Kruder & Dorfmeister

Kruder & Dorfmeister are the Viennese duo of Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, who started slowing the world's records down in 1993 and never quite sped them back up. Their reworkings of pop, hip hop, and drum and bass traded cold machine precision for something warmer and more narcotic, the sound the wider world eventually learned to call downtempo. The 1994 G-Stoned EP announced them, but it was The K&D Sessions (1998) that sold past a million copies and lodged itself among the most imitated records of its decade. They run their own label, G-Stone Recordings, were commissioned to score ringtones for Nokia's luxury handsets in 2007, and returned from a long quiet stretch in 2020 to keep refining a style no one has managed to improve on.