Chris Liebing - Another Day (2LP)

Chris Liebing’s Another Day lands on Mute with a calm kind of confidence, the sort you only get from a lifer who knows exactly when to pull back. Released on 19 November 2021, it follows Burn Slow and keeps walking that left‑of‑club path he opened up there. If you came up on his CLR era and expected pummelling functional tools, this one feels like stepping out of a warehouse into cool night air. The rhythms still hum underneath, but the mood is spacious and considered, almost painterly.

A big part of that feel comes from his work with Ralf Hildenbeutel, a co‑producer whose fingerprints run through 90s Frankfurt history with Sven Väth and Eye Q. You can hear that shared taste for melody and atmosphere. Pads bloom slowly. Bass sits deep but patient. The kicks don’t bully the room. Liebing builds tension the old fashioned way, with careful layering and time. Mute is a good home for this sort of hybrid, too. The label’s long history of electronic artists who prize texture as much as tempo gives the record a context where it makes sense that a techno icon would lean into quiet drama.

Vocal cameos are used like light sources in a dim space. Ladan Hussein, who many still know as Cold Specks, slips in with a cool, unforced presence that turns repetition into incantation. Polly Scattergood’s voice tilts the other way, glassy and emotive, catching on the edges of Liebing’s synths like sunlight on metal. None of it feels like a bolt‑on. The songs breathe around them, and when the beat swells, it feels earned. If Burn Slow hinted at a songwriter instinct inside the producer, Another Day sounds like the moment he trusts it.

The production is quietly luxurious. Drums have weight without smear. Highs are crisp but never brittle. Reverbs hang just long enough to sketch the size of the room. It’s easy to imagine Liebing and Hildenbeutel trading stems, nudging envelopes, shaving transients until the whole thing sits just so. There’s still grit when he wants it, a grain that keeps the music from sliding into pure ambience. But the palette is wide. One track will circle a single bass motif for minutes, inviting you to hear the tiny moves happening on top. Another will drift on a bed of synth chords and voice, closer to late night pop than to the main room. It’s not a flex. It’s taste.

What impresses most is how listenable it is front to back. Plenty of techno albums lose focus away from the club. Another Day rewards a proper sit‑down. Put the needle on and you get a gentle arc from shadow to light, the kind of sequencing that makes you flip the sleeve over to check who mastered it and where it was cut. On a good system, the low end comes through warm and controlled, and the quieter passages feel intimate, which makes the Another Day vinyl worth the shelf space. If you’re the sort who still files Mute releases together, this nestles neatly between the label’s art‑electronic lineage and its tougher dancefloor history.

There’s a small cultural footnote worth clocking, too. Liebing has been a public face of German techno for decades, and his move into this slower, moodier lane isn’t a retreat so much as a reframing. You can sense a producer who has spent years moving big rooms finding excitement in small details again. That’s a nice story for fans who have grown up alongside him. It also makes the album surprisingly friendly for people who might not normally reach for peak‑time records.

If you’re crate digging for Chris Liebing vinyl, this is the one you’ll play at home as much as you’d test on a rig. The pressing does justice to the dynamics, and it sits well next to other Chris Liebing albums on vinyl if you’re building out that section. It’s the sort of title you could spot in a Melbourne record store staff picks bin, with a handwritten note that just says, “late night, lights low.” And if you’re hunting around to buy Chris Liebing records online, keep an eye out for Another Day vinyl in particular. It’s a keeper, and a quiet reminder that evolution in techno doesn’t always mean louder or faster. Sometimes it’s this, a patient record with a long tail, still revealing new corners by the fourth or fifth spin. For those of us in vinyl records Australia circles, it’s a no brainer for the collection.