Sadly, in my short life on this planet, I’ve never had the experience of the Berlin underground’s old school Electro/synth scene. So I was chuffed as a pig with its bum in butter when **Aufschlag went on in my machine. This stuff is such pure old school, so untainted by modern sound engineering that it’s like playing a game of musical pong. The beep-click two-stepesqueness of the third track ‘Netzroller’ is currently playing and I can’t stop bouncing to it. Making this one of the hardest reviews I’ve ever had to write…

It seems **Mitte Karaoke have really glued the kind of energy you can get out of a great house record and the fun you get a feel for in electro. Not to make obvious conclusions here, but it sounds like a more light-hearted version of Black Dog, and ‘Liegt Doch Auf’m Weg…’ has one of the most gorgeous beats in it, with a great click-hop sound battling it out with a clean snare and chirpy Electro organ. Tracks like ‘robotertanz’ (I think means robot dance) Bring in the super facetiously-flat vocals of Dominik Sprungal, and it all gets even better in ‘Pandäbar’, which is, a song, as far as I can tell, about pandas, dancing. This is perhaps, however, an insight to the humor of Friedrich Eberhard and Dominik Sprungal, or at least the silly workings of two incredibly imaginative, innovative and importantly jovial minds.

The whole album’s beats are flat as funk. Mixing the sort of Electro-clash, Europe-filtered fashion glitz of today, with the seriously energetic and innovative Detroit techno of the past. I’m not sure whether to dye my hair pink and go out in a white suit, or just techno it up when listening to this. Regardless, **‘Aufschlag’ translates as ‘Impact’ - and that’s an apt title, considering how much better life is when this is playing, I’m packing my attaché-case it’s off to Berlin I go…