Audiopile Review: Another top tier ’90s electronic reissue from the Lapsus imprint and their Perennial Series, who have already bolstered our collections with new pressings of hard-to-find albums from the likes of Swayzak, Kettel and Cold Storage. This time around they’ve brought us Reflections, the 1994 debut from Kirk Degiorgio’s As One project, expanding the original with a few extra tracks, arriving just in time for its 30th anniversary. As acknowledged by Degiorgio himself, the futuristic sounds emanating from Detroit proved to be too irresistible to not tinker with, becoming an early adopter of the Detroit techno sound in the UK and riding a wave that began with the Artificial Intelligence series on Warp a few years prior. But Reflections isn’t just a paean to the legends of the recent past. With tracks that range from the smeary tones and jazz-inflected breaks of “Moon Over the Moab” to the absolute celestial flight of the 10+ minute “Meridian”, Degiorgio off ramps into the cosmos for a dizzyingly wide-ranging album that also offers a glimpse into the future. An absolute classic, not to be missed by any self-respecting fan of 90s electronic music.

Although 30 years after its birth this fundamental electronic gem called Reflections has achieved cult status, it is worth remembering that it all started in 1993 in a small apartment in Waterloo, London, with the help of a mixer and a bunch of hardware synth and drum machines of hardware, with the mastodontic Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer as the main partner. While in the UK the vast majority of kids showed a certain rejection of what came from North America in the form of electro, Kirk Degiorgio, under his alias As One, embraced it openly and incorporated it into his productions along with influences from other genres that he had already adored since he was young, such as jazz, soul or funk, thus becoming one of the true early adopters of Detroit techno in the UK. Reflections is a challenge in itself, and even more so considering what the consumption pattern of electronic music was in the early ’90s. This timeless album fits into the delicate border between being enough club to work on the dance floor, and still being musical and cerebral enough to be listened to at home. A milestone that, whether premeditated or not, Degiorgio more than achieved. Three decades later Lapsus Records has been able to access the pre-masters extracted from the original DATs to build a special 30th anniversary edition within its Perennial series. For the occasion, this reissue not only offers the tracks included in the first edition, it also adds the songs “The Priestess” — never released on vinyl before — and “Forgotten Memory” — until now unreleased and rediscovered in one of the DATs dating back to 1992 from the Reflections recording sessions. This is the definitive edition of an album that, despite coexisting with the explosion of the rave movement, would pave the path for the UK-Detroit connection.