Daniel Steinberg

Shut Up Daniel Steinberg

After over 15 years mastering his art of production, Daniel Steinberg steps out of the shadows to unveil his debut artist album ‘Shut Up’ on Front Room, a scathing, yet very eloquent, message to the all too often meaningless noise and communication of the digital age, the uninspired, the shallow and the generic. Daniel Steinberg has always shied away from press attention, instead preferring to craft his music shrouded from ego and hype. His productions are in favour with the likes of Ricardo Villalobos, Luciano, Claude Vonstroke and Richie Hawtin and he is very much an unsung hero of the scene. As Berlin’s underground throbbed with minimal beats and stripped down house, Steinberg seemed to reach into the concreted shadows and caverns and emerge with something shimmering with real heart and feeling. Dicing Brazilian samples with killer beats and laying on the glitch to heavy effect, this type of behaviour is definitely exercised to stunning effect across the LP. Title track ‘Shut Up’ is an entangled backdrop of resonant percussion grooves, softly lifted and driven forwards the hypnotic, cynical vocals and unfolding to reveal a myriad of aberrant soundscapes. Latin American flavoured ‘Attencion’ delivers sliced and warped piano lines that build and fall with each mesmeric pass as Samba rhythms and percussion stutter, cut and break away. While ‘Time Is Not Forever’ provides a unique take on futuristic disco; nodding to the early psychedelic disco sounds of 60’s and 70’s and fusing them with modern production techniques, tweaking and toying with the track parts as if they were instruments. From the killer disco grooves of ‘Time Is Not Forever’ to the jacking house of ‘Gimme’ or the dream like undercurrent of ‘Save My Darling’, Steinberg’s production breathes something deeply accomplished and enormously creative across the album while retaining a definite dance floor sensibility. A veritable chameleon of Berlin’s musical landscape since he first started producing his co