Kassem Mosse - Workshop 32 2xLP (Workshop, 2023)
"Long before “lo-fi house” was blowing up play counts on YouTube, Kassem Mosse, aka Gunnar Wendel, was making hazy, low-visibility house jams that seemed to creep through a sooty midnight fog. Tarnished and corroded, betraying hints of line noise and vinyl hiss, his music sounded like he’d made it on machines that had lain buried for a decade in the dirt. It wasn’t just the omnipresent murk that made his tracks distinctive; it was the ominous, ungainly way they moved, skulking heavily around the edges of the dancefloor like a hunched beast lurking in the underbrush. At once sensual and sullen, it was a vision of club music charged with danger—a kind of inclement weather that could turn nasty at any minute.
Wendel was prolific in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but he slowed his output after 2016, around the same time that he began moving away from the dancefloor. That year’s Disclosure, for London label Honest Jon’s, was chilly and aloof, draping atonal synth loops over brittle machine beats. The following year’s Chilazon Gaiden, for his own Ominira imprint, was more energetic but nearly as forbidding; its speedy, spaced-out techno suggested an unheated warehouse rave in deep winter. workshop 32 is his first solo work as Kassem Mosse in six years, and it is his most immediate and enveloping release in ages...
Even in his scuzziest early years, Kassem Mosse’s music flickered like a candle flame, and the best tracks on workshop 32 are among the most propulsive in his catalog. The C- and D-side cuts are especially nimble, perpetually switching up the rhythm with ghost notes and stray bursts of keys or voice. There are echoes of Moodymann and Theo Parrish in his stubbornly soulful syncopations, and of Pepe Braddock in his gauzy weave of tones. Mostly though, he just sounds like Kassem Mosse, even if Kassem Mosse has never sounded quite like this before....
He's back on his grind, and he’s never sounded sharper." - Philip Sherburne (Pitchfork)