In den Tiefen der Nacht – Luke Tangerine & Robson Darker (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: collaboration is where it’s at. It allows an artist to stretch their own sound, add other voices to their signature style, and throw a sonic spanner in the works of predictability and expectation. And, although I remain a big fan of Luke Tangerine‘s solo works, I find that it is when he teams up with other creative minds, as he does here, with singer Robson Darker, that he is at his best when other influences come to bear on his sonic world.

In den Tiefen der Nacht takes things out of his more usual dance and ambient realms and into a darker, more post-punk synth sound. This is a nice tipping of the hat to those early synth pioneers, ex-punks who, having grown bored of the limitations of the guitar sound, turned the new keyboard technologies to their creative will and, in part at least, were a catalyst for the 80s post-punk explosion.

Here, Robson’s vocals are as much an instrument in their own right as they are a vocal layer, especially for someone like me, for whom German isn’t a linguistic go-to. Still, it speaks volumes of the tones and delivery of the words that, even without knowing what they are saying, they work as a lush and balancing sound layer in the overall sonic picture.

The synths shimmer away behind the vocals, the beats drive things forward, and the chiming sonic shards and musical motifs, which are arrayed across the middle distance of the song, make for a beautiful contrast to the almost world-weary vocals snaking their way above them.

And, if you need a handy reference, how about this? Imagine if Depeche Mode had formed in central Europe in recent years instead of the London suburbs of the early eighties and had missed out on the early pop phase of their career and instead gone straight for the deeper, darker and cooler sound that defined their later career.

Cool, huh?