Basic Channel

Coinciding with the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany, the arrival of techno forever changed the social fabric of Berlin. Just a few years later, a pair of Berliners, Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus would in turn change techno just as definitively. Trafficking under various aliases—Maurizio, Cyrus, Quadrant, and, most famously, Basic Channel—they increasingly stripped the rave-tested style back to little more than a lattice of pulse and shadow. Between 1993 and 1994, they released a few handfuls of EPs, anthologized on 1995’s BCD, that drew the blueprint for the decades of ambient and minimal techno that would follow. (Their work could also be plenty lively: Tracks like “Octagon” and “Enforcement” are as punishing as they are heady.) Like many electronic acts of the era, they used diverse aliases to explore different styles: As Maurizio, they tried out deep-diving dub techno; as Round One to Round Five, they set their sights on languid deep house. The common denominator of all these projects was their rigorous focus on electronic sound at its most exquisitely reduced.