MARC LANSLEY founded Low Hanging Fruit together with Shumi back in his Köln days, before he moved over to Cleveland in 2015. LABOR 07 showcases four of his projects that went corrupt in an HDD failure and therefore have been "finished" in the same moment the drive crashed. Ludwig Zibell mastered the dust off the recovered demo bounces and unveils four inspiring gems of electronic music.

Track comments by MARC LANSLEY:

"Nobody has ever asked me about my tracks, but I really like hearing myself talk about them - and I love track-by-track commentaries, which is why I decided to bring these two passions together for my Labor release. Here goes nothing:

DOWNTOWN TREMOR (BRUNODROID)
If there’s a recurring theme for the four cuts on this release, it’s that they’re all unfinished business, stuff that I’ve tinkered with at some point, only to shelve them for later repurposing. Guess what - that never happened, because my main hard drive crashed on me a year ago, taking the original project files for most of my work with it. It’s an interesting opportunity, actually, to have your hand forced on deciding whether something is finished or not. There’s charme in the simplicity of these half-assed arrangements - something of an undiluted musical mood, if you will. „Downtown Tremor“ was done in Chicago in 2013, a bunch of quickly thrown-together patterns that were intended to be used by a rapper I was friends with. She never came around to do it, but I always liked the messiness of the beats and bass parts. I don’t remember why this track has two names - but they both stuck, so there’s that.

COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
There are these press CDs, sent to professionals for reviewing purposes, I guess, with a computer voice returning every 2 minutes that reminds the listener the release’s copyrighted nature. This „technology“ always struck me as particularly funny, in an awkward way - it was probably a bigger thing in the 2000s, not so much any more - which is why it was odd to hear it again on some press copy about two years ago, on a Moderat album of all places. The rest of the track is pretty much self-explanatory: sample the anti-sample message and see how far you can take it. Not that I took it very far - dabbled a bit with some generic house elements and then left it out in the rain. But there’s such a thing as digital patina and it’s doing wonders for me and my questionable work ethics in the studio.

RUFFER
It’s a track that I originally had sent to Labor’s mothership label Supermoll as an initial demo - and it was never intended to be anything more than that. The Supermoll people liked it, but were unhappy with the inconsistent bass drum - there are actually two different bass drums at play here, and they’re both pretty much garbage, from a production stand point. Never one to ignore valuable criticism, I immediately filed the cut under „later, perhaps“ and forgot about it. Turns out it’s a survivor, clawing its way out of the graveyard of broken promises and back into the playlists of the brave and mentally unstable, thanks to Labor.

PAUL IS DEAD
„Paul is dead“ is definitely the oldest of the bunch - the second or third track I churned out with my first copy of Ableton in 2007 or so. But the actual roots go back to 2001-2002, when I would ride the wave of strictly local DJ fame in my hometown Cologne, together with some other long-forgotten names of hopefuls - including one of the best (and most obsessive) DJs that city has ever seen: Jan-Eric Kaiser, the king of precision mixing and a good friend in cahoots with the Areal crew (that hadn’t moved to Berlin yet). He always liked to drop „Paul Ist Tot“ from Fehlfarben, an obscure, existentialist 1980 classic from an iconic German new wave band, right inbetween two banging techno cuts, for maximum effect. And then muse on about how somebody totally should do a remix of this. Well, here it is - only took longer than a decade, and it might not be what you expected, Jan. Sorry for that."