. The groove underneath does not change; what changes is how much is happening above it.

Midsection: Into the Darkness

In the middle the textures are at their richest, with melodic fragments and effects circling the core rhythm. This is where the “atmospheric layers of sound” the label promised are most audible.

Bridge: Supernatural Calm

The beat steps back and the pads and echoes come forward for a while, a moment of suspension before the rhythm returns.

Final Build

Towards the end the elements return together, the beat drives harder and the texture is at its densest, so the close lands as a release of everything the track has accumulated.

Concepts in Focus

Like most techno, the track stands on a four-on-the-floor kick: a bass drum on every beat of the bar. That fixed pulse is what makes a track of this length work. Because the body always knows where the beat is, the producers are free to change everything else slowly, and the listener follows the changes instead of having to find the rhythm again.

The shape of the track is a long build-up, or rather two: one at the start and one before the end, with a calmer stretch between them. Neither builds by speeding up. Layers are added and thickened, so intensity rises by density. Compare it with Kölsch – Bloodline (feat. Tomas Høffding), which also grows over a constant kick but reaches for melody where Alic reach for darkness.

Most of the mood lives in the ambient texture: the pads and effects that sit above the beat and change slowly. They carry no melody you could hum, yet they are what makes this “dark” and “psychedelic” techno rather than plain functional techno. Listen to the intro and the bridge, where the texture is heard with the least around it.

Overall Vibe

Going Down In A Blaze Of Glory is psychedelic techno in Alic’s own sense of the term: a physical, punching beat under layered, shifting atmospheres. Its slow progression makes it something to sink into rather than wait through, best heard loud, late and in one piece.

Conclusion

Without a word of lyric, Alic make the title audible through structure: a beat that never gives way, layers that keep arriving, and an ending that gathers everything at once. That it came out as a free netlabel release makes it a good door into a scene that has long shared its music openly.

Reference

VA - Ektoplazms Greatest Tips

Pilocka Krach - Discolight (Hrdvsion's NSD Mix)

2024-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Hrdvsion reworks Discolight by the Berlin artist Pilocka Krach as a club track with disco in its title and techno in its bones. The remix is vibrant and energetic, steady rather than explosive, and immersive in the way long, patient dance tracks are.

Song Summary

Pilocka Krach is an experimental electronic musician based in Berlin, whose own songs are short and playful; her first version of the track, “Discolights”, appeared in 2011 on a 7-inch limited to 100 copies, and the album version on her 2015 Best Of runs under four minutes. In April 2012 the German label Greatest Hits International issued a 12-inch of remixes, with Hrdvsion’s NSD Mix on the A-side beside versions by Hannah Holland, Patric Catani and Acid Pauli. Hrdvsion’s take stretches the track to five minutes and thirty-nine seconds and puts it on a steady club footing.

Musical Breakdown

Intro: Captivating Start

The remix opens with its rhythm, giving a DJ a stable start before the melodic material arrives.

Build-up: Layering the Energy

Percussion and synth lines are added one at a time, so the groove thickens gradually rather than all at once.

Drop: Dancefloor Explosion

When the full arrangement is in place, the track settles into its main groove. The release here is a matter of everything locking together rather than a big festival-style drop.

Bridge: Melodic Exploration

A lighter passage shifts the attention to the synth textures and small variations before the beat returns at full strength.

Climax: Full Energy

The groove comes back with all its layers, the remix at its densest.

Outro: Gradual Fade

Elements are stripped away again until little is left but rhythm, ready for the next record.

Concepts in Focus

This track is a remix in its most traditional form: a 12-inch for DJs with four producers’ readings of one song and no original at all. Hrdvsion’s NSD Mix leads; Hannah Holland’s, Patric Catani’s and Acid Pauli’s follow. Each producer chooses what to keep from the source and what to build around it, and the record as a whole is a small lesson in how differently the same material can be heard.

What makes the NSD Mix a club record is the four-on-the-floor pulse underneath it. Discogs files the 12-inch under techno, tech house and acid, styles that all rest on a kick drum landing on every beat. Listen to how that constant pulse lets the other elements come and go freely: nothing else has to keep time, so everything else can play.

Artistic Context

Hrdvsion, pronounced “hard vision”, is the Canadian composer and producer Nathan Jonson, born in 1980, brother of the techno producer Mathew Jonson and of Holly Jonson. Pilocka Krach works at the experimental edge of electronic music; her Best Of, issued in 2015 by the Berlin label Monika Enterprise with design by The Designers Republic, gathers her own versions, including Discolight.

Cultural Impact

Discolight’s remix 12-inch is a small record from Berlin’s underground rather than a hit, and its life has been in DJ sets and, more recently, on streaming, where the NSD Mix is published as the track embedded here. It is on this playground as an example of how a remix package can carry an experimental artist onto the dancefloor.

Luca Malina - FCKRZ

2024-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Genre and Mood

Luca Malina brings a dark edge to FCKRZ. The Viennese singer makes R&B-inspired pop, and this single uses an electronic production with live guitar to carry a lyric about the darker facets of relationships. The energy is real, but it is not a party: it is the energy of someone fed up.

Song Summary

“FCKRZ” shows Luca Malina working with a small, credited team: Luca Pivetz on production, Lukas Koffler on guitar, Nikodem Milewski on mixing and mastering, and Fabian Unger, also known as Der Traurige Gärtner, on the video. Her artist profile groups it with her debut “Don’t” as songs that explore the darker side of human relationships, and the title, which reads as a swear word with its vowels removed, makes the attitude plain.

Musical Breakdown

Intro: Setting the Vibe

The production sets the mood first, an electronic frame for the song before the voice comes in.

Build-up: Layering Elements

Layers are added as the track develops, the guitar and the beat finding their places around the vocal.

Drop: The Dancefloor Moment

The fullest section of the track is where the beat, the guitar and Malina’s voice all work together; this is pop structured for impact rather than a club drop.

Bridge: Melodic Interlude

A contrasting passage changes the texture before the last return of the main idea.

Climax: Full-Force Energy

The song returns with everything in place, its strongest statement of the title’s attitude.

Outro: Gentle Fade

The track winds down at under four minutes, a pop single’s length.

Concepts in Focus

The release credits make FCKRZ a good introduction to mixing. Producing a track (writing and arranging its parts) and mixing it (balancing all those parts into one finished stereo recording) are different jobs, and here they are done by different people: Luca Pivetz produced, Nikodem Milewski mixed and mastered. Listen for how the voice stays in front while the guitar and beat sit around it; those choices are made in the mix.

The music video was made by the same small circle: Fabian Unger filmed and cut it, and he, the guitarist Lukas Koffler and the cover artist Pia Suchan appear in it. For an independent artist the video is not a marketing extra but part of the work, and on YouTube it is how most listeners meet the song.

Artistic Context

Luca Malina is a singer from Vienna who comes from a family of artists and has sung, danced and acted all her life. Her first single, the R&B-inspired pop song “Don’t”, spent more than three weeks in the top 3 of the chart of Austria’s alternative radio station FM4, one of them at number 1, and her debut EP is called Trust Me When I Lie. FCKRZ was published in June 2021 with support from the Österreichischer Musikfonds, the Austrian Music Fund.

Cultural Impact

FCKRZ is a young artist’s single rather than a hit, and it belongs to the Viennese pop scene that FM4 has long championed. It is here as an example of how a modern single is made by a small, credited team, and of a voice using pop to say something unfriendly. Read the credits, then listen again.