Steve Angello - Tracks, the record nobody brings up

People seem to forget for the first few years of his career, Steve Angello was making French House.

The record that gets forgotten most is "Tracks". It's ten disco-looping records that came out on Konvex | Konkav on 13 January 2003, produced, mixed and arranged at Size Studios in Stockholm.

Konvex | Konkav were a German label, and the release sticks out as being a different style to most of their other catalogue.

They were a minimal house, tech house and ambient label out of Frankfurt am Main, run by Frank Elting and Stephan Lieb, who put out most of the catalogue themselves as Elting_Lieb. It was the label's second-last release, before they returned for a singular EP release in 2015, 12 years later, and sat among records by Blake C., M. Rahn and Codec and an ambient compilation called "Voyage Léger - Time To Chill". The label lived on until 2020 as Resopal Schallware.

The shortest thing on it is 5:26. It was clearly made for DJs rather than for people to listen to at home.

What is on it

1. Feel Good (8:03)
2. Instinct (8:13)
3. Miami Nice (5:26)
4. Fresh Coffee (6:30)
5. The End (7:11)
6. Crazy (6:47)
7. Player (8:11)
8. Summer Madness (8:05)
9. To The Sun (7:29)
10. Who's Dancing (7:22)

What it is built from

Four of the ten are documented:

• Feel Good takes Shalamar's "I Can Make You Feel Good", 1982
• Miami Nice takes Imagination's "Flashback", 1981
• Summer Madness takes Electric Light Orchestra's "Secret Messages", 1983
• The End takes Cerrone's "Give Me Love", 1977

It takes most of its samples from 80s records.

The album pairs in well with the sort of thing Angello was doing at the time. My personal favourite he made around the time was "Play It Loud" from 2004, which never got a proper release. Strangely, nobody at all has the vinyl for that track on Discogs, eleven people want it, and it has never sold. One person supposedly has the CDr, there's no photo of either, and both entries were submitted by the same person. So does the thing actually exist anywhere?

"Tracks" isn't really sought after now too, 97 people have it on Discogs and 32 want it. Copies go for somewhere between £1.50 and £9.46, and the last one sold in August, which isn't a lot for an early album by someone this well-known.

The album isn't on streaming, which could be because of a variety of reasons, but likely due to the (presumably) uncleared samples.