The ‘minimal’ aesthetic in dance music emerged in the early 90s via Detroit second wave techno producers like Robert Hood and Jeff Mills, Cologne’s Kompakt label, and Berlin’s Basic Channel, who in different ways all pursued a reduced, restrained, repetitive take on the techno template. In part a response to the perceived commerciality and over-exuberance of ‘hands-in-the-air’ exultant rave and trance, the minimal approach tended toward subtlety and nuance rather than bombast and euphoria, detail rather than broad strokes, with the focus on the hypnotic power of timbre, space, and repetition rather than the big emotions delivered by uplifting chords, huge synth riffs or epic breakdowns.
Between 1993 and 2012, Heiko Schäfer (1971-2017) and Ata’s Playhouse label were key in developing the minimal aesthetic in house music through a string of increasingly intriguing, leftfield, abstract, edgy, narcotic 12” house/techno/tech house releases in the second half of the ‘90s from artists including Ricardo Villalobos, Isolée, Losoul and Roman Flügel. Musical features and tropes that would be christened first minimal, then micro house can be heard emerging through these tracks: the clicks, creaks, pops and glitches that began to complement more traditional drum machine percussion sounds, the use of space and timbre to create dreamlike duvet-house or hauntingly skeletal haunted grooves, the intense concentration on detail in the production, the low quantity of parts in a track and their often wispy fragility, and the huge amounts of space and time given to tiny ideas to develop and unfurl.
At the start of the 2000s, along with their annual compilation series Famous When Dead, Playhouse began to release artist albums, and until 2012, continued to provide a purist and experimental alternative to mainstream club bangers so distinct that Isolée’s gossamer-light ultra-jazz anthem Beau Mot Plage and Ricardo Villalobos’ sprawling, disorientating, outer-limits trumpet-techno-trudge Fizheuer Zieheuer both, somehow, shared the unique Playhouse commonality.