SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: COLLABS 3000 (CHRIS LIEBING & SPEEDY J) – METALISM (20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

COLLABS 3000 (CHRIS LIEBING & SPEEDY J)
METALISM (20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
NOVAMUTE (MUTE RECORDS)

Collabs 3000 is the alliance of Germany’s Chris Liebing and Rotterdam’s Jochem Paap (Speedy J), two architects of high‑pressure, precision‑engineered techno. Twenty years on they have re-released (and remastered) their 2005 album Metalism, also releasing it on vinyl (and CD) for the first time.

The album continues to be a statement of disciplined impact—few elements, each machined to hit—with the pair trading Liebing’s club‑scale dynamics and Paap’s textural obsession.

Today Metalism feels like primal youth in its prime. Heads nodding in the studio. Maslow is in the building, Pavlov on the dance floor. It’s a time machine back to the turn of the century—Y2K anxieties, though sated, humming in the wiring—a confected doom that never materialized, transmuted here into a grinding propulsion.

The palette is techno, in its raw, deep and hypnotic sense, with some forays into ambient and more experimental music. Slow builds take shape—intricate, if deceptively simple, sound design, that hides its moving parts in plain sight. The record keeps reminding you that less can be so much more, that minimal ideas, properly weighted, feel maximal at scale.

Listening today, it’s as if steel shavings off the factory floor have been magnetized into rhythm; a lathe takes off another microscopic layer; tool and die and die again until the surfaces gleam. The remaster sharpens edges without harshness, giving the tracks more room to breathe.

Key tracks include: “Assault” — a raw, deep, hypnotic and minimal dirge. A sliver of the silver age of techno; foggy, and on its way to Tresor. Crunchy, hazy, permeating—an endurance mantra that keeps pressure steady while the room does the moving. Acid undulations permeate “Cream 3,” with disparate voices seemingly there, a phantom choir pinned under glass, but never fully heard. Hard industry rendered as breath and rasp. It opens the lungs and then withholds, a study in tension-by-subtraction. On “Hilt,” more voices try to break out of their ether, subdued and tied up; they remain fixed in space as percussion chisels around them.

This 20-year-old time capsule now opened and shining in the light of today, doesn’t seem dated or old fashioned. Did time stand still? Not really. Metalism transcends time.

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