For The Beneath, his latest 12″ on his own Strength Music label, once again pitches that signature DJ Qu sound — dark melodies always in the service of off-kilter yet hard-hitting percussion — for the bleakest, sweatiest, most subaltern dance floors imaginable. Should you, fair record buyer, take the plunge yet again?
jordan
STL, … And His Quest For Sound
April 29, 2010 – 10:01 AM
Every producer wants to make records that set themselves apart from other records. You’d think this would have to be true, right? Otherwise, why would anyone take the time and considerable cost necessary to create a piece of dance music? Practically every producer I hear strives to differentiate him or herself by way of the sounds — to get them as far away from the presets as possible; to design the presets of tomorrow, perhaps. Yet so many of the best moments in house and techno are those when the music itself fades away into a feeling. You can tune your drum machines all day, but if you can’t get something more out of them than soundwaves — if you can’t tease out that hypnotizing x-factor that makes certain dance records good beyond words — then you’re missing something critical.
Martin Buttrich, Crash Test
April 16, 2010 – 10:01 AM
When was the last time you thought about Martin Buttrich? The German studio wiz and producer (occasionally for hire) just isn’t blowing up on my radar like he used to a few years back, when his Seeing Through Shadows 12″ with Loco Dice for Minus and, of course, “Full Clip” were properly demolishing superclubs and underground parties alike. Ultra-detailed and hugely accessible, Buttrich was an ace in the studio by practically every objective measure. I’m personally surprised that I, a huge fan of those 2006 records and someone who thought Loco Dice’s 7 Dunham Place album from 2008 totally killed it, let him slide so far off my “to check” list. Chalk it up to his relative silence on the release front — Stoned Autopilot and its remix 12″ and a handful of remixes comprise his recent eponymous output — or to his brand of alternately C2-vampy and vaguely tropical digital house more or less falling out of favor, but as someone who follows dance music pretty well, I just haven’t had Martin Buttrich on the tip of my tongue for a few years.
Billy Love, Melloghettomental
April 6, 2010 – 10:01 AM
Few contemporary producers elicit unqualified, borderline worshipful praise quite like Theo Parrish. The mere mention of his name is enough to cause the eyes of house-heads to glaze over as they exhale the longest, most reverent “Ohhhhhh, dude” imaginable. The cynic in you refuses to believe that any producer, let alone one working today, could live up to this sort of breathlessness, but Parrish — now well into the second decade of his discography — consistently does. I often wonder if his sounding like practically no one else is a function of him understanding house better than practically everyone else: whether in the slow shuffle of his Sound Signature 12″s or the unbridled eclecticism of his legendary DJ sets, Parrish commits to the groove with a warmth, adventurousness, and veritable taxonomy of influences that makes him the standard-bearer for so many of us who love this music. I could keep talking about Theo for the next three days, but I haven’t mentioned Billy Love’s new doublepack for Sound Signature yet, and I’m pretty sure my eyes are starting to glaze over.
Scuba, Triangulation
March 30, 2010 – 10:01 AM
Paul Rose has undoubtedly proved himself to be one of the great dance music triple threats of the moment. He’s flexed his mighty A&R muscle at Hotflush, which in the past year helped launched the careers of next-gen buzz magnets like Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison. (His forward-thinking Sub:stance nights at the Berghain have surely bubbled up from a similar impulse.) He’s emerged as one of the world’s most impressively dexterous DJs (see his Sub:stance mix or, better yet, his latest podcast for RA for proof), dropping dubstep and 4/4 with equally sure hands. And bass sides as Scuba and a recent foray into techno as SCB have been among the underground’s most beloved records as of late.
BBH: Groove Committee, I Want You To Know
March 24, 2010 – 10:01 AM
Nu Groove, perhaps the most famous name in New York house after Strictly Rhythm, is an infamously difficult label to assess. Frank and Karen Mendez had originally started the imprint in 1988 as an outlet for Rheji and Ronald Burrell, former R&B producers (and twin brothers) who had recently parted ways with a major label. But by the time they pressed their last slab in 1992, the label had released over 100 records in seemingly as many club music subgenres. While the Burrells’ early singles remain fresh (especially Rheji’s, in this reviewer’s humble opinion), and the label provided a crucial early home to the likes of Frankie Bones, Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez pre-Masters At Work, and Victor Simonelli (see below), not all of the mélange holds up so well. Despite Nu Groove’s status as a completist’s worst nightmare, its pervasive underground-ness — disco soul emanating from brittle, staunchly low-tech sounds; a reputation built on a minimum image — manages to tie this behemoth of a catalog together. And as Underground Quality sends similar backroom ripples through the house music universe from the Tri-State Area once more, Nu Groove 12″s will undoubtedly wiggle their way out of dusty used bins at a somewhat faster rate.
Curator’s Cuts 05: Jordan Rothlein
March 22, 2010 – 12:01 AM
LWE’s Curator’s Cuts podcast series features our reviewing staff mixing together recent favorites and providing explanations for their selections. Staff writer Jordan Rothlein was tasked with mixing together Curator’s Cuts 05. We will post the tracklist later in the week, as each curator discloses and describes the tracklist as part of the podcast.
James Blake, The Bells Sketch
March 16, 2010 – 10:01 AM
I’m not exactly sure how to peg James Blake. But if dubstep professes to be music made for dance floors, then the young British producer almost certainly isn’t making it. His proudly unquantized beats (throbs of crunchy sound more than proper drum-hits) skitter in and out of the mix like confused cockroaches; his melodies, while warm, soulful, and usually ripped from records made in far simpler musical times, float over the proceedings like a minute-old ganja cloud — still pungently present, yet barely there. Despite sounding more than a bit like Untold, who’s championed his productions as labelhead at Hemlock, refashioned as a sleazy lounge act, Blake brings a strangely anthemic quality to productions which otherwise would probably be too experimental (or just downright blazed) for club consumption. Indeed, his latest offering, The Bells Sketch for the seriously in-bloom Hessle Audio label, has already attracted the attention of adventurous jocks like Dub War residents Dave Q and Alex Incyde, who managed to move floors (while simultaneously weirding them out, in a good way) when they each closed out recent sets with the A-side. It’s Blake’s most sophisticated record to date, but that doesn’t mean his dance floor credentials make a whole lot more sense.
Elektro Guzzi, Hexenschuss/Elastic Bulb
March 11, 2010 – 11:01 PM
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.
Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Arise
March 2, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
February 19, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
February 18, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
February 10, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
February 9, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
February 2, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
January 25, 2010 – 11:01 PM
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
January 14, 2010 – 11:30 AM
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
January 8, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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
January 4, 2010 – 1:01 AM
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”
December 22, 2009 – 1:01 AM
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”?