Today’s crate pick is one of my earliest influences, a long player that still amazes me today, Sven Väth‘s second album The Harlequin – The Robot and the Ballet-Dancer. I can’t remember where I heard this for the first time, but I had a copied C-cassette for four years until I bought a CD copy in 1998 in Essen, Germany for 29.99DM.
Released on Eye-Q in 1994, you can’t help hearing both Sven’s interest in early German trance sound and producer Ralf Hildenbeutel’s influence on the recording process. The booklet has a rather funny computer generated pics of Sven (see below) as well as a weird quote by Erasmus, which can also be heard on the intro track of the record.
But what hit me most when I first heard the LP through was the ending. Ballet-series, a 16 minute journey from Ballet-Romance’s string sections to acid sounds of Ballet-Fusion and finally to chill-out rhythms of Ballet-Dancer must be the first truly epic trance track I’ve ever heard (check the video below). Personally I would say this LP is one of the milestones of German oldskool trance and when looking Sven today you see we’ve come a long, long way from those days :)
Any thoughts of this record? Share them in the comments. See also the previous posts in “Picks from the crate” series.
