There are days that I'd really like to live in Smallville.
I don't mean Clark Kent's Kansas hometown; I'm talking about the Hamburg label that's home to acts like Christopher Rau, Julius Steinhoff, Moomin, and Smallpeople. I don't think I'm alone in my desire to put down roots, or at least rent a room, in their neatly tended acreage, where I imagine the fences are always white and picketed, and the windowpanes always streaked with rain; the aesthetic that they've created is so total, it exerts a remarkable emotional pull.
To begin with, there's the label's whimsical visual side, courtesy the illustrator Stefan Marx: the oddball cartoon figures, the cozy sloganeering, and even baubly abstracts that'd send J.M.W. Turner himself into ecstasy. It's an aesthetic that's quirky and elegant all at once.
And then, of course, there's the sound. Smallville descends from a long tradition of great German dance-music labels—Kompakt, Playhouse, Perlon, and particularly Dial, a Hamburg imprint co-founded by the frequent Smallville contributor Lawrence—for whom the in-house style is often at least as important as the individual artist's vision. And Smallville might have the most coherent aesthetic of any of them. That's not to say that they seem to be telling their artists what to do, or that all their releases sound the same; it's simply that all the label's records tend to orbit each other, and the energy of their combined gravitational force becomes a huge part of the label's appeal.
At its core, the Smallville sound is all about the contrast between textures, with crisp TR-808s cutting through downy pads, all of it topped off with piano melodies that twinkle like Christmas lights. Their vision of deep house descends directly from the tradition of Larry Heard—just backlit, soft-focused, and spun out until it's the texture of cotton candy.
Last month, Smallville celebrated its 10th anniversary with Smallville Ways, a compilation featuring new tracks from the label faithful—STL, Rau, Moomin, Smallpeople, Bon, Lawrence, Juniper, RVDS—plus a few friends of the crew. The label's first release, We Are Smallville—a three-track EP featuring Steinhoff & Hammouda, Sten (aka Lawrence), and DJ Swap—didn't actually appear until November, 2006, but the Hamburg record shop of the same name dates back to 2005, with Julius Steinhoff, Peter Kersten (Lawrence), and Stella Plazonja originally at the helm. A year after opening their doors, Lawrence and Steinhoff launched the label, while Plazonja moved to Berlin to study philosophy, and in 2010, Just von Ahlefeld (aka Dionne) joined the team, taking over the shop—leaving Steinhoff to concentrate on the label, and freeing up Lawrence to focus on the Berlin gallery, Mathew, that he runs with Carsten Jost. But Lawrence still keeps his studio in the back of the store, and the label operates less like a vertically integrated organization than a loose constellation of actors. Jacques Bon runs Smallville Records Paris, a satellite outfit that stems from Pantha du Prince's stint living in Paris, when he began stocking Dial and Smallville records in his girlfriend's shop; when they lost their lease, Bon set up his own store. And Lawrence's Mathew Gallery has a New York location now, too, while Stefan Marx's annual visits to the NY Art Book Fair help explain why a drawing of Hester Street's Joy's Flower Pot adorns Lawrence's recent ManhattanEP. Smallville is less a place than a state of mind, which makes it eminently portable.
"We talk a lot about what's coming up, and I will either go to his studio to see new things, or he just sends me new stuff," says Steinhoff of his working relationship with Marx. "He always has so many great things to choose from." In fact, Marx's drawings were one of the main motivating factors in the genesis of the label. Marx had just drawn the cover for Isolee's We Are Monster, recalls Steinhoff, and Smallville Hamburg was opening its doors. "We did a little cheesecake-and-coffee gathering at Smallville, and Stefan did a window painting for the store. When I first saw the Isolée cover, it had a big impact on me, as it all made sense. At the time, we didn't have the label yet, but we had the plan to do it, and we knew he should be the one to take care of the visual side."
The label's 11th year shows no sign of a slowdown. There's a new Moomin album on the way, and before that, a Moomin remix of an early '00s soul-disco tune. Fuck Reality, Smallville's fledgling remix label—so far, they've released updates of Westbam & Nena's "Oldschool Baby" and an edit of a Candi Staton classic—has a third release brewing. Move D has teamed up with two friends from Taipei as L'Amour Fou, with a new EP on the way. And Steinhoff is at work with his old pal Abdeslam Hammouda on a guitar-based album. "We will release that somewhere else, but this is something big for me," says Steinhoff.
Here are 10 standouts from the label's first decade. Set 'em aside for a rainy day.
STL, "Silent State" (Smallville 12)
"Silent State", released in 2009, marked the first time that the prolific Stephan Laubner had released anything on a label other than his own Something imprint, where he'd already put out a dozen or more records by that point, or Perlon, home to 2006's The Early Tracks and 2008's Lost in Brown Eyes. You've gotta wonder what made him choose to go with a new label for this one, if only because "Silent State" was clearly the most immediate and expansive thing he'd ever done. (The Smallville heads must have been beside themselves when they realized they were getting this one.) Its elements are as barely-there as on any of his records, in which unvarnished drum machines bump and clatter away against a backdrop of distant synths and persistent line noise, but its proportions are unmistakably anthemic—never mind that it was the quietest, cuddliest anthem you'd ever heard. (Resident Advisor wisely called it a "dance floor healer.") It was the perfect merger of STL's own dub techno instincts with Smallville's billowy deep house, with just a hint of Omar-S's windswept trance states mixed in.
Smallpeople, "Black Ice" (Smallville 27)
Smallpeople, aka Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld, are two of the label's core members, so it makes sense that their work would so often cut straight to the marrow of the Smallville aesthetic. "Black Ice" does just that, beginning with a title that's at once nostalgic—it always makes me think of ice skating, for some reason; specifically, the Peanuts cast drawing loops out on the frozen lake—and faintly menacing. The wistful little right-hand riff is as substantial as breath on a cold window, which only makes the drums and bass cut that much more sharply. It's an ethereal mood-piece that kicks you right in the gut.
Roaming, "Believe in Reflecting" (Smallville 31)
Speaking of Peanuts, there's this 2012 cut tucked away in the B2 slot of the lone EP from Roaming, aka Christopher Rau and Moomin, that goes so far as to sample "Christmas Time Is Here", from A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a quietly audacious move; even more so because the vocals aren't even really synchronized with the track. They're just loosely draped over Roaming's bass melody and crisp 808, spreading the wooziest kind of "happiness and cheer." But somehow, inexplicably, it works—maybe because Vince Guaraldi's piano tone is such an obvious antecedent for the Smallville crew's own penchant for watery, twinkling keys. It helps that the vocals are never brought out of the background; they just hang there, faintly coloring the scene, like a memory on the verge of crystallizing.
Christopher Rau, "Weird Alps" (Smallville LP06)
Long live the one-finger riff. Da da da da-da da, da da-da. The "melody" of this standout from Christopher Rau's sensibly titled sophomore album Two is just a single note—a tinny little brass stab—strung out into a syncopated pattern repeated bar after bar. The genius of the song is the way Rau folds all his other elements around the insistent pedal tone. It brings out the crispness of the drums, on the one side, and the soft, enveloping textures of the chords, on the other, and its dogged focus on that one goddamned note makes an otherwise unremarkable little four-note bass line seem positively epic. A little more than halfway through, the lead suddenly, briefly leaves its post and trips down the scale—a major development! Except that it never happens again, and you're left wondering if the momentary foray into actual melody was all in your imagination. It's a far tougher, more declarative cut that Rau is known for, but unlikely way that he comes out of his shell here is part of its charm.
Moomin, "Doobiest" (Smallville LP04)
Here's another one that's so quintessentially Smallville in spirit, it's like the label's entire catalog distilled into a single potent drop. With a rhythmic backdrop built out of sloshing waves, a sharp intake of breath, and honest-to-goodness seagull cries, it's one very small step away from being self-parody, but it works. A loop of shimmering Rhodes is all it takes to complete the misty, wistful aura. And the rest of The Story About You, the 2011 album that this song opens, is just as dreamy. (For more seagulls, check Christopher Rau's "RG in el Casa", off the new 10 Years – Smallville Ways compilation.)
Arnaldo, "Moving On" (Smallville 42)
Arnaldo (William Arnaldo Smith) is an Argentine-born, U.K.-raised, and Berlin-based producer whose only Smallville release, until recently, was a 2012 split with Juniper. The title of his new EP, Your Favourite Colour Is Green Yet You Dress in Black, sounds like it might be an emo lyric, which of course makes it perfect for the label's sentimentalist aesthetic. The record's only been out for a few months, so perhaps it's early to declare it among the label's best. But something about the shimmering riff at the center of "Moving On" keeps me coming back to the record, almost obsessively. As is so often the case with the label, the lead synth is a featherweight affair with the attack sanded down until it lands with the weight of a sigh. And at the still center of the track, framed by bone-dry drum machines and watery pads, that demure, two-note riff flickers away like a desert mirage. It's a small detail in a vast landscape, but it holds your attention like nothing else.
Julius Steinhoff, Flocking Behavior (Smallville LP09)
I started off wanting to highlight individual tracks, but that's hard to do in Smallville's case; their theme-and-variations game is so carefully controlled, the elements don't actually change that much from track to track. And once you've heard one, you typically want to hear more. Julius Steinhoff's 2014 album shows how well the label's aesthetic works when drawn out to full-length format. We get glistening synth experiments ("Treehouse"), Midwestern genuflections ("Where Days Begin"), shivering strings ("Hey You"), nervous 808s ("Sun and Stars"), wispy fillips ("Flocking Behaviour"), and hypnotic bassline tracks ("Cheetah Nights", "All the Things You Are"), all strung in a line like paper lanterns.
Move D & Benjamin Brunn, Songs from the Beehive (Smallville LP01)
Released in 2008, Songs from the Beehive was the first artist album on the label, and it's still one of the very best things they've ever put out. Both musicians, who had previously collaborated on the 2006 album Let's Call It a Day, are masters of nuance and texture, and the album unspools with the feel of a carefully controlled studio jam. "Like a Restless Sea" is an otherworldly, lyrical ambient cut that samples a spoken-word snippet from The Sound of Music, of all things; "Come In" and "Mothercorn" are jewel-toned studies in slow-motion house. Four of the album's undulating, immersive cuts run 12 minutes or longer; "Radar", the dub techno fantasia that closes the record, is nearly 21 minutes long. For an introduction, try "Velvet Paws", which trembles like a beaded curtain at the doorway to the infinite.
Benjamin Brunn, Live at Golden Pudel Club (Pudelville 01)
Running 39 minutes and broken into two side-long tracks, this live album was recorded at the Golden Pudel, a legendary Hamburg club-slash-dive where punk's counter-cultural spirit, rather than "club culture," holds sway. (Maybe Steve Albini should check it out sometime.) Both sides are essentially drum-free, save the occasional pitter-pat burst of white noise, but even those imitations of hi-hats are quickly swallowed up by bass gurgle and jewel-toned chords. Bubbling like a lava lamp, it's ambient jazz, essentially, with a rippling pulse and richer color than NASA's recent space photography.
Various, 10 Years, Smallville Ways (Smallville CD10)
Even if you've never heard a lick of Smallville before, there are worse approaches than to begin with the new comp and work your way backwards. Jacques Bon's "Tribute to You" is bright-eyed acid—one of the few 303 jams on the label that come to mind, in fact—in a major key. Lawrence's "Dawn 808" offers the perfect balance between crisp claps and squishy chords. Juniper's "Variations in Grey" is built around a tremolo synth squiggle so exquisite, you'd like to frame it and hang it on the wall. Stockholm's Kornél Kovács parachutes in from Studio Barnhus, the label he runs with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist, bearing what I'm pretty sure is the first vocal track ever published by Smallville. RVDS & Rau's "Umbé Data" boasts some lovely xylophone flourishes, Smallpeople's "Cricket Orchestra" is narcotic and low-slung, and STL's "Leaving Peaceful" enlivens dub techno with shuffling beats (and slowly rolling waves) as only STL can.