Hard. Physical. Uncompromising. Modeselektor, one of the defining forces of Berlin electronic music, will open the 14th edition of Spectaculare at Prague’s ROXY on 3 March. Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary will bring a live show built on massive bass, fractured beats and their trademark disregard for genre boundaries. A tightly controlled visual production of projections and light is not merely a backdrop, but a force that amplifies the intensity of the entire experience. They arrive in Prague just weeks after the release of their new album MDSLKTR – a record that strips away excess, returns to first principles and searches once again for the raw core of the Modeselektor sound.

The path towards MDSLKTR began with Classics Vol. 01, when Modeselektor dismantled material from their landmark albums Hello Mom! and Happy Birthday! and dug back into almost three decades of studio sessions, fragments and unfinished ideas. But the past is not a safe space for nostalgia. It is material to be broken apart again. The result is twelve new tracks driven by reduction, pressure and clarity: fewer layers, fewer ornaments, more direct impact. MDSLKTR reaches back to a time when their sound emerged from Berlin rave, techno, electro, hip hop, IDM and bass music while refusing to obey the rules of any one of them.

That refusal to settle into a single sound took Modeselektor from illegal parties in post-Wall Berlin to some of the world’s biggest stages. Along the way came collaborations with Thom Yorke, Tommy Cash, Flohio, Blixa Bargeld and Apparat, with whom they formed Moderat, as well as their own Monkeytown Records label. They are not returning to their roots out of nostalgia. They are returning to tear them apart once more. At ROXY, that idea becomes pure physical force – sound, image, light and three decades of restlessness compressed into a single live show.

The evening will be set in motion by Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Philipp Johann Thimm, a long-time collaborator of Apparat and a distinctive voice in contemporary experimental electronic music. Their work together on LP5 earned a Grammy nomination, while Thimm has also developed a solo practice spanning electronic, acoustic and audiovisual forms.