Anima EP

Thirty years into a career that has touched some of electronic music’s most important labels—Playhouse, Klang Elektronik, the Alter Ego project he shares with Jörg Burger—Roman Flügel has nothing left to prove. That freedom is audible all over the Anima EP, his return to Gerd Janson’s Running Back: three tracks that swap his usual club-floor restlessness for something warmer, stranger and more openly sentimental. It’s the kind of record only a veteran can make.

Written during lockdown, the EP arrives with a disarmingly simple concept: D.I.S.C.O. is a love letter to nightlife from a man stuck at home, described by Flügel himself as “a robot remembering everything that was”. The image fits perfectly. The edit opens on a four-to-the-floor beat with a warm, slightly detuned bassline and a filter-swept string loop that glows like a memory of a good night rather than the night itself—the disco strut is all there, but viewed through a haze of balearic reverb, every element softer-edged and more forgiving than the real thing.

Title track Anima stretches out over nearly seven minutes, trading the opener’s pep for a deeper, mid-tempo glide. A hushed, echoing chord motif circles above a patient kick and shaker groove whilst muted pads swell and recede, and there’s real craft in how little Flügel needs to do to hold attention for the duration. Closer Eating Darkness is the outlier—a three-minute sketch of droning, treated piano and creeping static that feels less like a dance track than a palate-cleanser, and one that gestures clearly towards the full-length of the same name due on Running Back in May.

It would be easy for a lockdown record about missing the club to curdle into nostalgia, but the Anima EP never does. Flügel’s production is too playful for that—the basslines too bouncy, the pads too wistful, the whole thing worn lightly. As a stopgap between albums it’s generous; as a document of a strange year it’s unexpectedly moving. A small, warm record with a big heart.