Looking back at the first enigmatic PCP compilation: Frankfurt Trax Vol. 1 - House Of Techno

PCP had many releases of a strange and experimental nature. But even amongst its most unusual ones, this one stands out.
In fact, this compilation (and its tracks) rarely gets mentioned in "best-of" lists, DJ charts, mix-sets.
People know it exists. But they seldom talk about it.

And indeed, it is "at the edge of the board" in many ways. It almost sounds as it if was done by a different label, a different Planet Core Productions.
Few of the aliases appear again in later releases - a rarity for this label's catalogue.

There are not much "Hardcore" sounds, yes. But PCP never produced 'purely Hardcore', and you could not expect much Hardcore in 1990 anyway.
But there neither is that typical, detroit-infused, somewhat minimalist, catacomb, and claustrophobic techno mania - which later became the trademark style of PCP.

Instead, the sounds are varied, massive, expansive.
There are links to hip hop, ebm, dance...
And even though the instrumentation itself feels minimalist, the sound itself feels huge.

To put it this way: if PCP had continued that way, I could imagine them filling rock and pop arenas with a kind of PCP sound that lies in the middle of mass appeal madness and emissions from the deepest underground.
Headlining the newspapers and owning the charts.

But PCP went another way; they took no quarters, they went as rough and secretive and underground as possible.
So underground that only now, decades later, a wide audience slowly unpeels these layers.

So that's what we got here. A huge "what-if?" artifact out of the earliest days of PCP.

Rating: 89 out of 100