Sputnik's music is very intimate. Even their live-performances are characterized by a certain gentleness. There are no towers of Marshall amplifiers to torture your eardrums; instead they like to hug you with their beautiful little gestures. If you look at the state of music in the Nineties, one sees that, post-Acid House, the sampler as musical tool not only changed the way we make music (build out of fragments) but also fragmented music itself. In true postmodern fashion technomusic imploded with the ensuing supernova creating countless small pockets of Techno shooting away in different directions. At one extreme there is the Wagnerian bombast of Gabber, Techstep Jungle and German Trance, at the other a wild proliferation of Techno as a new form of toymusic.

Examples are to be found in the clicking rhythms of Mouse on Mars, the fartcore of Squarepusher, the out-of-control computergame tunes of Aphex Twin or Air's lost music from European youths of the Seventies. What sets Sputnik apart from these artists is the clever use of cliches. Sputnik miniaturize the cliches of Jungle (the intro and outro of "Olympic") and Techno (the handclaps, computervoice and tiny drumroll on "E=MC˛"). In a way this is a return to Kraftwerk whose music always was build economically from sparse and small sounds (although surprisingly they, bar "Spacelab", never were into space). Kraftwerk reached musical nirvana when they succeeded in extracting "a leetle melodee" from their pocket calculator.