Lido Hotel (Remastered)

Consisting of half new tracks and half edited versions of tracks formerly released by Mathias Schaffhäuser on his Ware label, Lido Hotel showcases exactly why the astute Achim Szepanski decided to release this album on Force Tracks, his label focused on minimal house and dancefloor-orientated sounds. The tracks all start with a mid- to up-tempo house template stripped down to dub bass beats and little else. From there, Schaffhäuser adds a few meticulous formal attributes, usually descriptive high-frequency percussive sounds to offset the deep dub bass beats. With this sparse yet remarkably evocative rhythm track in place, he will then either feature one of his talented vocalists — Antye Greie-Fuchs, Regina Janssen (Donna Regina), Unknown Trooper, himself — or else just let the music flow without any vocals. The fact that this album isn't entirely vocal driven and that it features a range of different vocalists with a diverse range of accents makes this album even more listenable, adding a further amount of intrigue to the already remarkable minimal house rhythms. While it's often enough just to know that an album is on Force Tracks or one of the affiliated Force Inc labels, this album goes above and beyond the normally high-quality level with its emphasis on a broad range of unique musical ideas that still retain an underlying aesthetic. Furthermore, this album functions just as well as a listening album as it does as a relatively down-tempo dance record, offering yet another reason to hunt it down.