THROWBACK THURSDAY: Der Dritte Raum – Hale Bopp [August 1998]
It’s rare enough that you can say that a particular track could have been released ‘at any time in the last 20 years’ and still sound relevant, but then Der Dritte Raum’s Hale Bopp, released in 1998, isn’t your average dance track.
First coming to prominence on CD2 of Sasha’s amazing Global Underground 009: San Francisco (a mix that also includes Breeder’s Twilo Thunder and Jark Prongo’s Movin’ Thru Your System – epic), and enjoying a resurgence on the back of its appearance in Maceo Plex’s 2014 Boiler Room set, Hale Bopp doesn’t fit into any particular genre, and in an industry built on ‘peaks and troughs’, it has neither.
Instead, it embeds itself into your brain from the off, taking you on a voyage through time and space, much like the comet from which it takes its name, which passed by Earth in 1997.
The artist, Der Dritte Raum, is the pseudonym of German producer Andreas Krüger, the former keyboardist with short-lived EBM group Eiskalte Gaeste; according to the band’s Discogs page, “The main reason of disbanding was, that Andreas Krüger got bored of making melancholy, dark 80’s wave-music and went more interested in the arising techno sound.”
Darkwave’s loss was certainly techno’s gain, as Krüger followed up mid-90s tribal monsters such as Trommelmaschine with this melodic epic.
Incidentally, the Hale-Bopp comet is next anticipated to pass by this planet in the year 4380 AD – whether mankind will still exist is a questionable point, but if it does, I can think of the perfect soundtrack for the occasion…
[Kudos to HouseMusicLover7 for the upload]
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