Dettinger had already flirted with ambient on the Cocteaus-sampling track on Blond; with Intershop (named after a state-run chain store in the former East Germany), he moved more decisively into an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine. (“We always loved ambient,” recalled Mayer of his reaction to the Intershop demo. “KLF’s Chill Out was a record where everyone inside Kompakt could sing every note. To include ambient into the world of Kompakt was just a logical step for us.”) The first track—untitled, like every single cut in Dettinger’s catalog—lays out the palette that set the album apart from its peers.
His synthesizers have a blurry, liquid quality. The sub-bass is too low to register as anything other than a vague pressure welling up underneath. Sampled drum-machine hits flit backward and forward like windshield wipers. The gliding groove gives the impression of rolling ceaselessly ahead in slow motion; the tempo is an unhurried 100 beats per minute, though dub delay on the fogged-out snares and hi-hats adds a quickening sense of movement that keeps the groove from plodding. Where techno usually stomps, this aqueous opening salvo undulates.
Across six more tracks, Intershop builds on that humble set of ideas in evocative and vividly tactile ways. Track two wreathes its chords in a halo of distortion that glows like hammered copper. Track three, a loping fusion of hip-hop and industrial dub, is shot through with what might be the rattle of a film projector, gravelly and unyielding. On track four, reversed drum hits and elliptical delay patterns combine to create a groove that seems to pull apart at the seams—a lumbering, intransigent cadence that goes to the heart of Dettinger’s unusual sense of rhythm.
If his mysterious sound design—lo-fi, suggestive, always seeming to hide secrets beneath its mottled surface—ropes you in, the music’s emotional pull keeps you there. That’s particularly true of Intershop’s final two tracks. The penultimate cut is a loping dub sketch whose luminous melody flickers like a wraith in the woods; in the closing track, a handful of piano notes run through a delay chain that slips increasingly out of phase, swirling like water going down the drain. It is one of the simplest songs I’ve ever heard; on some days, I’m pretty sure it’s also the saddest.
Six months after Intershop, Dettinger returned to the dancefloor with the bruising, bewilderingly left-footed Totentanz 12″, which lumbers like an elephant through a field of icicles. Then, with August 2000’s Oasis, he delivered his magnum opus. For many years, I’d considered Intershop to be his masterpiece, but with time, Oasis has come to rival its predecessor. The general approach is much the same as the first time out: The tempos are slow, the sounds dusty, the spaces between them yawning and empty. You can practically see the tumbleweeds bouncing through the music. But Oasis benefits from a more varied palette than Dettinger’s debut, and its crumbling sense of structure feels even stranger.