3 out of 5

Label: Analogical Force

Produced by: Carsten Schulz

An endearing, if minor, release, Quadratrschulz’s Halo Welt EP reminds me of the early 00s of electronica, when Boards of Canada and other Warp artists of that ilk were common posters in dorm rooms, and you’d walk into music store and hear a pleasant digital beat – warm synths; a rounded bassline – and, if inquiring about it, you’d be directed to the “groove” section of the shop, and shown some nondescript new release. It’s on sale, you buy it, maybe listen to it on the way home (did you still have a portable CD player?), and then ripped it into a playlist, not thinking of it much after that. Every now and then a song from the album comes up, and you’re like, “oh yeah, I remember buying this. It was pretty good!” and maybe you poke around their discography, see they’ve been releasing album after album since, but your playlist has switched over to another track, and the internet has rabbitholes, awaiting your attentions.

It’s just that Halo Welt is so pleasant and unobtrusive that I’d forget I was listening to it. Individual moments / beats don’t stand out much, but there is a really nice cumulative effect that builds over its first three tracks, showing off a somewhat atypical song structure for electronica that feels a bit more like pop songs than techno, with a verse-chorus-verse type exchange amongst the burbly synth layers. This peaks with the album’s best track – Herb (Fre 01:11 Edit 3) – in which something almost equating to a trumpet toodles atop the beat, for a kind of elevator music jazz tune. It’s fun.

Final track Stoff (Die 02:13 Edit 08b) loses these organic aspects for a very standard groove loop; also not unpleasant at all, but just meaning things end pretty muted.