From A 20th Century Box, by Sp@sms

From A 20th Century Box

by Sp@sms

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Deluxe limited edition high quality 180 grams double vinyl edition, packed in a 350 grams full color gatefold sleeve and full color innersleeves. These inner sleeves contain a long interview by DJ White Delight with Arno Peeters and in-depth notes, comments and backgrounds for all the tracks. Pressed as “Eco record”, using all colour residues, resulting in a pressing with each copy having unique patterns and colors! This vinyl edition contains 10 tracks including remixes by Bloody Mary and Cosmic Force! Tracks not on vinyl are Titanic and Cem Traxx 1, and the original versions of both Pathos and Unidentified Urban (Titanic and Cem Traxx 1 are available on vinyl as part of Sp@sms' Titanic EP - 8 UTR QDM5).

Includes unlimited streaming of From A 20th Century Box via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 3 days

€7 EUR or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
The limited edition CD, with 12 tracks and a total playing time of 75 minutes, comes in a beautiful digipack including a full color 24-page booklet. The booklet contains a long interview by DJ White Delight with Arno Peeters and in-depth notes, comments and backgrounds for all the tracks. This CD version contains 4 tracks that are not available on the vinyl edition of this album.

Includes unlimited streaming of From A 20th Century Box via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 7 days

€6 EUR
Cassette + Digital Album
Limited edition on-shell printed cassette, packed in a Maltese cross cardboard sleeve. This cassette version contains 13 tracks, including the remixes by Bloody Mary and Cosmic Force, plus 3 cassette only bonus tracks: the original, full-length version of Bossanova, the Underwater Dub version of Titanic (remixed by DJ Zero One) and the previously unreleased track Understand Dope For What It Really Is. The cassette does not include the original versions of Pathos, Unidentified Urban and Titanic, nor the edited version of Bossanova.

Includes unlimited streaming of From A 20th Century Box via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 7 days

edition of 50

€12 EUR
Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

€12 EUR or more

1.	Pathos 05:56	buy track
2.	Bossanova (edit) 05:47	buy track
3.	CEM Traxx 1 07:17	buy track
4.	Titanic 05:24	buy track
5.	Bossanova (cut short) 03:40	buy track
6.	Coopertest 02:54	buy track
7.	Unidentified Urban 04:09	buy track
8.	LocomoTangoSinus 05:11	buy track
9.	NeuroMatrix V1 04:58	buy track
10.	Wow 'n Flutter 12:07	buy track
11.	Tribe 333 05:47	buy track
12.	Words with the Shaman 11:40	buy track

about

Sp@sms returns to U-TRAX with an eclectic full-length album, featuring sound collages and electro, techno and acid tracks that are both retro and futuristic.

Hot on the heels of his ‘Unidentified Pathos EP’ release, quirky Utrecht producer Arno Peeters, aka Sp@sms, presents the full-length album ‘From the 20th Century Box’. As the title suggests, this album contains previously unreleased material from the archives of the Dutch dance pioneer, known by most for his releases on Djax-Up-Beats in the early 90s.
As can be expected of U-TRAX, the album comes in three different editions, with the vinyl version containing the remixes of ‘Pathos’ by Bloody Mary and ‘Unidentified Urban’ by Cosmic Force. The CD and digital version boast the original versions of these tracks, plus two additional tracks: CEM Traxx 1 and Titanic V1, both previously released on vinyl in 2019, as part of the ‘Titanic EP’. Finally, the cassette version more or less has the same track list as the CD/digi version, but has both aforementioned remixes and DJ Zero One’s ‘Underwater Dub’ of ‘Titanic’, the original full-length version of ‘Bossanova’, plus one more bonus track in the rugged ‘Understand dope for what it really is’.
Buyers of the physical releases get treated on superior quality products, another trademark of U-TRAX. The vinyl edition boasts a 180 grams, colored, double disc set in a full-color gatefold sleeve. Both discs come in a full-color inner sleeve, one that contains a long and open-hearted interview label-owner DJ White Delight had with Arno Peeters, a very personal story that covers his complete career as a music producer and sound smith. The other inner sleeve presents in-depth notes, comments and backgrounds for all tracks on the album.
For the CD, that has a total playing time of 75 minutes and comes in a beautiful digipack, the interview and track notes are converted to a full-color 24-page booklet. The cassette will have full-color on-body print and comes in a plastic-free Maltese cross fold-up sleeve.

Opener ‘Pathos’ was originally produced in 1991, making it 31 years old today. Yet, the acid-infused, dark techno track still sounds urgent and very suitable for modern dancefloors. Bloody Mary took a classic EBM (Electronic Body Music) approach for her remix, which works perfectly for this track.
From 1992 comes ‘Bossanova’, in which the rhythm from the Casio SK-1 toy-sampler is used in such a way, that it almost sounds like repetitive tribal drums. ‘CEM Traxx 1’ (2003) is a melancholic electro trip through a scorching landscape, followed by the unusually clean (for Arno’s standards at least) acid track ‘Titanic’ from 1991, that was originally produced for a Random XS EP, the band Arno once founded with DJ Zero One.
Then the madness gets going, with the 1993 track ‘Bossanova (cut short)’, which is a version of the original in which all nasty and noisy dub-tricks that Arno had up his sleeve have been applied. ‘Coopertest’ from 1992 is the first sound collage on this album and it sees a gorgeous sample from Twin Peaks’ agent Cooper being combined with a pile of crazy music samples that couldn’t be more different from each other.
‘Unidentified Urban’ started out as a radio-commercial for Peter Stuyvesant in 2003, and was later rebuilt by Arno into a nice old-school electro track. In the Cosmic Force remix of this song, the melancholic synthesizer chords take main stage, combined with pumping electro beats, a 303 bassline and some sick ‘Miami Vice’-like 80s drums in the break.
What follows is perhaps the strangest piece of music you have ever heard. In the 1991 sound collage ‘LocomoTangoSinus’, Arno managed to mix Dutch and Argentinian folklore music and turn it into a fascinating composition. His conceptual approach to music gets exposed further in ‘NeuroMatrix V1’ from 1996, in which he imagined a future where music gets controlled directly by our neurons. For the twelve-minute space-dub-trip ‘Wow ‘n Flutter’ (1996), Arno teamed up with Bart Rovers, with whom he previously made the African Nightflight EP on U-TRAX in 1996.
In ‘Tribe 333’ from 1992, Peeters violated every rule from the early 90s, by combining acid with humor. The album is closed by a final sound collage, that was actually not made in the 20th century. The 2012 composition ‘Words with the Shaman’ is however one of Arno’s personal favorites and the spooky track is a worthy closer for this totally unique album.

credits

released July 29, 2022

All tracks written, produced and mastered (for CD, digital and cassette) by Arno Peeters.
Mastered (for vinyl) by Johanz Westerman at BallyHoo Mastering Studios.
Graphic design by Marieke Botterman at Botterman Ontwerp.

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about

U-TRAX Utrecht, Netherlands

Independent Dutch label, based in Utrecht. Released 20 leftfield techno/acid/house/electro records between 1993 and 1997 on U-TRAX and its sublabel Phoq U Phonogrammen.
After a soft re-launch in October 2018, U-TRAX is back with re-releases, re-presses and fresh new music since 2021.
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