“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.
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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.
Curator’s Cuts 02: Jordan Rothlein
LWE’s Curator’s Cuts podcast series features our reviewing staff mixing together recent favorites and providing explanations for their selections. Contributing writer Jordan Rothlein steps up to the decks for Curator’s Cuts 02. We will post the tracklist later in the week, as each curator discloses and describes the tracklist as part of the podcast.
Wax, Dub Shed Sessions I
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?
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.”
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.