How are you supposed to go to work after such a breakfast?!!!?

Phew, it’s been so long since the last post, it almost feels like a resurrection!

As always folks, I’m the one to blame: maybe it’s a renewed love affair with music that keeps me inhouse with my beloved instrument? or maybe it was a relaxing stay in Australia that infused a delicious-but-dangerous slackness in my work ethic, long after I rotated back to Berlin? Anyway, I haven’t visited WordPress in a while and now there’s a lot to say!

Concerning Australia, the Session Victim boys and myself had a wonderful stay at the other end of the world a few weeks ago: great gigs, great food, great friends and all in all just a bloody great time! Special thanks to Mad Racket, Christian Vance, Future Classic and all the aussie crew for setting up Retreat’s first international tour, we’ll be back soon!

It’s a bit late for this one, but we still wish to express our gratitude to everyone that has supported our label in 2010: it’s been our best year so far so we thank you all for helping us promoting the vinyl cause! Despite the fact that more and more labels are doing only digital releases and that Technics has (apparently) finally stopped producing the world’s best turntable, a certain “vinyl-niche” (with vinyl-only labels and vinyl-friendly DJ’s) has definitely settled in the music underground and we’re proud to be part of this movement…

So what’s in store for Retreat this year? Well, since we’re sometimes eager to continue with our traditions, we’ll start the 2011 catalogue with another edition of the “Treats” series…which brings us now to volume 3! Iron Curtis, Session Victim and Quarion have all submitted an exclusive track for this record and while we can’t divulge more info at the moment, we promise you that “Treats Vol.3″ will be the best episode so far! You can also expect some hot new music from Session Victim and Quarion on Retreat later this year as well as exclusive podcasts and a few surprises…

And don’t forget that if you’re looking for previous releases from Retreat’s two main artists and their affiliated projects, our webshop has got all the goodies! From Session Victim’s first bangers on Real Soon to Quarion’s classics on Drumpoet Community via Matthias Reiling’s recent masterpieces on Giegling, you’ll be able to complete your collection at a very fair price.

Before signing off, we’d also like to mention that our super designer Gesine Todt has just finished crafting an open font for Google’s Web Fonts API! A very classy typeface that you can download here.

Thanks for your ongoing support, we promise to hit you up with more news very soon!

ps: our special heartfelt thoughts go out to our followers in Japan, as they are facing a terrible crisis. We wish you a lot of courage and hope during these tough times…

Hotter than a chili contest, “Kickstart My Love” is set to be the soundtrack of the current heatwave sweeping over Europe!

“Here’s a little mix I did for the ‘Reels’-podcast-series of my buddies at Retreat. It contains some of my alltime favorite 12″s, some tracks i went nuts on the past few years, two fantastic edits done by my dear friend Jool (under his ‘Edit Piafra’ moniker) besides some later records and tracks from 2009 and 2010.
Thanks to my mate Baaz who allowed me to use his spaceship-like-lookin’ cd-player for this mix.
I hope the quality is not too bad and you guys like it – even this mix is a little genre-rollercoaster in it’s first half.”

This was actually taken in London

It’s going to be my fourth winter here in Berlin, but I still can’t get used to the following natural phenomena: how fast the sun is setting  between 4 and 5 in the afternoon. It’s almost as if you look out the window, write some nonsense in 140 characters and when you look out again, bam, darkness crept in…

I won’t lie, it gets me depressed sometime. That’s why I’ve decided to take german lessons again every morning, so that I can get as much “light” as possible and mostly because I want to master a bit more properly a very difficult language. Although I’m pretty sure that I’m learning stuff that my fellow german co-conspirator doesn’t use (Hauke, wie oft benutzt du den Konjunktiv I??!!?), it feels good to implement new knowledge other than music history, sofware use or geopolitics (what I’m into these days).

But speaking of my Berlin Kumpel, have you checked out his exclusive “Fried and then basted” mix? It’s the first session of our brand new REELS platform and it’s pretty hot! We already have a couple of exclusive mixes lined up for the next editions, including a killer slo-mo House set from Mark August so stay tuned!

On the Retreat front, Barrio Payment has been getting mad support from a lot of cats…and the 12″ is almost sold out! So much thanks to everyone for supporting Hunee and our small family business. The record bags are also about to disappear very quickly from our stock so get them while you can…or just wait until we manufacture some more