Iven Schmidt

"Built around three previous Ware singles, the eleven tracks here stay uptempo. While not the first to explicitly craft a record around the concept of driving (or highways, or autobahns), Schmidt conjures up the sleek German design of today by hotwiring its primitive arcade heart and making a driving game out of it. "Quest for Tires" starts off like the Commodore 64's classic Night Driver game, all simple white dashes on a black screen before the bass and distorted patches shift up into something more akin to Pole Position-- the pulses and accompanying clicks seem almost kinetic as the track makes hairpin turns and musses up digitized hairdos. "Digital Sun" is a quarter-eater, too. With a bass like glycerin drops on a trampoline, Schmidt keeps his keys in a twitchy mode, flicking pings across the ears before breaking it all down into a distorted Nintendo ditty bouncing like Donkey Kong barrels. While "Pocket Hero" may be the track built from assorted Game Boy sounds, "LSR" is most gamey, combining canned handclaps with Mario fireballs and jump-blips. And if the classic arcade sentiments weren't conveyed already, "Moon Patrol" revitalizes that craggy, horizontal-scrolling shooter of yore with stun-synths and vocoded commands. Built from a crisp house beat, "M Track" drops in snips of distorted scratches until its breakdown reveals the crunching noises to be the edge of a biting melodic line. It stutters to a stop before bouncing back even harder with little pings darting out like Frogger in the tempered traffic of Model 500-type racecars and trucks. The cut-up vocals of "Tanzmaschine" are bit too distracting at the end of the disc, but it's the only speed bump on an otherwise thrilling ride through a very crowded and vibrant urban scene."