Scott Hardware returns to his part-time home, workplace, and source of inspiration. In 2013, during the coldest, darkest winter in recent memory and when he was still known around town as Ken Park, his debut album “You Think About it Too Much” was born in Lichtenberg. So yes, that does make him “the artist formerly known as Ken Park” [insert love symbol here]. Despite this transition in nomenclature, Hardware’s music has stayed incredibly true to itself—at its core it remains a motley, texturally rich electro-pop of the half-shadowy sort with strobe-lit shoutouts to the late 80s and early 90s. New Order, Happy Mondays, and EMF are the dancers you recognize, in chopped up seconds, inches from your face and then lose again into fog and water-tight euphoria. This music also holds your hand in the come-down, the afterglow, the now-introspective bliss. The high quality stuff makes for a blithely soft landing—and an infectious, rapturous hit “He Says I’m on an Island” raises the following questions: “hadn’t there been talk of Trainspotting 2?” “and what with the soundtrack?”

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