Audiopile Review: German producer Philipp Priebe’s 2022 album, Apparent Calm Palms, gets a fresh repress and, after initially overlooking it, marks its debut here in the shop. With the crushing mountain of releases that we’re offered each week, which numbers well into the hundreds, we’re bound to miss a handful of things that would normally be shoo-ins for us. Priebe’s album is one of those. Not far from the deep techno, minimal, ambient and IDM crossover aesthetic that’s been the forte of his fellow Germans at the Giegling and Dial Records camps (both labels are buy-on-sight for us), Priebe engineers a dense, meticulously crafted album. Driven by an energetic pacing, Priebe submerges the kinetic pulse with flourishes of vocal samples, airy ambience and intertwining synth lines, landing somewhere between the post-rave warmth of DJ Metatron/DJ Healer and the textural depth of Lawrence, the latter of whom just contributed a remix to a digital-only EP.

Stólar label boss Philipp Priebe delivers his new album ‘Apparent Calm Palms’ this October, joining the roster of Mainz/Hamburg, Germany’s Feuilleton.
Berlin-based artist Philipp Priebe has been steadily making his mark on the contemporary deep hazy house and leftfield electronica scene over the past few years with a series of releases on his own Stólar imprint. Here though we see him deliver his second album following his debut LP ‘The Being Of The Beautiful’ released on Japan’s IL Y A Records back in 2014. Feuilleton is the brainchild of Chris Gruber (Fossar) and Tim Eder and since 2018 has unveiled material from the duo themselves, RR (René Raabe), Snad, Gari Romalis, Melina, Jakob Seidensticker and more.
Throughout the ‘Apparent Calm Palms’ LP Priebe delivers a concoction of styles and sounds cohesi-vely fused together to form the bigger concept which is he tells us is ‘’an album about small towns and villages and the needs and desires that brings one night out in clubs. The transport/travel, the preparty, all the things that you had to do, when you are not directly living in the big party places, but still want to have a decent night out, away from your usual suspects.’’.
Throughout the ten-track LP Philipp delivers ethereal deep house with opening track ‘Desires’, the succeeding ‘Interborough’ and ‘Chimera’, murky dub house leaning cuts like ‘Quiet Decay’, ‘Slalom’, ‘Unfold’ and ‘Conclusions’ while ‘Transfiguration’ showcases a more classic Chicago House influence. Title-track ‘Apparent Calm Palms’ and the interlude ‘Behind Their House’ then see Priebe offer a foray into textural ambient sounds, once again showcasing his unique ability to craft raw, understated and emotion fuelled material across a variety of genres.
Mastering by Sven Weisemann and Lacquer Cut by Stefan Betke