(Abstract, Ambient, IDM, Contemporary Jazz) VA - Sven Väth - Coming Home - 2014, MP3, 320 kbps

Coming Home by Sven Väth
Sven Väth is looking relaxed. The global House and Techno scene continues to define his life but he deals with it now at his own pace — he is in control of his life’s beat. Yet he’s also still the creature of passion for whom producing music, playing sets, remixing and of course flying the world are far more than simply technological or logistic challenges. To his mind, all that stuff is not only brimming with life but also directed by a higher order or even by the kind of “soul” familiar to us from older historical genres such as Jazz or Blues. In spinning vinyl for over three decades, Väth has made the quintessence of electronic music his life’s work. And coping with the pros and cons of nightlife is naturally a part of that.
After a gig in New York he’s just arrived (back) in Ibiza to duly celebrate the “Grand Opening” of his Cocoon Club in the legendary Amnesia in early June. Väth remains a man true to vinyl and hence solid DJ cases. “It’s a matter of honour — and of course also a statement about which generation you belong to”, he explains with a burst of laughter. The usual DJ hero tales are not his thing at all yet he wouldn’t ever want to do without the haptic qualities of real records. “I don’t need 15,000 sound files when I’m booked for a gig — I’m not a jukebox” he exclaims in the unmistakable Hessen vernacular of a (middle-) aged warhorse. “Once the Cocoon Club in Frankfurt reached its end it was time for me to make a cut. I needed a change of space and ambiance, not just a change of address. And so Berlin wasn’t an option, even though I like to play or go out on the tiles there” he says. Väth now alternates between London and Thailand. He and the British capital have had a close personal and musical relationship since the start of his career, he explains, so there was something almost organic about breaking camp in his old home on the River Main in order to set up afresh on the banks of the Thames.
His is pretty much a life always on the go — except when he gets home, as he often must, so as to wind down, relax, cook and of course listen to music — different music than when he’s in clubs or driving to the next airport. And this is the stuff from which the successful compilation series “Coming Home” is made, a CD series that since 2007 has been inspiring heroes of electronic music to put together their personal “own-four-walls” selection and hand it over to their fans and other music lovers. Colleagues from Nightmares on Wax, DJ Hell, the Berlin sound collective Jazzanova and the Paris band Nouvelle Vague have already pulled out the stops for “Coming Home” — and now it’s Sven Väth’s turn to delve deep into his vinyl collection.
He has compiled fourteen tracks for “Coming Home’ — songs he listens to when he returns to his London apartment after playing sets worldwide. “I actually intended to present only my current fave songs — without any particular dramaturgy. But even so, there’s a musical arc of suspense to what came together in the end”, Väth says of his selection. Norwegian Jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen gets the ball rolling: “Poverty And It’s Opposite” hovers like steaming mist over rolling rice fields, a minimalist, meditative trumpet running through an overall weave of Jazz, Classical and Ambient sounds. Here, East Asian influences such as the warm, soft tones of the Japanese shakuhachi flute define the sound artist’s spectrum: an ideal Väth soundtrack, accompanied by the patter of warm summer rain on the porch of a Thai bamboo hut. Horror Inc. by contrast is yet another pseudonym of Canadian DJ and Techno producer Marc Leclair aka Akufen. Väth has compiled his “fave listens” in a way such that the tension gradually mounts. The fifth track, “Fantastic Piano”, from the exceptionally talented Swede Axel Boman sounds something like a contemporary Burt Bacharach composition. With “Tears for Animals” the New York sisters CocoRosie dive into the blooming field of eclecticism while Donni Sò presents “La Pagliarella”(remixed here by Ulrich Schnauss), which was originally released by the formerly Cologne- but meanwhile Berlin-based small label Karaoke Kalk, in the framework of the project “Heimatlieder aus Deutschland”.
These few concrete examples of song show how Sven Väth breaks all the rules and disregards genre borders. “My influences have always been diverse and unpredictable. And that is unmistakably the case also on this quiet listening compilation”, he says in conclusion. And then he has to go. The next gig calls. Another journey into sound!