Sascha Funke - "Mango"

Sascha Funke - Take a Chance With Me (Bpitch Control 2008)

Sascha Funke - Mango / Bpitch Control

Ah! Few things on earth please me as much as a new Bpitch Control release (even if it's only a single - Thanks a lot for making me wait, Ben Klock...). My love for Berlin minimalism was born with this label and everything surrounding it - sometimes you just have to block out the wordpress and press play to see what the hot fuss is about. I've busied myself excavating Berlin and beyond ever since, but ground zero for me will always be Ellen Allien's imprint.

As with anything though, you play favorites. Sascha Funke has never been my go-to guy for some reason. Despite the relative strength of 2003's Bravo, Funke's steady stream of output (which includes a slew of 12s and remixes for various artists that continues even now) never registered on my radar. Or maybe it was just that I was suspicious of his Günther-esque facial hair and press foto-posturing. Whatever the case, visiting Mango was something I felt necessary to at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

For the record, Sascha Funke has grown up. There is a reserved air of maturity about Mango that can be evidenced in songs such as "Take a Chance With Me," a track that has these glowing synths and beats that crackle with the same vinyl blip as LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great." You know what I'm talking about, where the beat is just so muted that it sounds like it's struggling simply to go on at all. Plucked guitars slowly phased in and out give it a "Miami Vice" feel, but it never explodes into an overwrought celebration of self-pity. The emotion is reserved, for better or worse, sleazier or safer. It is smarter. It is sleeker.

It would seem, then, that all of those remixes of Télépopmusik and Gui Boratto and his fellow Bpitchers have helped him crystallize his own sound. As the beat snaps its fingers in on the first single, "Double Checked," Funke plays it cool enough to ensure that Mango will endure at least long enough to be one of minimal's heaviest hitters in the first quarter of '08. Beyond, who knows? But at least Funke has shown that he is capable of running with the big guns, and not just through association via label or remix.

It pleases me that the warm synthesizers and nods to both early-80s Italo and post-millennial minimalism are so prevalent on this record. Mango is the sound of a man who has worked hard to get where he is, and in so doing has reached a level of completeness that he had previously only been hinting at. Ripe with summer and winter jams alike, Sascha Funke has delivered an album that demands attention by pushing it away. "Du bist okay," says the headline on MySpace. Appropriate in that sense, and like the music, an extension of the man behind it. Delivered with a wink and loving every coy second. We the people? Well, we'll just dance to it, thanks very much. Yeah Sascha, you are okay. Just don't stop because we think you're better than that. Okay? Okay. Yeah. You're okay. Stay that way.