Artist: Henrik Schwarz
Title: Supravision EP
Label: Moodmusic
Released: 2002
Tracklisting: ‘Marvin’ / ‘Say Say Say’ / ‘Forbidden (Club Mix)’

A few months ago, while spending another evening exploring the forgotten corners of my record collection, I had an idea: a new series of articles where I look back at a release, put it in context, and reassess it. The series, I decided, should be called Reappraised and the only firm rule for inclusion was that I had to own the record. Unlike the Bleepography series, which is rooted in bleep & bass, breakbeat hardcore and releases that in some way connect to those styles, there would be no musical rules for Reappraised; after all, my record collection genuinely features a wide range of genres, sub-genres and musical oddities or outliers.

So here it is, the first Reappraised article. It features a record I stumbled on during that fateful night – one I had played in clubs (and at home) countless times over the years, but had not picked out, dusted down and ‘dropped’ for the best part of a decade.

There was a good reason for that. The section of the collection I rediscovered it in was relatively inaccessible, hidden by a combination of boxes and loose piles of wax dug out for DJ gigs. It was mostly full of flotsam and jetsam – vintage white label promos from the days I was editing the reviews section of IDJ magazine, iffy re-edit EPs from the days before my disco knowledge had developed, and stuff I’d bought when I was a kid (including, for some reason, a 2 Unlimited 12”).

There was, though, one gem in there – a 12” single I thought I’d somehow managed to lose at a gig or during a particularly messy after-party some years back. What I’d rediscovered was Supravision, the debut 12” from German producer Henrik Schwarz. Released by Klas Lindblad AKA Sasse’s Moodmusic label in 2002, it was – and remains – one of the most startling first releases I can remember.

Of course, as we now know, it was just the start of Schwarz’s journey to becoming the artist he is today – a widely admired composer, DJ and live performer known for taking on adventurous projects, creating interesting albums and collaborating with jazz and classical music performers. Initially, though, he continued to focus on club dancefloors and in the five years that followed the release of Supravision, the German delivered a string of now classic cuts and remixes.

There was the deliciously wayward and freaky ‘Leave My Head Alone Brain’; a starring role in some of Innervisions most admired formative releases (see Ame, Dixon and Derrick L Carter hook-up ‘Where We At?’); the raw and glitchy techno minimalism of ‘Jimi’s (2006 Mix 3)’; the undulating tech-house trip ‘Walk Music’; a frankly sublime, slow-burn remix of Coldcut and Robert Owens’ cover of ‘Walk a Mile In My Shoes’; and a debut album showcasing his mastery of the performance potential of the then still-new Ableton Live performance/production software (2005’s Henrik Schwarz Live). All of this made Schwarz an in-demand performer and remixer at a time when his home city of Berlin was the undisputed capitol city of electronic music.

Of course, when the Supravision EP started landing in record stores in 2002, Schwarz was still an unknown debutant (at least outside of the city he called home). The 12” rightly got a lot of attention, though I don’t remember it being one that was lauded by the press. Its’ success was almost entirely down to the magical music it contained, and specifically the epic, 13-minute A-side, ‘Marvin’.

Clocking in at under 100 BPM, it was an unlikely club hit – even at a time when slow-motion ‘chuggers’, pitched-down acid tracks and long, hypnotic after-hours workouts were all the rage. I generally struggled to know how and when to play it, as although it was slow – both in terms of tempo and the speed in which its subtle but devastating musical changes occurred – it was heavy enough to sound properly big on club soundsystems. In the end, I settled for playing it in warm-up sets and dusting it out when people came back to mine to drink, talk rubbish and celebrate the dying embers of their saucer-eyed highs.

Listening back now, 22 years on, ‘Marvin’ has lost none of its magic or mastery of slow-build dancefloor dynamics. It blew me away when I first listened to it at Eat The Beat Records in Bristol and two-and-a-bit decades later it still has the power to move me. Over the years, I’ve accrued quite a lot of very deep house records, but very few can compare to the level of ultra-deepness Schwarz achieved on ‘Marvin’ (besides, perhaps, those by Japanese one-off Sprinkles). It’s a genuine marvel of sound design, locked-in dancefloor hypnotism and heady machine soul.

I have no idea about the inspirations behind it, but it feels like a very Berlin record – one designed to eke the last drops of rhythm out of tired, bleary-eyed dancers after a weekend of debauchery. My hunch has always been that he started with the sample that gives the track its’ name – a short snippet of the opening bars of Marvin Gaye’s 1975 sensual soul masterpiece ‘I Want You’, heavily looped and filtered – and built the track from there, initially combining a sludgy kickdrum and hissing snares with the kind of hand percussion patterns Gaye had utilised on his game-changing What’s Going On album.

As the track progresses, we get heady sustained chords, echo-laden drum fills, waves of echoing electronic motifs – frequently doused in delay – and the kind of subtle, mind-mangling mixing tricks more often associated with dub techno. It kind of bubbles and builds, slowly changing throughout, but you’re so locked in that the shifts barely register. It’s simply magnificent.

The EP’s other two tracks are not quite as revelatory, immersive or life-enriching, but have nevertheless stood the test of time pretty well. ‘Say Say Say’ is a typically druggy chunk of German deep house/tech-house fusion featuring his own improvised vocals (credited on the sleeve to Schwarz’s alternative alias RikPUTIN), while ‘Forbidden (Club Mix)’ dials into the enveloping, dubbed-out deep house sonics explored on ‘Marvin’ – albeit at a higher tempo – and gives them a futurist tech-house twist. The latter is a marvel of sorts, but still pales into insignificance when compared to the mesmerising A-side.

Schwarz’s next move – aside from establishing his own Sunday Music imprint via the self-explanatory This Is Sunday Music EP in early 2003 – was to return to Moodmusic with another ridiculously deep, pitched-down jam based on tampering with a small section of a soul classic.

‘Chicago’, which incorporated mutilated, smacked-out snippets of the Roy Ayers tune of the same name, was another bona-fide epic. Beginning with two minutes of trippy, minor-key synth sounds, it saw Schwarz conjure up another chuggy and druggy groove, with much of the track’s impact once again being down to judicious mixing and DJ style trickery. It was very good and, if anything, weirder and more mind-mangling than its predecessor, but to these ears lacked the softly spun sensuality and sense of wonder that was such a big part of his first single’s appeal.

I have plenty of admiration for Schwarz, his achievements and commitment to diving headlong into more experimental projects (many of his contemporaries have just continued to churn out run-of-the-mill tech-house or techno records, securing lucrative DJ work but failing to hit the heights of their earliest records). That said, I still don’t think he’s made anything since that quite matches the brilliance of ‘Marvin’.