Move D - ’Kunststoff’
No. 28 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Germany is one of the original seedbeds of popular electronic music, having hatched Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Italy’s Giorgio Moroder in the 1970s. By the 1990s, cities like Frankfurt were pioneering trance music, where Sven Väth headlined the infamous Dorian Gray nightclub and once reputedly played a nonstop 24-hour DJ set. In Berlin, Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus practically invented “dub techno” as Basic Channel, a trippy fusion of subsonic bass, echoing percussion and hypnotic minimalism. By the 2000s, Germany dominated much of global electronic music culture with its Berghain club in Berlin and Väth’s Cocoon Recordings.
But of all these breakout artists and scenes, David Moufang as Move D, a classically trained musician, pianist and jazz guitarist from Heidelberg, would write perhaps the consummate German techno album of the 1990s, reflecting a quieter, more sensitive side of his native culture. His mellifluous style was soothing and yet astonishing in its melodic insights and rhythmic turns, drawing heavily from jazz, soul and house music, mixing his ambient techno into an aural absinthe; with a sixth sense for synthesizers’ ability to stretch space and time, Moufang casually opened the mind to the intimate places between notes and beats, and in those magical spaces, like the full moon moving between clouds, he could completely transform how one listened.
As a kid, he listened to a lot of jazz and classical music, as well as American popular music broadcast by a local US military base radio station. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey also had a huge impact on him. “The movie touches topics that are important for today and for the future,” he told DJ Tech Tools in 2018. “It embeds religious aspects, an alien story, and artificial intelligence, outside of mankind.” Classical ranging from Viennese composers Johann and Richard Strauss to contemporary classical by György Ligeti and Jean Sibelius amazed him.
Moufang was “space crazy,” making little spaceships as a boy and then messing around with walkie talkies and audio equipment to make his space cockpit. His father was a jazz trumpeter who played at Heidelberg’s local US jazz club, where jazz greats like Don Cherry, Karl Berger and Charlie Haden would also play. He would learn to play piano and guitar when he was around ten and in his teens play in a band called Rivers And Trains. “I do have a history of playing in bands with guitars…to me music is about communication,” he told Gerd Janson for Red Bull Music Academy in 2008, reflecting on his love for playing and collaborating. “I communicate with people listening to the music, but more interesting is the part of creating it if you deal with another person.”
Living in Mannheim in the late 1980s, he was at the forefront of nightclub culture before acid house or raves swept through Europe. A denizen of discotheques, he learned to DJ one night at a time, observing music’s relationship to movement one song at a time. “Black music” as he described it, was central to his formation. Soul, funk, and hip hop, and then house and techno shaped his instincts and sensibilities before warehouses and outdoor parties opened up new sonic possibilities. The convergence of the human and the machine — and the balance he sought — revolutionized how he thought about how music can move the social heart.
“At house parties … you could see Black people, Turkish people, all ethnics mixed, poor people, rich people, funny-dressed people, straight-dressed people,” he told Janson, explaining his introduction to acid house parties. “It was all alright, and I do remember one night sitting there and watching the scenery and … a young raver was coming to me, he said, ‘You’re looking kind of pale, are you alright? Did you have a bad pill, maybe?’ I said, ‘No, I’m fine, just listening.’ This was really so striking to me. In the rock business, at festivals people would trample on you, and nobody gives a damn if you’re feeling bad. They would rather hit you on the head … and now it was this and I was really overwhelmed and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a new generation.’”
“It was a real culture shock,” he told Generator magazine of his first techno experience, “as it is for everyone being in their first techno club. And even though I didn’t directly identify with the music, which was very hardcore and nightmarish, I could still appreciate a strong movement. I could grasp that this was a scene that wasn’t just about money.” Soon enough though, he caught the rave bug and his mastery of rhythm from his jazz training would serve his sixth sense for tasteful hypnotizing grooves, spiked with beautiful and evocative melodies, something universal to all his work, whether it’s his Reagenz project or his dub-electro on collaborations like Deep Space Network Meets Higher Intelligence Agency.
This love for the new generation would also lead him deeper into house music. His club-bound sound was thick with dub and groove, inspired by Chicago and Detroit. Jazz fusion grooves like ‘Hurt Me,’ drifting to his hypnotic guitar, and microhouse jams like ‘Your Rolling Hills,’ digging into the warm haze of a backroom daze, capture the happy and good vibe times of Germany’s early rave days. ‘Silk Dub’ in particular is drippy dub house at its most magnificent, rippling and echoing and clapping into Moufang’s late hours bliss. Or ‘Got Thing’ that jives it down damn diggity good. Psychedelic and euphoric to the max, yet cool and relaxed, it’s the heat of the Germanic summer draft. And then there’s ‘Computer Flop’ with DJ Laté. It’s a masterpiece of dreamy cool cat moves, sliding into a tipsy bedtime groove.
“We get together to have fun,” he told Deep House Amsterdam in 2017. “I can be with total strangers in Taiwan, not being able to speak with people, not knowing anything about them but with the language of music I can totally relate and communicate. We can have this great experience together and we don’t need a translator. It’s amazing what music does to a person. It’s some kind of universal language that works with all kinds of different cultures and even species — my cat is into music, I can tell! I’m not religious and I’m very skeptical about religion as a dogma but the existence of music seems somehow divine….It may sound weird or esoteric but I feel like it’s healing people and even the planet. Like some kind of exorcism through dance.”
And yet in 1995, he was exploring his quieter side in the studio. In a big bang of creative exploration, he embarked on several projects with and for the legendary ambient pioneer Pete Namlook. In that year alone, he crafted two albums for his Fax recordings, followed with 24 albums as “Move D / Namlook” alone. Moufang started his spacey excursions with the classic Deep Space Network albums Earth to Infinity and Big Rooms. He would team up with Birmingham’s Higher Intelligence Agency as well for the dub waves of Deep Space Network Meets Higher Intelligence Agency. Interminable spaces abound in these deep space expeditions. But what anchors Moufang’s 1990s work is his inimitable sense for a blissed out liquid groove.
“Maybe we should say the very first things that I did was kind of ambient music, very much influenced by Chill Out, the KLF, and probably The Orb as well,” he told Janson for RBMA in Barcelona, identifying the emerging theme that would bring his honeyed mellifluous space grooves into an earthly focus with Kunststoff. “So that was ambient, and obviously there were some other ambient artists at that time. And then there was techno like Detroit techno, Frankfurt techno, but techno-techno, and in between I felt there was a huge gap, an open field, and that is where I tried to come in when I did Kunststoff.” So it is in that space between that he saw his chance to move.
Kunststoff, which means “plastic” in German, shaped those gaps into previously unimagined thoughts and feelings. Case in point, the sensual ‘In/Out’ heaves and sighs into a heightened delirium, like a trampoline at the base of the skull, its deep-rocking soft beats collapse the distance between two “somas,” the Greek “soma” for body and the Sanskrit “soma” of Vedic legend, the mythic drink of mystic poets that channeled the gods. Higher and higher it goes, until in-and-out, and up-and-down, lose themselves, one in the other, with a vertiginous repose, leaping on through galaxies of karmic sound — wormholes of what goes around, comes around.
Starter ‘Eastman’ echoes Derrick May‘s Detroit techno classic ‘It Is What It Is,’ drifting over the blue Atlantic to the warm Riviera — a slow-mo smear of sunrise modulations. ‘Sandmann,’ the first track Moufang composed for the album, struts confidently to a bouncy machine-room groove. While ‘Hood’ crawls deep inside rubber-band tones. Moody drums and aquatic tribalism ricochet on ‘Soap Bubbles,’ ‘Nimm 2’ and ‘Trist,’ worthy heirs to Manuel Göttsching, Neu! and Herbie Hancock‘s Headhunters, from cosmic rock (kosmische musik) to humanistic techno to psychedelic jazz.
“Jazz,” Moufang told the journalist Sean Besson in 1995, “that’s what I listen to really. Miles Davis has always been the greatest influence on me. I can really dig his quality of not being super technical but still have more to say than everyone else. And that’s the ambient factor as well, to make more music out of less notes. I’m for reduction.” That lighter touch, yet always having something more to say, is what gives his music a movement. It’s a restraint that serves the album well with repeated listens — like walking a finely tuned and finely grained township, every corner a lovely twist.
Kunststoff also takes on a real sense of place in its global meander. The gentle, dreamy melodies of ‘’77 Sunset Trip’ linger in America’s old discos — electro soul moving to a hot New York City night or the deep house musings of Chicago’s Larry Heard and his Mr. Fingers: ‘Tribute to Mr. Fingers’ drives home the point. Chilling out, Moufang coasts into the lucid dreaming of ‘Beyond the Machine’ and the Mideastern moonrise of ‘Xing the Jordan.’ With each turn, Moufang folds his Afro-American and Euro-Teutonic, and future-past influences, into something deep and infinite.
“As a matter of fact, I do like people who stand for one sound and they’ve done it all their lives, like Larry Heard, it is fine to me,” he told Janson, reflecting on why he loved to drift and jump on through open doors. “But I also really like people who show some changes, like Squarepusher or Miles Davis or the Beatles. When I can see where they are moving and their horizon is not limited to these parameters, that they are open to other things… I think essentially that is important for music to be open.”
For it’s ‘Amazing Discoveries’ that still marks Moufang as one of the great audio visionaries of his time. Like a double helix it coils its synth lines up into a magical stairway of sonic reflections. At once tranquil and poised, it looks up at the Sun from the bottom of the sea through waving kelp — and wakes the mind’s surface from long slumber to daydream wonder, deep down and up high into its heady communal axis, calling to mind the healing exorcisms of raves and the divine.
At times quiet and quick, Kunststoff is no casual album, though its easy-come-easy-go vibe runs throughout its winding travels. Unlike Moufang’s cosmic musings as Deep Space Network with Jonas Grossmann, Move D side-winds to a sexier, earthier beat. It’s the joy of his ‘Got 2 Be’ getting crazy yet never scary, deep into the soul, or the classic space odyssey on his Solitaire mix of ‘In/Out.’
Discoveries of the heart and mind, Moufang’s moves are simply second to none. Skipping and slinking, drifting and diving and rising, it’s “intelligent” dance music for connoisseurs who know that Afro-Germanic is as intellectual as it gets. And that between the two moves and grooves the soul.
Track Listing:
1. Eastman
2. Soap Bubbles
3. Sandmann
4. In/Out (initial mix)
5. Hood
6. Tribute to Mr. Fingers
7. 77 Sunset Strip
8. Beyond the Machine
9. Nimm 2
10. Amazing Discoveries
11. Trist
12. Xing the Jordan / Seven