Slamming onto your summer spectrum clad in the rarest synthesized silks and ready to get down low, Das Spezial present three heaters and two panel beaters transmitting from somewhere way out on the horizon. ‘Sophia’ is the grungiest gear the Speziales have cooked up to date, laden with crushing layers of Buchla-generated waveforms contorting before your ears, stepping to you hard on the 100 BPM tip and beefed up in the low end for a frankly devastating end result. By comparison ‘Nahid’ reaches skyward in a euphoric suite of arps moving in intricate formations and cracking round the edges. Not so much a case of hands in the air but more head in the clouds, with a dramatic narrative which builds into a knee-buckling drop to make the masses hit the deck with the sheer joy of it all. Giving you the synth-noir soundtrack fantasy 80s Zimmer could have only dreamt of, ‘Shayar’ hits hard from the outset with a set piece geared towards high tension and hard-bitten protagonists doing dreadful things, but feeling guilty about it deep down inside. There’s more than enough welly in the original productions to make an adventurous body jerk, but to indulge the more pronounced dancefloor tendencies of Das Spezial, imperious US producer Matrixxman is on hand with two monumental versions of ‘Sophia’. The ‘Medusa Mix’ is a pitch-perfect blend of EBM seduction and acid immersion – all throbbing bass lines and concrete slabs of staccato drum pressure coming on tough and teasing into a proto-trance pulse as the filter on the 303 opens up. By way of contrast, the ‘Cyborg Mix’ turns up the heat and dials in some swing for a tense, absolutely locked-on techno work out for those who like their nihilistic machine music to still be funky as hell. This is Das Spezial, what else did you expect?