★★★★☆
His house music spun by candlelight with a faint and quirky glow, Acid Pauli is playing for a select band of trusted followers — a few more than a back to mine, but not by much, with everything cosily cocooned in a cave-turned-club. Crucially not fading into the pallid or the muted, augmented by a sense of the noble (Kadebostan), the sultry (Raz Ohara) and the not-of-this-world (the Speak n Spell guesting on Normal Brain’s “M-U-S-I-C”), Martin Gretschmann is resident DJ to a secret society and faraway place that takes two discs, two and a half hours and a secret middle compartment to get to. Oddballs from Nicolas Jaar and the slightly creepy Jan Turkenburg, where Pauli flies closer to the sun, make nice with Move D’s lounge groove and Pauli’s own “Farewell Fred” offering sounds coming in from the cold.
Disc two carries on with the stylish, tribally-attuned modesty, broadening the mix’s weight with Pauli & Nannue Tipitier trying to swell its band of followers who have hung on his every beat so far. It does edge towards regular deep house dalliances in the dark, with the greater shimmies of Kabale Und Liebe and Tempo Di Roma discovering an ass-to-shake ratio. Intercepted by the steel drums of Taron Trekka and the reassurances of Calico Horse, Francesca Lombardo and The Band That Never Met, the candles begin to flicker this way and that, but never go out.
File under: NU, dOP, Console