Liner Notes: Christian Kleine's Lost World

The Story Behind The Release on its 7-year anniversary

Liner notes are printed on thick card inside each of our vinyl releases.
See here for some background on the intention and format. I am publishing Liner Notes from existing and past releases here on Substack for all to enjoy.

Artist: Christian Kleine
Title: Electronic Music From The Lost World: 1998-2001
Format: Gatefold Coke Bottle Green 2LP + digital
Cat: ASIPV010
Released: 2018

With a second edition coming soon from camp Christian Kleine, we thought to complete the liner notes for this release, and mark the 7-year anniversary (today!) since its release. Grab the album as Name Your Price over on Bandcamp, for today only.

Artwork:

The original photo for this artwork was provided by another great IDM artist, Midori Hirano (aka Mimicof). Shot in Berlin, it represented the city’s brutalist and often ‘dull’ architecture - at a time when Christian was creating this music. Taking this original photo, Noah / Keep Adding then worked his magic to make it much more uplifting and abstract. To this day, I think it’s one of the most complete pieces of artwork we have pulled together, and the Coke bottle green vinyl made this one hell of a good-looking 2LP.

Story:

This was our first release with Christian, who had long been an inspiration for me and the label's creation. Of course, many will know that Ulrich Schnuass’s album, whose name inspired the start of the blog, was on City Centre Offices, which Christian was a big part of… read more about that world in this feature on the site and a soundbite below from CCO’s Thaddeus Herrmann.

Christian was another one of the people I met through the radio show on KISS FM. Only difference was that he did not send a tape, he just knocked on the studio door. Thank God we heard him. He lived down the road from the radio station, so quite often, I would hang out before the show at his place. I was looking for musical direction with my own music at the time. I had done some releases, but I wanted a fresh start. I couldn’t really get it off the ground. So we developed this habit of meeting on Sundays in Christian’s studio to just jam. It was difficult in the beginning, because he was working in a different setup, but maybe this was key. We found our roles quite easily.

The first e.p. was done in just a couple of weeks, people liked it. When Thomas Morr approached us to release a record on his label, I was really happy. Not just because I really liked him and his label - he was helping with distribution for CCO as well, but mainly because I was not comfortable with the idea of releasing my own music on my label. I did not want to waste resources we could have used for other artists.

Before our release (ASIPV010), Christian had provided us with an isolatedmix, and I’m certain that’s where conversations began to release some of his music. At the time, Christian wasn’t creating much new stuff, but he said he had a bunch of unreleased music from that era should I be interested.

Modest in his ways, this music was as good as the productions he released in the heyday of CCO. So much, we have volume 2 of Lost World to come early this year…

Insight:

We were experimenting with inserts during these early vinyl releases, and any owner of the 2LP may remember the postcard we printed for this one. The idea was to create something that could be shared with a friend, including a discount for the album. Not sure anybody did it?! But I still love this idea. Maybe I will bring it back for a future release. Only now I’m realizing I don’t have a photo of it in real life, so I will need to dig up some library copies I stashed away. For now, here is the back print.

Press:

Given Lupo mastered every single City Centre Offices release back in the day, it had to be him behind the controls of mastering and cutting the lacquer for this one. This was our first time using Lupo, and it kick-started a long relationship that still exists now, with Lupo behind our next release from Christian and many others in recent years. I can’t remember how the cut went on this one, but I’m pretty certain, given Lupo did the lacquer, it would have gone smoothly.

For context, labels can also have the plant cut the lacquer directly, which can sometimes result in mistakes given you don’t know the engineer and he/she might not be used to a specific type of music. Lupo is our safe pair of hands.