Tobias

As a member of the generation of German minimal techno producers that set the template for the genre we know today back in the early '90s, Tobias Freund has kept a relatively low profile compared to peers such as Thomas Fehlmann, Wolfgang Voigt and Moritz von Oswald. For many years, he was known more widely as a studio engineer whose claim to fame was working on the Milli Vanilli album. But a few years ago, when he began producing austerely, glitchy techno experiments as part of NSI, Freund experienced something of a second wind and revisionists have gone back to exhume his obscure early singles and collaborations. Leaning Over Backwards is his latest undertaking, a dense, deeply looped minimal techno album on Berlin's Ostgut Ton label. Freund appears to have found the ideal home for his brand of six a.m. club music, as Leaning Over Backwards has much in common with the imprint's revival of Luke Slater's Planetary Assault Systems. Both aspire to retrench minimal techno in its roots of repetition, where the danceability is an afterglow squeezed out of a groove's shadow, which may or may not be there in the hypnotic undertow of the BPMs.