Vainqueur

In the wake of the Berlin Wall's fall and the ascent of electronic dance music, Rene Löwe delved into the vinyl he encountered at the Hard Wax record store. Early in the 1990s, as Detroit artists arrived in Berlin for collaborations and DJ sets, Löwe developed a close friendship with Eddie Fowlkes, who helped him establish a personal studio. During this period he assumed the French name Vainqueur. An encounter with Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus—the two figures behind Hard Wax—occurred at one of their live performances at Waschhaus, the club where Löwe himself spun, and quickly led to releases on the duo's M label. His debut record as Vainqueur, 1992's Lyot, emerged as a techno anthem fueled by dense, pounding percussion and a catchy riff that found ideal treatment in the Maurizio mix. In May 1995 Löwe created the music that would form the first Elevation release on Chain Reaction, Hard Wax's most ambitious label to date. Eschewing a traditional techno focus on percussion, he instead emphasized sequencing, yielding an epic ambient track in which discrete sounds moved through elaborate patterns—a passage through the gradual metamorphosis of a sound. Further releases followed, and he gathered his Chain Reaction output on the 1997 Elevations CD, which incorporated additional unreleased variations on the sonic approach introduced in the initial Elevation record. Although Löwe has not produced an extensive body of work, his landmark productions retain importance within the revisionist strain of techno connected to labels such as Chain Reaction and Mille Plateaux.