Audiopile Review: Double shot this week of two EPs of Terre Thaemlitz’s legendary work culled from her 1994 CD-only album Tranquilizer, both 12”s fitted with freshly unearthed mixes that were initially issued on the expanded 2xCD 30th anniversary reissue from earlier this year. Thaemlitz might be better known as a prominent DJ of NYC’s underground ballroom scene or under their DJ Sprinkles guise—2009’s Midtown 120 Blues was awarded Resident Advisor’s album of the year and is now considered a house classic. But sandwiched in the middle of these two iconic periods is her work during the mid 90s for Instinct Ambient, the short-lived but highly influential imprint probably best known for their ambient-techno classics from Human Mesh Dance and Deep Space Network. The entirety of Tranquilizer is actually a varied effort with several mood shifts, one that takes off from the exploratory ambient template set by The Orb and the KLF, imbuing it with her own emotional heft, colouring in the drifting vapours with bits of field recordings, classic breaks, heartbreaking piano solos, and bits of spacey ephemera. Rather than reissue the album in its entirety on vinyl, these two 12” EPs zero in on a couple of the album’s finer moments, offering them up alongside alternate takes and mixes. The squishy downtempo drift of “Hovering Glows” is cut into a half length version on the “Little Guy Mix”, driving straight to the emotive core, while the “Vinyl Mix” dials up the lushness of the track, letting the levitational chiming bells and tabla beats hang in the air just a little longer. The sublime album ender for Tranquilizer is “Fina • Departure”, which is extended here into two side-long pieces— “Fina” leaning further into the hypnotic narcotic percussion, and “Original Long Version” meditating deeper in the humid blend of wavering synths, hypnotizing cicadas and the sound of distant thunder. Utterly timeless music. Like all things on Thaemlitz’s Comatose Records, these are strictly limited (500 pressed), and our supplier is officially out of stock. You get one swing at these.

“The second in a series of EP’s from Terre Thaemlitz, 1994, with almost half an hour of gorgeous, bleary-eyed dreamweaving that slots in the all-time sublime alongside The Art Of Noise’s ‘Moments In Love’, here pressed up on vinyl for the very first time, in two extended versions.

EP2 in the ‘Tranquilizer’ reissue series gives new afterlife to the curtain closer of Terre’s debut album with a previously unheard extended mix, and that gorgeous Art of Noise style version that also recalls SAW II-era AFX x Bryn Jones on a deep one. Both sides scroll right back to a nascent Terre, sensitively feeling out a sound between the tumultuous summer of ’93 and spring of ’94, in the years after she’d carved a name for herself as an influential deep house DJ in Manhattan’s queer bars and clubs.

Terre’s debut album ‘Tranquilizer’ would emerge as a reflective antidote to club pressures with a lushly melancholic, deeply atmospheric suite intended to cushion bodies and minds in a vein spawned by the dreamy collages of The KLF’s ‘Chill Out’ album in 1990, and further developed by a rhizome of international artists including Terre’s Instinct labelmate Dave Moufang (Move D), and the likes of The Orb, AFX, and many others whose work endures to this day.

‘Fina-Departure (Original Long Version)’ extends the balmy, beat-less scene of woozy keyboards, cicadas and swooping crop-duster planes to twice as long, with what we detect as a personal frisson of melancholy/nostalgia for the Midwest planes of Missouri, Kansas, where Terre grew up. The flipside’s ‘Fina’ feels like a hidden level addendum to the album, where night settles on the plains as distant drumming mingles in the hot air to form an utterly timeless scenario reminding us of the stark drum passages of Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works’ or the kind of ritualistic ambient pursued in Stroom reissues of ‘90s Pablo’s Eye. Aye, it’s a special one.