Indeed, while some grooves are more physical than others, everything about Movements seems deliberately designed to subvert the usual inverse relationship between a dance record's club-readiness and home-friendliness: 'Darko' might boast heart-tugging synth melodies worthy of Boards of Canada, but its cavernous, bass-heavy production begs to be showcased over huge speakers in a rammed warehouse. If Get Physical increasingly resembles early Warp in its elevation of club dynamics to a steely artform, Movements might be its equivalent of LFO's Frequencies- a record whose state of the art grooves were equally suited to sweaty dancefloors and the close intimacy of headphones. And at times it does feel like a survey, moving from rumbling Metro Area disco ('Night Falls') to fluttering Isolée falter-funk ('The Birds and the Beats') to beautiful Kompakt techno-pop ('Wasting Time') with an unselfconscious grace the belies the album's range. In the process, Get Physical has become a byword for arty-but-populist records with crossover potential- from one genre enclave to another and from cult status to mass consumption.īooka Shade are perfectly placed to capitalize on this unexpected ubiquity, and while their 2004 debut Memento surprised many with its noirish, claustrophobic vibe, Movements is the gregarious corrective: not only the better record, but friendlier, larger, and more epochal in its survey of the varied delights of German house and techno. Other artists have followed in the duo's wake, crafting records that perversely treat 'minimal' as a license to create grooves of impossible largesse. Booka Shade's 'Mandarine Girl', issued last May, announced a paradigm shift, its sheets of noise and spiralling synth riffs reaching out to both the most stentorian minimal and the most epic trance.

Two years ago Berlin-based Get Physical was belatedly recognised as the label for voluptuous, hook-heavy electro-house, but by this point it was already moving on.

Booka shade movements