It’s easy to gloss Rene Pawlowitz’s essential Shedding the Past album for Ostgut Ton last year as an exercise in purity through genre affiliation (in that instance, industrial-strength techno). Yet I suspect the man — recording variably as Shed, EQD, Wax, STP, and Deuce (with Marcel Dettmann) — believes less in adherence to a particular beat structure and compositional strategy than in finding club music’s future in a raw envisioning of its past. How else can Pawlowitz’s instantly recognizable sound (bass boom + sharp synth burst = swift Armani Exchange model genocide) wend its way through steely retro house (Wax’s “20002B”) and soulful dubstep (his Shed remix of Peverelist’s “Junktion”), all the while keeping the fire of true techno music better than any of his more clear-cut classicist Hard Wax associates?
Author Archive: Jordan Rothlein
Roska, TWC EP
To put it nicely, garage MC turned funky functionalist Roska isn’t exactly what you’d call a home listening guy. While his super-percussive tools work perfectly in the club, they hardly evolve enough to maintain your headphoned attention. Even in their intended environs, a DJ has little reason (aside from track length, which can occasionally push a tedious eight minutes) to choose one Roska track over another; they’e all basically some iteration of the same kicks-and-snares (plus supermassive bass) patterns for which the man born Wayne Goodlitt named his label. Admittedly, Roska’s jams have become slightly more intricate and interesting with each release, and his recent remix of Untold’s “Just For You” hinted more than ever at broader compositional horizons for his pitch-perfect drum samples. But the quality of the tunes found on the “TWC EP” — while falling far short of stone-cold classics — still comes as something of a shock. It’s as if this guy woke up one morning, ate Sven Weisemann for breakfast, made an appointment with Efdemin’s tailor, and became a fully-fledged dub house producer by midday. Behold the first 100-percent recommendable Roska record.
DJ Hell feat. P. Diddy, The DJ (Radio Slave Remix)
When I read in July that Radio Slave would be joining hands with DJ Hell and P. Diddy on a 28-minute remix of the latter pair’s recent collabo, “The DJ,” I felt as though I had finally found the master plan behind my existence. “Go forth,” God seemed to be saying from between the lines of this bizarre Resident Advisor news blurb, “and review this record.”
LWE Interviews Marcel Dettmann
In discussions of his solo and collaborative productions for Ostgut Ton and his own MDR label, his biting remixes for folks as disparate as Modeselektor and Sandwell District, and his infamously expansive DJ sets, club music commentators invariably accuse Marcel Dettmann of being a purist. But purism — as a stance on techno — implies pretension, and you’d be hard pressed to meet a man who puts on fewer airs about this music than Dettmann. At his headlining appearance at New York’s famed Bunker party, he may have threaded the needle from Tan-Ru’s “Assembly” (his fitting tribute to the late Ian Loveday, who passed away in June) to Newworldaquarium’s “Trespassers” and touched on countless rare techno sides in between. But if Dettmann — casually clad in jeans and an MDR t-shirt and handing out high-fives to all who approached him — played professor in any regard that night, it was only delineating how one brings down the house and keep revelers enraptured straight through 6 a.m. A few hours before all this madness commenced, I sat down with the famed Berghain resident for a chat on dubstep, Deuce, and what this whole techno thing means to the man who has lately come to personify it.
Ike Release/Hot City, Ike Release vs. Hot City
I think we can pretty much all agree that when we’re talking about dubstep these days, we’re only nominally talking about dubstep. Like the theorized supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, that anemic, bass-powered sound of South London constituting dubstep in the strictest sense keeps a nearly infinite cosmic soup of highly disparate sounds in constant motion without registering much of a blip on its own. High-profile podcasts like The Village Orchestra’s “Blank Page” mix (moving from Boards of Canada to Zomby to Drexciya) and mnml ssgs’s recent SCB mix (in which Paul “Scuba” Rose finds parity between headfucker Donato Dozzy and funky drummer Roska) ostensibly rep dubstep in 2009 as much as DJ Hatcha’s “Dubstep Allstars: Vol. 01” mix comp did in 2004. It’s not uncommon in dance music for the signifier to lose its signified (see: minimal techno), but it’s perhaps rare for a genre or sub-genre to improve as its title becomes diluted to the point of possible meaninglessness. While the line between Horsepower Productions and the Hotflush roster might not be yardstick-straight, but how brilliant is it that such a line exists in the first place?
Milton Bradley, Psychological Drama
When we last checked in on Do Not Resist The Beat!’s menacing aesthetic — think selections for a techno dungeon beneath another techno dungeon — the labels proprietor and sole artist as of this writing, Milton Bradley, sounded manic, painting the apocalypse in broad, fiery strokes at a high BPM. “Dystopian Vision” might be the best Ostgut Ton record the fabled Berghain imprint had no hand in releasing this year, and it wouldn’t have been a huge surprise if “Psychological Drama,” Bradley’s latest, continued to pummel its audience with similarly brass knuckle-imbued fists. I mean, ’tis the zeitgeist, and the guy sure has a knack for ferocious, stuttering rhythms. But on his third 12″, Bradley turns his prophet’s gaze inward and maybe farther downward, trading visceral beats for paranoid ones. If he left you feeling slightly concussed before, then prepare to get head-fucked.
John Roberts, Blame
John Roberts claims to spend a lot of time tweaking tracks from his bed or couch. I find this both plausible and kind of baffling. While the American Berliner prodigiously crafts fresh-out-the-steam-room house tunes mirroring the laid-back circumstances of their creation, he populates his sides with some of the most hyper-tangible and painstakingly textured samples in deep house. Dance music nerds often fetishize records made on analog gear in elaborate custom recording studios, but shy of hiring an on-call chair massage crew, I just can’t see panel after panel of humming gear birthing ear candy as good-vibin’ and deceptively crafty as Roberts’s couch-and-MacBook music. Spooning a modular synth is also pretty difficult.
Levon Vincent, The Medium Is The Message
Three words I hate throwing around in dance music: “buy on sight.” Face it, it’s a phrase that’s almost never true. In a music scene where “awesome” means something exceedingly specific to every DJ with a brain cell in their head, it’s a solid bet eventually even your own personal Villalobos will cut a platter that just isn’t your style. In principle, then, I can’t call Levon Vincent buy-on-sight. But I’ll let my record bag speak for itself: each and every paper-sleeved 12″ the New Yorker has hand-stamped his name on this year has found its way in there, and dammit do I want more. Mixing the minor-key dub atmospherics of records on Modern Love or Echocord with the metallic timbre and classicism of the Ostgut crew, Vincent doesn’t push a forgotten or underrepresented sound so much as he generously drizzles some much-needed (and ultra-distinguishing) big city sass on his contributions to the recent bumper crop of quasi-white label rawness.
Marcel Fengler, Twisted Bleach
While Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock have each established themselves as like-minded soundsmiths of taut, ultra-functional, ear-splitting techno workouts, fellow Berghain resident and best pal Marcel Fengler remains something of an unknown quantity. He has yet to venture beyond the OstGut Ton mothership, and his two previous releases — murky, Gothic techno rollers pitched towards the latest of late nights — have been amongst the label’s most slept-on releases. But if Fengler has his eyes set on the sort of visibility (and lucrative weekends of globetrotting) his associates have gained in the last few years, something tells me “Twisted Bleach,” his latest for OstGut, might just be his international plane ticket.
Tin Man, Cool Wave
Since 2004, California-born and Vienna-based Johannes Auvinen has been issuing melancholy, droning homages to acid house, ambient, and brittle synth-wave for Sähkö’s Keys of Life imprint and his own Global A label as Tin Man. But it took four years for Auvinen’s mélange of classic influences to congeal into something timeless in its own right. Chillingly beautiful, his “Wasteland” mini-album from 2008 stands as one of the most carefully constructed electronic records and subtly satisfying song cycles of the decade, a rare sort of 12″ whose six tracks — despite club-slaying potential in the hands of adventurous jocks — play better in succession than sandwiched within DJ sets.
Unknown Artist, Freak For You / Point And Gaze
If Beats In Space‘s Tim Sweeney showed up to play your town’s roller rink with his signature blond shag dyed coal black and fresh blood trickling from the corners of his mouth, would you be terrified or freaking pumped at the prospect of pogo-ing to satanic slow-mo disco edits until he had to tuck back into his coffin at dawn? Assuredly, “Freak For You/Point And Gaze,” the latest 12″ from Werk Discs and its founder Actress’s shadowy Thriller imprint, would be at the front of his crate on such a spooky evening.
RV featuring Los Updates/Reboot, Baile/Caminando
Ricardo Villalobos’s best productions, the records of his I will play for my children to help explain why daddy can’t remember large swaths of his early twenties, might be behind him. But whenever I’ll tune into a bootleg or Youtube video from a Ricardo festival set (W has left the White House, sir; now will you please book some US gigs?), I can’t help but imagine him seconding Lil Wayne’s rueful boast on the burden of singularity: “We are not the same/ I am a Martian.” Everyone’s favorite floppy-haired, German-Chilean pure sound advocate has traversed stoned aural landscapes where few ears have dared venture before, and it’s only through the labyrinthine logic of his magnum DJ sets that three-quarters of his record bag makes any sense. I thus greet each new platter from Sei Es Drum, Villalobos’s quasi-white label platform on which he tosses the public some of his sets’ most typically-Ricardo material, with the excitement of owning a souvenir from this man’s space voyage and the trepidation of knowing it will bring me no closer to ultimate hallucinogenic-bongo knowledge.
Spatial, Infra002 EP
We humans typically deal with space in terms of the three dimensions most readily apparent to our senses– length, width, and height. If theoretical physicists like Brian Greene and Lisa Randal — whose respective bestsellers The Elegant Universe and Warped Passages helped usher the wacky nomenclature of superstring theory into the late night stoner blather of an entire generation — are to be believed, the universe might actually require something like eleven to function properly. You can’t really blame the sizable demographic of dubsteppers, each competing tooth and nail to get their bass jams out of a DJs distended record bag before the other dude’s, for ignoring the extra dimensions we remain more or less oblivious to in favor of amping up the big three. Aptly-named twostepper Spatial, however, has not forgotten those knotted-up pockets wherein only the most esoteric matter tingles.
LWE 2Q Reports: Top 5 Labels
Record nerds of the world are greeted daily by news of the music industry’s impending doom. Yet record labels — in dance music, at least — have refused to fade away. All profitability aside, might the concept of the record label in 2009 be as strong as it’s ever been? As record stores continue closing at an alarming rate (Manhattan’s Etherea Records, one of my personal favorite spots for dance vinyl, shuttered this past February), there exist less shelf space for the familiar sleeve designs and logos of your favorite imprints to stare down enticingly at you. But in this digital era, where dance music is more easily disseminated than ever before, the filter of a reputable record label has taken on supreme importance in separating wheat from chaff. Tellingly, some of 2009’s most exciting labels have de-emphasized genre affiliation in favor of amping up their reputation for quality output. Others, realizing how quickly novel sounds can weave their way through the scene via the blogosphere (ahem), are starting labels as incubators for daring new tracks that might not have found an outlet otherwise. And despite the seemingly endless tide of new music gushing through the cracks of record bags and hard drives, some of the best labels have resisted the urge to flood the market with their brand, releasing only the choicest of cuts.
Various Artists, All Night Long EP’s 1 & 2
Dubstep may have found a novel approach to its inherent darkness and sparseness in techno; might there be an alternate path, though, one in which dubstep finds less subterranean manifestations in the dapper grooves of house? Aus Music, the debonair and slightly experimental tech-house imprint founded by Will Saul and Fin Greenall, answered in the affirmative with its recent and astounding Appleblim & Komonazmuk rework of (Greenall-fronted) Sideshow’s “If Alone.” The label continues its genre-melding trek with two new EPs of exclusive tracks from All Night Long, Saul’s new mix celebrating Aus’s twentieth release. Though never quite reaching the sublime heights of “If Alone,” Saul has curated four generally strong sides of house music in flux.
The Chain, Letting Go
London’s Dan Foat and Nathan Boddy released “Droidnosh” on Mule Electronic last year as Foat & Boddy. But just because they’ve named their new project after a song on Rumours doesn’t mean the newly resurgent R & S has gone soft on us. If the pounding rhythms and undulating synths found on the first release since their rechristening are any indication, The Chain wish to have their name taken quite literally. “Letting Go” contains the sort of well-oiled machine music you’d expect from the Belgian, home-away-from-home of Detroit techno. Can The Chain take the label’s classic rave style and, like Radio Slave and Shed (remixing Steve Lawler) on its last two slabs, give us a reason to buy off the new release shelf instead of digging through the used bin for the classics?
Stimming, Reflections
Martin Stimming doesn’t sound anything like Villalobos or Ben Klock. None of the records in his increasingly label-diverse discography evoke frozen tundras, k-holes or the post-industrial cathedral of Berghain on Sunday morning. His distinctively unmechanized house grooves are neither a vintage call to jack nor a dive into the depths. The longer I’ve sat on Reflections, Stimming’s debut full-length, the more I’ve realized what an awesome anomaly this young producer’s music is in 2009: his sound decidedly skirts the zeitgeist, but the undeniable quality and sensitivity of his handiwork renders him a perennial must-listen in a dance music scene moving more and more away from the organic tech-house that earns him his living.
Milton Bradley, Dystopian Vision
Do Not Resist The Beat!—should we consider that a listening strategy? “Dystopian Vision,” Milton Bradley’s second release this year for his own willfully obscure label, encapsulates some of the most abrasive, pulverizing techno sound design a producer can commit to record without completely alienating the floor. But if you’re willing to stick your head over Mr. Bradley’s 500 copy, limited-edition hole into hell, you might just find some serious, sulfury funk gurgling up from the deep.
Hector & Bryant, Tension
Berlin’s Hardwax, that Berghain-staffed den of alluringly anonymous white labels, might be the vinyl emporium of the moment. But what about London’s Phonica? Resembling more a design-minded record nerd’s studio apartment than a storefront adjacent to a Soho parking garage, Phonica has built an international reputation not by genre affiliation but on the high quality of the wax lining its walls. As a very green DJ studying abroad a few years back, I received my unofficial techno education at the shop, saddling up at a listening station once or twice a week with an employee-curated stack of new 12″s. I returned to the States with two suitcases full of Phonica’s wares (and a decimated savings account), and the bulk of my purchases still sound fresh today. So it’s no surprise that “Tension,” the first release on the shop’s eponymous label, features some of the most finely honed, built-to-last dance music on the shelves right now (not to mention some of the prettiest packaging).