Three or four dudes hunched over laptops, MIDI controllers, and a tangle of cable — is that a band? With relatively few exceptions (the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Theo Parrish’s Rotating Assembly, and Innerzone Orchestra all come to mind), that’s about as close as you’ll get to one in club music. Plenty of red-blooded guitar wielders have owed a massive debt to house and techno; some, like Animal Collective or Hot Chip, owed one massive enough to make us reconsider the genre to which we’d had them pegged. But has a power trio — the “rock band” in its most elemental form — ever tried to straight-up play techno? On their 12″ debut for eternally unpredictable Macro imprint, Elektro Guzzi do just that, and they claim to do it without overdubs, loops, or laptops.
Author Archive: Jordan Rothlein
Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Arise
Whether out of self-censorship or plain old yacht rock ignorance, almost none of the press surrounding Anthony “Shake” Shakir’s Frictionalism 1994-2009 has mentioned that “Arise,” one of the retrospective’s standout inclusions, is basically just a beefed-up edit of the closing drum break from Steely Dan’s “Aja.” That’s right, techno brethren: Shake just made you listen to Steely Dan. Featuring the percussion acrobatics of legendary session drummer Steve Gadd (who, rock ‘n roll lore has it, pulled off his contribution to the eight-minute track in a single take), the title cut from the band’s 1977 album has always felt like something more than a guilty pleasure, a soft rock epic with enough funk and stoney strangeness to win over even the Dan’s most humorless anti-fans. And on a 1998’s …Waiting For Russell 12″ for his Frictional imprint, he officially brought Walter Becker’s and Donald Fagen’’s irony machine — perhaps the smoothest conceptual art project of all time — into the fold of his myriad influences.
LWE Does Unsound Festival New York
Since 2003, the Unsound Festival has been about bringing the disparate impulses inherent in electronic music under one roof — a music event urging you to scratch your chin one minute and dance your ass off the next. Presenting itself like a film festival but booked like a forward-thinking summertime weekender, Unsound has consistently showcased brilliant and challenging new sounds without ripping them from their underground trappings. Any music festival as likely to feature Sunn 0))) as Zomby is sure to pique my interest, but by nature of it happening in Krakow, Poland, its ridiculously open bookings stood quite a bit out of my reach. New York City — its population overeducated, overstimulated, and relatively accepting of high-end dance music thanks in no small part to Beyond Booking’s forward-thinking Bunker parties — always seemed like the perfect candidate for something like Unsound, and for a week in February 2010, my fair city got it. And not even a knock-off, either! The Unsound Festival New York brought a truly impressive and deliciously diverse line-up of electronic musicians — asking you to ponder, get down, or do both at once — to underground venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn. And I was lucky enough to trudge through New York’s famous February weather to witness the festival on Little White Earbuds’s behalf. (Very big ups are due to Gamall Awad of Backspin Promotions for making this possible.)
Scuba, Sub:stance
It’s hard to resist beginning any discussion of an Ostgut Ton release — be it a single, album, or mix compilation — without discussing the room from which its artist ostensibly drew his or her inspiration. Berghain, with its veritable pipe organ of Funktion One stacks pushing sweaty air into lofty post-industrial buttresses, is particularly susceptible to this line of thinking. As evidenced by the sandpaper highs and sucker-punch lows adopted by just about anyone who’s been at (or looking to get their records to) the club’s helm, Berghain begs producers to push its acoustic buttons in extremely particular ways.
Pangaea, Pangaea EP
One could argue that dubstep traditionally thrives on massiveness: those seemingly infinite bass lines wobbling up from the deep like tsunamis, those scythe-like snares ripping the fabric of the track at each half-step. But in the years since Skull Disco cut its singular path out of wamp-wamp-stomp, producers have become far more willing to manipulate eardrums on a much finer scale. The world’s subwoofers may continue to suffer abuse, but their previously bored tweeter brothers and sisters have found their work on weekend evenings getting a bit more technical. Kevin McAuley, the young Leeds-based producer, DJ, and Hessle Audio co-founder better known as Pangaea, comes from this school of bass music thought, and his soul-soaked singles for Hessle Audio, Hotflush, and — perhaps most memorably — his as-of-this-writing one-off Memories white label have tweezed ecstasy out of a more whispery sound pallet. His burgeoning discography, however, has yet to feature anything as distinctive and defining as what’s on offer over the four sides of his self-titled Hessle Audio doublepack.
A Made Up Sound, Sun Touch
Throw a stone anywhere in house and techno and you’ll hit a production alias. Plenty of producers release music under a couple of different names, but only a handful have been able to embody each persona so fully that none of them feels like a side project. Rene Pawlowitz, whose aliases have gone so far as to remix each other, is one of those producers. Dave Huismans, the Dutch bass juggernaut whose A Made Up Sound project Pawlowitz championed on his Subsolo imprint, has proven himself to be another. The softer side of 2562, AMOS lets balmy house syrup flow over chapped dubstep knuckles, and the combination has made for some of Huismans’s juiciest and most effective material. So it’s no wonder there’s a lot riding on AMOS’s latest self-released sides, especially for anyone who heard his house-flecked “Rework/Closer” 12″ last year and still has goosebumps. Hardly the house coming-out party you might have expected (if anything, his 2562 full-length Unbalance pretty well accomplished that), “Sun Touch” instead finds the flecks of wiggly, pale house that distinguish Huismans’s personae burrowing even deeper into the spaces between all that jagged steppin’. It’s another stand-out AMUS record, but he’s hardly just showing off.
André Lodemann, Still Dreaming
You get the sense that André Lodemann’s ears aren’t made from the same stuff that yours are. Producing since 2004 but really picking up speed in 2009 with his self-released output on Best Works, Lodemann has a way of rendering strange, tiny melodies into much catchier, dreamier, bigger components than they might fundamentally be. His definition of a hook, not to mention his sense of pacing and melodic development, might not be yours, but his level of execution — from a technical standpoint, dude’s biting at Martin Buttrich’s heels — and sheer earnestness go a long way towards selling you on such wacky deep house logic. Derided as cheesy by some, Lodemann rivals Reggie Dokes as one of house’s most idiosyncratically appealing voices. The aptly named “Still Dreaming” for Freerange, perhaps his highest-profile release since the Wanna Feel EP on Simple in 2008, brings to the big room those mystical, meandering melodies Lodemann spent 2009 perfecting. He’s made one of the more distinctive European house anthems in recent memory.
Oskar Offermann, Apple Crumble Beneath My Feet
Dance music is nothing if not purpose-driven. And when one of your primary concerns is filling up a floor and making those on it go apeshit, it’s tough to resist what’s tried and true. But how does a producer not reinvent the wheel without engaging in outright hackery? In the weeks since I received Oskar Offermann’s latest White 12″, “Apple Crumble Beneath My Feet,” I’ve been scratching my head over whether the producer and labelhead is painting by numbers or insidiously distinguishing himself from the hordes of producers making records nearly identical to this one. WHITE008 brings you three tracks of bog-standard, disco-flecked Rhodes riffs — your laptop wearing a Moodymann wig, basically. But I can’t help but feel like Offermann has a compositional sense that pushes him beyond his music’s ever-obvious sound palate. It’s quite possible you already own this record in about twenty or thirty near-identical forms. Is it worth buying again?
Reggie Dokes, Untill Tomorrow
I can’t think of a producer with a stranger idea of what constitutes house music than Atlanta’s Reggie Dokes. Like fellow Detroit expats Octave One, he gives listeners the sense that every off-kilter drum hit or plaintive piano chord has been placed with great care. Yet the melodic logic he’s employed since he leaped into production in 2001 has rarely made anything close to perfect sense. To be blunt, Dokes is positively all over the place, brewing up for his own Psychostasia imprint and labels like Philpot and Clone Loft Supreme a psychedelic suspension of weird chord changes and jarring phrase shifts. His Spectacle of Deepness EP on We Play House, a serious highlight of my 2009, even played like the hallucination of a madman. But what a gorgeously schizophrenic mess it was. His final transmission of 2009, “Untill Tomorrow” [sic] for Clone’s absurdly limited Royal Oak series (who knew you could press just fifty records?), finds him doubling back on the haziness of that release to produce a record on the whole more direct, more floor-oriented, and more obviously funky than most of his output to date. Unsurprisingly, however, those of you longing for those same old Rhodes vamps and Sascha Dive vocals might still want to look elsewhere.
DJ Qu, Party People Clap
With DJ Jus-Ed on permanent impresario/wood-cutting duties and Levon Vincent releasing a near-constant stream of contemporary classics, New York house’s flagship positions look pretty well locked-down as 2010 gets cracking. It’s a bit more of a tossup for the underdog slot. Fred P., whose Black Jazz Consortium long-player and singles for his own Soul People Music imprint were among 2009’s most coveted dance records, makes for something of an easy bet, though I can’t deny his talent at cranking out tense, minimalist house trips. And Anthony Parasole, who’s already proven himself a formidable selector, will almost certainly raise his asking price when his first solo production credit drops later this year. But I’m throwing my lot behind DJ Qu, the New Jersey man and former dancer born Ramon Lisandro Quezada. His latest, “Party People Clap” for Vincent’s and Parasole’s Deconstruct Music, has a whole lot to do with it.
LWE Podcast 39: Basic Soul Unit
As Basic Soul Unit, Toronto’s Stuart Li has earned a reputation as something of a producer’s producer. Combining the rough-hewn trackiness of underground techno with hazy atmospherics of deep house (not to mention a healthy pinch of low-end and DFA-style synth wackiness), his releases for labels like New Kanada and Mathematics have shown they can play chameleon in practically any discerning record bag. But 2009, which saw his “Dank” single released by Philpot and his track “Things Pass” included in Ostgut Ton’s Panorama Bar 02 EP, scraped away at Li’s underground status, raising the bar on his studio prowess while placing Basic Soul Unit on a whole host of new radars. Whether you call it a 2009 victory lap or harbinger of a stellar 2010 to come, LWE’s 39th podcast, an exclusive mix of heavy, organic, and thoroughly trippy house grooves, gives us a rare and tasty showcase of Li’s DJ chops.
The Year In: “Records”
Forget the rise of mnml, the revival of deep house, the Berghain, civil rights vocal samples, the very existence of Richie Hawtin — was there any more rift-causing development over the last couple of years than the ascendence of digital technology in dance music production, dissemination, and DJing? While the vast majority of club revelers probably couldn’t have cared less what was happening behind the DJ booth, DJs and the journo-bloggers who obsess over them spent the years after Serato Scratch Live (the hardware/software package that most successfully merged a ones-and-zeros music collection with the technique and physicality of spinning real vinyl) debuted in 2004 wringing their hands over what this all means for dance music. We wouldn’t have the word “techno” without “technology,” but is soul not an equally weighty part of the equation? And isn’t vinyl culture a pretty big part of techno’s soul? To paraphrase what practically everyone inclined to grapple with such a thing grappled with: When we put the quality of the tunes aside, can a 300 gigabyte drive stuffed with ID3-tagged files not too fundamentally different from Word documents begin to approximate, to use Dapayk & Padberg’s phrase from their 2007 album of the same name, the indominable “black beauty”?
Basic Soul Unit, Basic Necessity EP
“Tool” is almost exclusively used dismissively in dance music criticism, but must every track hold up unlayered, unmixed, or otherwise isolated? Some brilliant club tunes deserve your headphoned attention, but I think we critics sometimes lose sight of where classic moments in dance music occur — on the floor, with a deft selector manning the decks. Toronto’s Stuart Li, known in grimy house music circles as Basic Soul Unit, has become a DJ’s favorite for the very reason many of us might usually click the skip button: save his “Panorama Bar 02 | Part I” A-side, “Things Pass” from this fall, which found Li in veritable anthem mode, they’re unabashedly tracky. While Basic Soul Unit’s recent “Basic Necessity EP” for New Kanada might not contain a DJ’s main event, its contents provide the sort of sinews that hold great sets together, bridging the gap between the energy of one showcase track and the next.
Jenifa Mayanja, Close Encounters
Jenifa Mayanja, wife of Underground Quality impresario DJ Jus Ed and veteran DJ in her own right, has released house singles and “mix albums” over the last couple of years almost exclusively on her own Bu-Mako label. While buoyant and imbued with energy, much of her self-released output has owed far too big a debt to New Age for me to really get behind; the rawness that has made so much recent New York house such an invigorating listen has been lost on her 12″s behind an impenetrable wall of incense smoke. So what a pleasant surprise “Close Encounters” — Bu-Mako’s twelfth release — is, both for anyone who would rather sweat while dancing than taking a Bikram yoga class and for New York house as a whole.
Ghostleigh, Continuum
One of the top reasons for my continued patronage of record stores is getting to gab with the people behind the counter. Blogs and forums certainly offer a wealth of information about choice new releases, but it’s pretty hard to beat a recommendation from someone whose job involves listening to practically every piece of wax that passes through the door. I can’t think of a more consistently awesome way for getting new sounds on my radar. So on a recent trip to Dope Jams in Brooklyn, when a clerk preferential to classic house and techno slipped the new (and unfamiliar to me) Ghostleigh 12″ into my stack and uttered something to the effect of, “I’m not usually into dubstep, but holy shit, dude!” I certainly took notice.
D. Quin, At The End of the World
All the hippest wax this year has reached techno heads with as little adornment and explanation as feasibly possible. “At The End of the World,” a single-sided oddity from Brooklyn’s Slow To Speak label and unknown producer Dan Quin, offers white label followers something unexpected: a wealth of information. Tucked neatly into the paper sleeve behind the hand-stamped vinyl, a note entitled “Dan Quin Background Analysis” on Old Antarctic Explorers Association letterhead details the spiritual and scientific journey of the producer in question. It could all be a gas, but here goes: while covering the Antarctic seal-mating beat for “a prominent U.S. nature magazine,” this “anti-social Steve Irwin” abandoned human society to become one with his desolate surroundings and ultimately find “his igloo of inspiration.”
Tama Sumo, Panorama Bar 02
In his LWE interview with Will Lynch, Seth Troxler let this morsel slip about Berlin’s famed club scene: “…it feels like people are going through the motions sometimes, you know?” When he comes to America, he goes on to say, “it’s a lot easier to blow people’s minds.” I haven’t partied in Berlin since the fall of 2006, so I can’t weigh in personally. But I got to thinking again about Troxler’s bittersweet observation while listening to the latest Ostgut Ton mix, Tama Sumo’s Panorama Bar 02. Unlike Cassy’s epochal Panorama Bar 01, mixed at the height of Berlin’s mythical status among underground club music heads, or Marcel Dettmann’s techno masterclass Berghain 02, Tama Sumo’s mix feels less like a codification of a local sound than a nudge towards getting a legendary dance floor excited again.
Shackleton, Three EPs
Despite his dubstep pedigree, Sam Shackleton’s association with Perlon really hasn’t raised many eyebrows. “Blood On My Hands,” his seminal 9/11 anti-anthem caned by Cassy and eventually remixed to mindblowing effect by Ricardo Villalobos, introduced the minimal scarf-wearing set to the British producer’s tribal, ethereal take on bass music. By the time Shackleton returned Villalobos’s favor with his labyrinthine, original-besting take on “Minimoonstar” for Perlon in 2008, the technoid wing of dubstep — thanks in no small part to the Shack’s beefed-up Muslimgauze breaks — had already burrowed itself so deeply into techno that Shackleton actually felt like a logical and hardly controversial addition to Zip’s and Markus Nikolai’s fabled roster.
Matias Aguayo, Ay Ay Ay
Out of practically every contemporary dance music producer I can think of, Matias Aguayo appears to be wringing his hands the least over his genre’s digital future. His BumBumBox mini-events in major South American metropolises — wherein a few daisychained boom boxes, an iPod full of DJ mixes, and a random urban location stand in for a Funktion One, a vinyl-wielding selector in an expensive t-shirt, and a dance floor — take the most terrifying possible outcome of the mp3’s rise to dominance and spin a nifty little party out of the formula. His excellent Comeme label, home to some of the strangest and crunchiest house nuggets of the year, was never even intended to make it beyond a MySpace page. And he recorded his Resident Advisor mix, one of my favorite entries in the venerable series this year, on his computer while in transit. Producers and DJs have spent the latter portion of this decade burrowing into classicism, a fine security blanket for when techno’s hi-tech future finally arrives and feels cooler to the touch than many enthusiasts imagined. Regardless of your stance on the megabytes now driving our parties and singles, you’ve got to respect an industry veteran giving his blessing to the automated, compressed direction we may be ceaselessly barreling towards.