Vinyl - 1991 - High-Tech High-Life - Vinyl (Exclusive)

Originally released on Opal Tapes in 2012, High-Tech High-Life was the first release from 1991, the project of Gothenburg musician Axel Backman. It arrived with very little information attached to it, but the response was immediate. Boomkat picked it out as the highlight of Opal Tapes’ second batch and one of the most striking debuts they had heard that year, drawing a line between Backman’s music and the hazier worlds of Boards of Canada, Oneohtrix Point Never and JD Emmanuel.

More than a decade later, High-Tech High-Life still feels difficult to place. There is something recognisable about it, but it's hard to say exactly what. The sounds are blurred and worn, melodies seem to arrive already half-remembered, and rhythms appear through layers of hiss before disappearing again. At times it feels less like listening to a recording than trying to remember one. There is warmth here, and plenty of beauty, but the record never quite settles into nostalgia. Backman was working with sounds that already carried associations with older electronic music, new age, ambient and the imagined futures of another era, but High-Tech High-Life doesn't feel like an exercise in recreating any of them. These things have been pulled apart and put back together incorrectly. Familiar shapes remain, but their origins have become unclear.

The title itself contains much of the contradiction. High-Tech High-Life suggests progress, luxury and technological optimism, while the music often sounds unstable, degraded or on the verge of disappearing. The lo-fi recording isn't something laid over the music to make it appear old. Noise, distortion and loss are part of how the record works. Sounds bleed together. Fidelity changes from moment to moment. Something beautiful will appear briefly through the murk and then be gone. That feeling runs through the album from the opening High-Tech Low-Life to the closing Alaiyah. Between them are pieces that can be remarkably direct emotionally despite how obscured their surfaces are. This was something Boomkat picked up on at the time, describing an album of aching melodies and gauzy atmospheres that worked best when taken as a whole. That remains true. Individual tracks stand up on their own, but High-Tech High-Life makes most sense as one continuous environment.

It also captures something particular about the period in which it appeared. In the early 2010s, a lot of electronic music was moving through cassettes, small-run releases, blogs, forums and newly emerging online networks. Records could appear with almost no context and quickly find their own audience. High-Tech High-Life belonged to that world, and to the early identity of Opal Tapes, but even then it seemed slightly detached from what was happening around it. Time has made that quality stranger rather than clearer. Some records become very obviously products of the year in which they were made. High-Tech High-Life hasn't really done that. Its mixture of cheap technology, damaged fidelity, ambient space and strangely affecting melody still refuses to settle into a particular period.

Now remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time, High-Tech High-Life returns more than a decade after it first appeared. The recording is clearer, but its peculiar sense of distance remains. What sounded in 2012 like a transmission from somewhere difficult to identify still does.

Credits

All sound by Axel Backman / 1991
Gothenburg, 2011–2012
Includes a free digital download of the album.