East Flanders was a veritable gold mine of house fundamentals in 2009, thanks to the underestimated work of the young We Play House Recordings. With an aesthetic as direct and to-the-point as the label’s chosen name, the line has typically favored retro synthetic palettes and low-slung earworm grooves. And though all of their records have been worth a look, when you start tallying last year’s out-and-out stunners — San Soda’s “Dorsnee,” Dynamodyse’s “Gare du Nord,” Reggie Dokes’ “Dancefloor Spectacle,” Russ Gabriel’s “Le Voyeur,” Ramon Tapia & Maxim Lany’s “Highway,” to name names — you can’t help but wonder how they’ve kept such a modest profile. WPH starts the new year with an in-house affair, a quartet of 90’s throwbacks from the team-up of label founder Red D and the producer behind roughly half the label’s output, San Soda. And yes, as the title suggests, you may sing along to them.

On opener “Let’s Go,” the promised vocals play in achy, gospel-tinged clips and, with added help from some synth strings, flesh out a lean, arid arrangement of handclaps and keyboard stabs. Low-key and gently sultry, it’s something of a contrast to the flip’s “More Than Seven,” a slick, smiling call to the dance floor cooly voiced by Lady Linn. Though its basic, amiably dated instrumentation prowls and punches capably, it’s the exuberant confidence of the vocal that best relays the track’s particular sensibility. Devoid of ennui or brooding, “More Than Seven” is so unabashedly a “good times” club track that you almost blush. Well, almost. I actually wish Linn cut loose a bit, maybe sacrificed a little poised sass in the heat of the moment. Even and still, it’s genuinely refreshing to hear vocal house in 2010 that smiles as easily as it sighs. Also included on the record are a taut instrumental version of “More Than Seven,” and “Let’s Go Seven,” which pairs Linn’s “More Than Seven” vocals and a sweated-up take on the instrumental from “Let’s Go.” None of it quite hits me like the WPH standouts I mentioned earlier, but this record certainly won’t harm the label’s reputation with house DJs and mavens.

It’s getting to be full-time work keeping tabs on Brendon Moeller these days. Spread over his assorted monikers, he issued at least eight records of new material in 2009. Cohort Shigeru Tanabu has conducted himself a bit more discretely, though he did notch a soaring, string-laden peak time record with Wave Music early last year, and followed it with the loose “Jazzin’” for Apt. International. Originally a guitarist, he’s also made numerous contributions to Moeller’s Beat Pharmacy records, but Manaboo presumably brings the duo’s collaboration to full interactive fruition, the label press release emphasizing an engagement of their shared enthusiasm for jazz. Don’t let track titles like “Blutrane” mislead you, though; techno and house are the crucial touchstones here.

The mid-tempo title track’s balmy pads, dipping bass lines, and shuffling disco guitar dip into the deep house well, but its sleek sheen is more make-out than melancholy. “Utopia” and “Blutrane” mine the overlapping territory of house’s sensuality and dub techno’s tactile atmospherics. “Utopia” seeks sonic depths with what sound like sonar blips, and unsurprisingly find metallic chords and numbing sub-bass at the bottom. “Blutrane” buries a muddled John Coltrane interview beneath a “Quadrant Dub” recipe of submerged reverb and filtered percussion. There’s little question that Moeller and Tanabu know their way around this sort of sound design but, much like the barely discernible recording of Coltrane’s voice, the music’s vague grey-scale seems to resist close listening, settling quickly into the background. From where I stand, the duo better distinguish themselves with “Morpheen,” a slow builder that balances moody jazz samples and future dub textures to haunting and elegant effect. Like “Unhuh,” it’s a minor pleasure, but a comfortable one, with an easy mood and slinky allure that may find more takers in the cocktail lounge than on the floor.

We love to drag geography into discussions of dance music, and with Mr. Raoul K, it’s hard not to. Turned onto to electronic dance music after moving from the Ivory Coast to Hamburg, his reputation as a producer is founded on a growing catalog of euphoric and rather continental club tracks that swirl with traditional African elements. Granted, African motifs are hardly anomalous in dance music, but they’ve held an uncommonly prominent role in this particular producer’s discography, and not just the rhythms, either. From the balafon twinkling through last year’s excellent “Wind of Goree” for Mule Musiq to the shudders of kora heard on 2008’s “Le Cercle Peul,” Raoul’s keen interest in working with live recordings of African acoustic instruments is probably the first thing you notice when you hear his music — at least it was, anyway.

I don’t doubt that Raoul continues to pursue this interest on the title track of his new Mystic Things, but it’s not front-and-center this time. Loose, acoustic drum sounds stand out but, from the pounding to the plinking, they play more as seasoning here, character adjuncts in a minimal house aesthetic more focused on the modulation from lulling drones to restorative swells. Vocals come courtesy of a certain Lopazz, though his incitements to “dance with your body” struggle to reach the surface of the track’s repetitive commotion. Sometimes, little more than a moan can be discerned, but that hardly hurts the track’s immersive intensity. It’s not a subtle track, but “Mystic Things” direct approach does achieve a near-trance narcosis that seems to smuggle the nighttime and crowd onto the record along with the demanding rhythm. B-side “No Food No Groove,” then, is the record’s low-key potboiler. It’s on this track that you’ll hear the distinctive use of traditional African instruments that Raoul’s known for, the percolating wooden percussion (perhaps a balafon again) doled out as lovely, stripped-down melodic phrases and agitated rhythmic rushes alike. Striving for a brighter and more blissed-out energy than its partner track, its sonic sunrise might well come in handy after a night soundtracked by the A-side.

[Non Standard Productions] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s)

More and more, the recordings of Max Loderbauer and Tobias Freund’s Non Standard Institute seem to parallel the ineffable and absorbing audio artifacts they namecheck from time to time — records like Cluster’s Großes Wasser, Pharaoh Sanders’ Thembi, or This Heat’s This Heat. Like those records, their latest EP sounds as though conceived through exploratory tinker-now, edit-later studio sessions where the ultimate goal isn’t necessarily a new record. All the same, their latest eccentric collection of fascinating, too-brief compositional sketches is a richly satisfying listen. Cut from the same cloth as the track LWE hosted as a free mp3 this month, you could imagine Eitherway as something like last year’s RA-podcasted Mutek set, but parsed into discrete vignettes.

Clocking in at a lean two-and-a-half minutes, “Scale” opens the record with a droning melody loop and an accumulation of thwacking percussion that sounds for all the world like hail falling on a windshield. “Cabinet” quickly redirects, a sort of eerie, abbreviated take on electro-acoustic Nordic jazz (Supersilent’s “6.1″ sticks out as a point of reference). Its fragile set piece of sci-fi textures, insect-like drum machine debris, and faint snatches of piano is mainly a showcase for the modular synth that Loderbauer plays in plaintive, theremin-like moans. Later on, the woozy “Uncertainty” covers similar terrain, but with a retro palette and see-sawing momentum that verge on techno, though at some remove from the genre. Coming a bit closer, the restless title track sets galloping snares and the hot zaps of something credited as a “random voltage generator” on a nighttime chase through an ambient field of absent chimes. Likewise, the propulsive “Forward” boasts a ferocious drum pattern, but its tightly-wrapped, repetitive piano loops slide so dizzily out of sync that calling it a DJ tool seems like a cruel dare.

The record closes with “Tapped,” reprising the hurled beats of “Scale” beneath a shimmying, free-form warble best compared to a pliant sheet of metal shaken over a mic. Granted, some of that may read like a bit of a chore, but for all its analogue equipment-tweakery and unscripted musical interaction, Eitherway steers clear of the hazards of a gear-fetish geek-out or a hair-down jam. Luscious sound design and tonal variety have a lot to do with it, but the real hero is the duo’s meticulous editing. We’re whisked through six tracks in just twenty-two minutes, the pieces given only enough time to establish a palette, a pattern, and a groove before the curtains close to make way for the next track. As the duo’s press releases proclaim, it’s a “non standard” way to produce music, but it does manage to captivate — spellbind, even. It’s that old showbiz trick, I guess: always leave them wanting more.

Few things grab my attention like a Benjamin Brunn credit on the sleeve, and it’s particularly nice when they fit as neatly as the one here. Area is an alternate guise for Canadian-born, Chicago-reared DJ/producer m50. I’m not sure what the exact distinction is, but this particular EP — for François K’s Wave Music — traffics in forms of abstracted melodic house not distant from Brunn’s esteemed body of work. Assured opener “LLPOD” has a tense dance floor utility and an almost jazzy swing, but what makes it memorable are the sputters, drips and steam jets animating the background, reminding of the atmospheric eddies of Brunn’s “Raymond.” Its abstracted dub grooves also put me in mind of, for example, Anders Ilar’s “Organza.” Little details similarly animate “Respons,” a simple techno builder that works small wonders with a robotic tintinnabulation bubbling brightly at the track’s surface.

My pick for EP highlight, “Missing A Few” is a lush soundscape whose design draws liberally from ambient electronics and IDM. Marimba-like synth tones, whispy atmospherics, and ghost-in-the-machine whirs and ticks give the track a fog-like drift. But “Missing” isn’t abstract so much as evocative, thanks to a distorted, elastic kick-drum that doggedly structures the diaphanous textures. Warm, shoegaze-dreamy but floor-ready pop, it takes me back to the finds I gladly plucked from Kompakt’s shelves back when I lived in Cologne. And, closing the record, there’s that aforementioned Brunn contribution — only his second remix of which I’m aware. Continuing along the path he’s pursued on recent Bine singles like “77,” Brunn works Farben-style melodic glitch and a fusion disco plunk (a la Isolée’s “Albacares”) into his “LLPOD” overhaul – a welcome compliment to the warm organics of Area’s trio.

Years before he’d released a single record of his own, Andy Vaz had already left a conspicuous mark on electronic music as the man behind Background Records. When he finally started releasing music, he garnered a good deal of attention for the “clicks, cuts, and a 4/4″ sound exemplified by the cult Soundvariation series. In the last three or four years, though, both his music and his A&R focus have increasingly mined classic house influences. More a shift of priorities than an outright swap of musical templates, house has always been a part of Vaz’s program, and his morphing live sets retain much of the abstract and experimental qualities that characterized his first records. Yore Records, the label he runs with Alessandro Vaccaro, is the focus of another Little White Earbuds interview feature. Today, though, our exclusive podcast focuses on the sometimes silky, sometimes jazzy, and very often jacking music Vaz produces himself. Live sets, as discussed in the Q&A below, are where Vaz feels most comfortable, and this percolating mix certainly finds him in very fine form.

Download: LWE Podcast 40: Andy Vaz (59:52)

Tracklist:

01. Andy Vaz live. All music written, produced, mixed and recorded by Andy Vaz. Courtesy of Yore Records, 2009

You’d been in the scene for a while before you finally started putting out your own records. What was it that finally got you making and sharing music of your own?

Andy Vaz: It takes time to develop a sound and define a language of your own. It’s a learning process, and I allowed myself enough time to be able to express what I had to say.

You’re doing a lot of live sets these days. Is there a particular attraction to this kind of music-making for you right now?

That’s what I do. I don’t DJ! I never have! I have five thousand records plus, but I don’t play them out in clubs. I only perform live. Currently stepping it up with the Akai APC 40 and a live 808 (Miami Acidlab 808 clone, a lovely hardware drum-computer). It makes things way more interactive. APC helps me not having to focus so much on the screen, and the 808 is just really putting it on top. Being able to change beats and patterns and program random beats on the fly really makes it much more of a real live performance, and it’s giving the audience a better understanding of what’s actually happening.

Your music has shifted toward house over the years. In this mix, I detect a lot of Chicago influences. What’s led to the change in your sound?

I got bored of making “minimal techno.” Done it when it was fun and when I thought I may have something to contribute, and now it will be house. Let’s see where it will shift to next (laughs). However, to me even my first and only longplayer, Repetitive Moments Last Forever, was house, rather than minimal techno, so it’s not that new to me to make house music really. That came out in 2006, and I made it in 2005.

There was a time when you weren’t interested in using samples in your music. What changed your attitude on that?

It simply suits house music. House has always, not entirely of course, been sample-based music. So it seemed logical to try things out. However, I have now shifted to working with real musicians and vocalists. Way more organic and fun! Makes it more human too, working with real people.

Who are you working with these days? I know you got Alton Miller to sing on a couple tracks this year, which we hear in your mix.

Yeah, Alton, Eva Soul, and stuff coming up with DJ Mix (Woman on Wax).

How does this work? How far along is a track before vocals enter the picture?

Track first, totally isolated from the vox. Then the vocalist goes wild on it. If they feel the track, it goes somewhere. If not, then that’s it.

You have more of a presence as an artist on Yore than you did on Background or A Touch of Class. Is Yore the primary outlet for your own music right now, or will you use the Vazbit platform again in the future?

Yore is my new home now!

Do you think you’ll ever revisit sounds along the lines of the Sound Variation series?

Haha, that’s the most frequently asked question. The answer is clearly NO. It makes me really happy though that so many people ask me about that, and seem disappointed this had come to and end and will not return. I think a set of eight records (plus two remix records) was just the right amount. I don’t like to repeat myself over and over. I get bored and then I cannot make it any longer.

Any favorite records from the past year, aside from the stuff you’ve put out on Yore?

Floating Points, “Love Me Like This.” And I really like the latest Scott Grooves doublepack “Riddum Collection!” Some deep as hell stuff there, and heaps of plain killer 808 drum patterns!

I love that Scott Grooves record. As for Yore, you guys finished 2009 with a second record from Kez YM, and you’re opening the new year with your own “Shadow City” record. What else is in the pipeline for 2010?

We have the latest split EP between myself and Patrice Scott coming up next, and we’ve just launched our own webshop for both digital and vinyl and for all the labels under my belt — Background, A Touch of Class, Vazbit, Sound Variation, Deep Night Essentials (anybody remember this? Haha), and of course Yore. We offer 98% of everything digitally. However, we are missing audio masters of a few releases. Besides that, it will all be there, plus some special items, exclusive unreleased stuff, and Yore releases available a month prior to hitting other stores.

Is Yore’s web store operated in-house?

I personally will be in charge of it, and I have another person helping with the mailouts of the orders and such, and who will run it when I am on tour or producing. Getting it all together sure has been a hell of a mission. Me and my crew worked on it for three months straight and of course it massively kept me away from making music. So now since it’s done, I am happy I can get back to work and do something for myself in the studio again.

I recall that last year around this time, Kompakt closed its mp3 store, saying that it took a lot of time and distracted them from the music.

Since we will only handle our own label catalog, I don’t expect the maintenance on the site to take away from whats most important: the labels and the studio.

I’ve got a couple of random questions to cap this. I understand that hip-hop was your first love. Do you listen to much of it these days?

Yes! All day long! For real!

Greatest MC of all time?

KRS-One in his early days!

“Days of yore,” indeed! Okay, last question. You’ve got ties to both Düsseldorf and Cologne, so I’ve got to ask: kölsch or altbier?

Kölsch all the way and also all day long!!

Download: LWE Podcast 40: Andy Vaz (59:52)

Related:

LWE Podcast 02: dOP

LWE Podcast 03: Nick Höppner

LWE Podcast 04: Leonid

LWE Podcast 05: Tama Sumo

LWE Podcast 06: Adam Marshall

LWE Podcast 07: DJ Bone

LWE Podcast 08: Solomun

Talking Shopcast 01: Even Tuell

LWE Podcast 09: Pär Grindvik

LWE Podcast 10: Andomat 3000

LWE Podcast 11: Simon Flower

LWE Podcast 12: Andrey Radovski

Talking Shopcast 02: echospace [detroit]

LWE Podcast 13: Paul Frick

LWE Podcast 14: DJ Sprinkles

LWE Podcast 15: Duplex

LWE Podcast 16: Mike Shannon

Talking Shopcast 03: Kenneth Christiansen

LWE Podcast 17: Louis Guilliaume

Talking Shopcast 04: Efdemin

LWE Podcast 18: Patrice Bäumel

LWE Podcast 19: John Daly

LWE Podcast 20: Stefan Goldmann

LWE Podcast 21: Le K

LWE Podcast 22: Portable vs. Bodycode

LWE Podcast 23: Aki Latvamäki

LWE Podcast 24: Arnaud Rebotini

LWE Podcast 25: Peter Van Hoesen

Talking Shopcast 05: Steffi

LWE Podcast 26: Ripperton

LWE Podcast 27: DJ T.

LWE Podcast 28: Paul Brtschitsch

LWE Podcast 29: Black Jazz Consortium

LWE Podcast 30: Santiago Salazar

LWE Podcast 31: Spencer Parker

Talking Shopcast 06: Kez YM

LWE Podcast 32: Shaun Reeves

LWE Podcast 33: Chilling the Do (aka Kassem Mosse & Mix Mup)

LWE Podcast 34: St. Plomb

LWE Podcast 35: Margaret Dygas

LWE Podcast 36: Kirk Degiorgio

LWE Podcast 37: Hauntologists

LWE Podcast 38: Thomas Andersen

LWE Podcast 39: Basic Soul Unit

[Data Leak] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s)

Fostered by the hungry eclecticism of The I-F’s legendary Cybernetic Broadcasting System and the music communities that have gathered in its wake, Bas roR has been DJing around Rotterdam for some time (in clubs and on the radio) and has already notched a memorable EP with Kubra’s “Control Issues,” a collaboration with DJ Tim for Arne Weinberg’s AW Recordings. Like much of the Kubra record, Bas roR’s solo debut recalls the deep and the weird of 90’s techno — Dan Curtin, Ultradyne and Stasis all come to mind, as well as some Rephlex sounds. The brushed percussion, bright melodic squiggles and brooding chord patterns of the title track, for example, are pure zero-gravity, practically describing a slow drift through a meteor shower.

That’s about as dreamy as this record gets, though. “Syringed” opts for more of a wriggly, off-key funk, rolling out a bullfrog bass line and a host of creaks, whirs and bleeps to freak up the light clamor of handclaps and sighing UFO pads. The record’s longest and certainly “biggest” track, “Reload” keeps the science fiction dressings, but takes a more aggressive approach. Echoing, Levon Vincent-sized keyboard stabs dominate the track, while layers of synth collide and accumulate in a dissonant hum that disorients and elates in equal measure. Reprising the space-man sonics of “Syringed,” “Grief” embeds a rubbery bass groove in what sounds for all the world like a swarm of insects. Sounding a bit like a sleazy cousin to MLZ’s “One Cycle,” it’s easy to see why it’s being charted by the likes of Marcel Dettmann, and safe to say that Bas roR won’t be a Rotterdam secret for long.

To start off our year end coverage, LWE correspondent Chris Burkhalter breaks down the top five labels of 2009

Dance music enthusiasts are almost certainly the most label-conscious people in the record-buying world. How else can you explain the bickering over new Perlon signings, the ubiquity of the compound adjective “buy-on-sight,” or the hastily depleted stocks of anonymously-produced 12″s? We follow our favorite DJs and producers, naturally, but a record publishing operation with vision and taste is very often the best guide to the sounds we thirst for. 2009’s cream of the crop — labels like Running Back, Uzuri, Prologue, Dial, Sound Signature, Blueprint, Apple Pips, and Time To Express — did more than narrow the field of available records, but sharpened our expectations of what new music should achieve. And the mushrooming of secretive private presses (many of them fostered by Hardwax’s distribution) yielded results that were just as rewarding. But from where I’m standing, these five labels loomed largest.

In some circles, Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” might be reason enough to include Scuba’s imprint among the ranks of the year’s most important, influential, and exciting labels, but there was a lot more going on at Hotflush than just one huge track. Between the mid-tempo melancholy of Mount Kimbie’s “Maybes” EP and Untold’s trio of bubbling rhythm tracks, Hotflush pursued curious new paths for bass music’s future. Meanwhile, records from Sigha and Pangaea showed that, with a little personality, the label’s more tried-and-true sonic templates still bang plenty hard. And Scuba himself turned out three discs worth of material, continuing his steady creep toward techno, and delivering one of his finest tracks to date in “Symbiosis.” Hotflush’s quality control team is certainly due for a raise, as their 2009 strike rate was virtually unrivaled.

Was any label as enigmatic as Macro this year? Unpredictable and often challenging, the label’s 2009 run sometimes seemed to provoke its audience, but it was all essential listening – whether the goal was meeting the latest challenge or verifying fierce objections. The elusive Stravinsky edit left even ardent supporters scratching their heads, but it was Goldmann’s grandiose/kitschy remix of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade” that was most contentious. Macro still trades in proper dance music, of course, but on its own terms. Raudive wove stately jazz abstraction into his twisting techno single for the label, while the promotional blurb for Peter Kruder’s tense 12″ name-checked Tchaikovsky. And the original version of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade”? Electrifying techno quicksilver, and a proper classic. The label’s most notable releases, though, involved a trove of previously unheard punk/new wave/proto-techno that Patrick Cowley recorded with singer Jorge Socarras in the Seventies. An expansive archival project that seized the label’s full resources for the second half of the year, it felt more like a gift to dance music than a market product.

Four months after announcing the end of publishing activities, Clone found a whole mess of music they wanted us to hear — and too much for just one label. So Clone switched the lights back on and splintered into half a dozen niche sublabels. Combined, they turned Clone’s “going out of business” year into one of its most prodigious. In general, the new imprints are founded on retro tastes, with Clone Jack For Daze and Clone Loft Supreme styled after vintage Chicago and New York house sounds, respectively, Clone Basement Series taking on classically-minded techno, and so on. The artists showcased came from all over, and had their own creative itineraries, but the records generally presented minor updates on beloved house and techno sounds. The least of these were skillfully-executed, stylish homages, and the best were astounding. For myself, the highlights were A Made Up Sound’s fresh reconfigurations of house, Reggie Dokes’ “Chicago Pimp,” and the Mike Dehnert records (including the deliciously garish Levon Vincent remix). Your own year-end list might not include those tracks, but it’d be hard to believe that it escaped Clone’s tentacles entirely.

2009 began gloriously for Hyperdub with Joker’s “Digidesign” and Kode9’s own “Black Sun,” and the label hasn’t let up since. The beefy 5 Years compilation officially celebrated the label’s five-year anniversary, but its eclectic disc of new material doubled as the announcement of Hyperdub’s transition from a hungry young label to a confident musical institution whose reach now extends well beyond the garage continuum. Artists well-known to Hyperdub fans — Zomby, Darkstar, Samiyam, Ikonika, and yes, Burial — turned in potent new material, but it was the first-timers to the label that really got people talking. The aforementioned Joker track stands proud beside the label’s finest releases to date, and was backed by that slinky, R&B-steeped track from 2000F & J Kamata. Mark Pritchard’s drunk 8-bit “Wind It Up” was utterly unavoidable. And then there’s Hyperdub’s newest star, Cooly G. Add to this a full album from King Midas Sound, and visits from Martyn, Mala, and Flying Lotus, and we wouldn’t blame you if you were still playing catch-up in January.

This Hamburg label’s handful of records (totaling just fourteen tracks) traded in light melodies, gradual builds, and mild flavors, capitalizing on the allure of warm glow over searing heat. There was always a thumping functionality for the dance floor, but a subtle one easily concealed by the elegance of the often melancholy compositions. The And Suddenly It’s Morning compilation appropriately arrived in autumn, and went a long way toward characterizing the label’s sweater-and-scarf aesthetic, but the highlights of the year were the two EPs that preceded it. STL brokered with Smallville for one of the finest entries in his exhaustive catalog, a record of bright, layered melodies and brooding dub atmospherics. And the label’s only remix for the year, Jus-Ed’s scrub of Steinhoff & Hammouda’s “You Are,” positively smoldered. As we got to know these records, Smallville emerged from under the long shadow of the kindrid spirits at the neighboring Dial, and grew to be a cherished favorite of DJs, critics, and fans alike. And, just like Dial, Smallville’s wares worked at least as well on headphones as in the club, so that if Smallville wasn’t responsible for an indelible moment toward the close of your best night out this year, there’s a good chance they soundtracked a memorable walk home.

[echospace [detroit]] (buy vinyl) (buy mp3s tk)

When the time comes for year-end wrap-ups, count on STL’s pursuit of techno’s humid depths to be one of 2009’s leading stories. The past eleven months saw Stephan Laubner following other creative muses as well (and prolifically), but between the “Silent State” EP for Smallville and a mix CD tellingly titled Dub Techno Explorations, it seems safe to declare a new chapter in the STL legacy. Despite its reverb and grit, “Silent State”’s bass lines were so buoyant that many notched it as house, but Exploration’s seventy minutes of dub techno oxidation aimed more for texture and atmosphere. Appropriate enough, then, that the Echospace crew took interest, helping Laubner issue — by my count — his tenth record of 2009.

The two STL tracks featured here, “Check Mate” and “Beautiful Mind,” both appeared on Explorations mix (tracks 2 and 5, if you want to check). Tenuously contained between hasty fade-ins and fade-outs, these aren’t autonomous tracks so much as windows opening on sonic continuities exceeding the capacity of vinyl. Not that they’re less entrancing for it, though. Hypnotic, soft focus, texture, murk, haze, smoke — you know the tags. But this is nebulous even as dub techno goes, the ponderous chords, treated percussion, and field recordings matted into diffuse abstraction. The listless, tinny percussion in “Check Mate”’s high-end captures the track’s sense of absent drift but, all the while, churning bass grooves and neat kick drum patterns steadily pull us forward. It’s the permeating fog that registers most, of course, and that goes double for the sleepy-eyed “Beautiful Mind.” Dub techno lends itself well to headphone-listening, and Laubner’s gift for early morning, solitary music really blossoms on this track. Behind a drizzle of shakers and dripped drum taps, the atonal chords moan like emanations from some distant shipyard. It’s gently immersive but, more than that, its casual melancholy achieves an emotional depth that sets it apart from just about everything else on the field.

We’re also treated to a rare remix of STL’s work, courtesy of cv313. Their “Remodel” of “Check Mate” — actually positioned at the front of the record — asserts dub over drift, its tougher kick drums and cheerier rhythms resulting in a firmer track with a lot more oomph. Offering a sort of counterpoint to STL’s take on the genre, it’s another fine entry in cv313’s run of dub-inspired head-nod. There’s not a complaint I can lodge against this package.

Word spread quickly about Hauntologists’ first EP, a record that reveled in heady live experimentation, but with unrelenting tripping rhythms that guaranteed as much energy on the dance floor as in the studio. Their sophomore record refined the palette, and its winding, often eerie grooves garnered plenty of DJ support. Considering that they left their names off of those two Hard Wax-distributed records, though, we count ourselves pretty lucky that Hauntologists’ Jay Ahern and Stefan Schneider agreed to an LWE interview. Hardly hiding behind mystique, the duo treat us to an engaged, in-depth conversation, pulling back the curtain to reveal what’s behind their stripped-down, twisting funk. Along the way, we talk about gear and human interaction, Neu! and Berghain, the ghosts of Berlin, and “the Africa of the mind.” And to accompany your reading, Hauntologists have compiled a special mixtape for our 37th podcast. An eclectic yet cohesive snapshot of influences and interests, the selections range from classic house to avant-jazz to… well, you should just hear it.

Download: LWE Podcast 37: Hauntologists (71:10)

Tracklist:

01. Ramjac Corporation, “Cameroon Massif!” [Irdial Discs]
02. Art Ensemble Of Chicago, “Promenade: Cote Bamako II” [ECM]
03. Mike Dunn, “So Let It Be House” [Clone Classic Cuts]
04. Tortoise, “Gigantes” (Mark Ernestus Version) [Thrill Jockey]
05. Unknown, “‘Akazéhé’ Par Deux Jeunes Filles” [Ocora]
06. Abe Duque & Acid Maria, “Turn Down The Lights” [Abe Duque Records]
07. Delia Derbyshire, “Liquid Energy” [Glo Spot Records]
08. Shackleton, “Blood On My Hands” (Ricardo Villalobos Apocalypso Now Mix) [Skull Disco]
09. Rhythm & Sound, “Poor People Must Work” (Carl Craig Remix) [Burial Mix]
10. The Congos, “Congoman” [Blood & Fire]
11. Eric Burell, “Badness”
12. Roter Stern Belgrad, “Afars” [Klar! 80]
13. Rhythim Is Rhythim, “Kao-Tic Harmony” [Transmat]
14. Instra:mental, “No Future” [Nonplus Records]
15. Terence Dixon, “Minimalism II A2″ [Background]

It’s great to have you two in the same room for this conversation. Stefan, you’re not based in Berlin, are you?

Stefan: I’m with Jay here at the studio in Berlin now, but I live in Düsseldorf. I’m over here for a couple of days, because I’m working on a theater production in Potsdam, near Berlin.

How long have you lived in Berlin, Jay?

Jay: About three years. I came via Ireland. My family’s Irish American. I grew up in Florida, went to high school in Florida. For my university years I went to London, fucked that up, and then went to Dublin where my family could keep an eye on me. And I settled in there and enjoyed living in Dublin. I used to make music there, and also worked for a record distributor. But I always loved Berlin, I had friends here, and after a while, that was that, I moved.

Was that related to the distribution job?

Jay: Basically, I was asked to come over to set up the German office for Domino Records. So that was my day job. But I knew Stefan before, because I used to run a little seven-inch label called Earsugar Jukebox, and I released Stefan’s music on Earsugar. So it was kind of funny that we were meeting in Berlin, years later, in the context of To Rococo Rot.

You were distributing them?

Jay: I was their label in Germany, via Domino. I did that for a couple years, and now I work at Hard Wax. I love Domino, but obviously electronic music is my thing, and when I got the opportunity to work at Hard Wax it was a pretty big deal for me.

And Cheap & Deep, Hauntologists, and even your Add Noise records are distributed through Hard Wax, aren’t they?

Jay: I’ve had a long relationship with Hard Wax. I mean, Ireland is a beautiful and wonderful place, and there are great producers coming from it, but the club scene is very small. It was one of those things where you wouldn’t really make music full-time for a job. It’s an expensive country to live in. But yeah, I always made tracks. I loved Hard Wax and when I’d go to Berlin, I would go into the shop, I knew the guys. So long story short, then when I moved to Berlin, they said, “Look, why don’t start putting all your stuff through us, and we’ll distribute it for you.” That was wonderful — I still remember the day.

Stefan, listening to the “Loss of Clarity” EP you recorded as Mapstation, and Jay’s last Add Noise record, it’s as though I can hear your sounds beginning to come together. What was it that made you two decide to first work together as Hauntologists?

Stefan: As Jay told you, we knew each other through that seven-inch label he ran. Then I found a record of Add Noise, which I found really, really exciting. And when Jay and I were discussing new records, I said, “I find that Add Noise record really exceptional.” And he said, “Yeah, that’s me!” That was pretty much a surprise. Then he asked me, “Stefan, I’ve heard that you have a Roland 303. I have an 808.” And we thought, okay, it’s time to bring the two together. So we ended up having a recording session together here in Berlin, one and a half years ago. It went really well. You immediately could feel that there is an energy between the two of us, an energy that is quite rare. The past couple of years I’ve collaborated with a number of people for one-off concerts, live concerts, and also sometimes studio work. But that session with Jay had something very special, very unique from the first moment.

So what did that recording session, for example, look like?

Stefan: To be honest, I don’t find the equipment very important. Some of the machines are those legendary Roland machines, but I think we could also do what we want to do with a totally different setup. I bought a Roland 303 some years ago, and always used it in a very un-acid way, for occasional bass hums or frequencies. And I told a lot of people that, like on the last Mapstation EP, on every single track there’s a 303. People couldn’t hear that, and found it interesting that I would use a 303 in a non-acid way. That’s also a bit the way Jay and I seem to work together, so that — maybe not the next session, but for recordings in the future — we could totally drop our equipment. It’s more that the stuff we’re using at the moment is what we’re familiar with, and I think that that’s more important than the history of those machines.

Jay: My introduction to Stefan’s music was through the Sleep, Engine Sleep album that he did as Mapstation. And what struck me about it was the purity of tone, of rhythm and also, kind of the advancement of dub. But also the performance aspect. It’s like what Stefan was saying about the equipment. You know, 808s and 303s and x0xs… those devices came from a time when it was about being able to perform on stuff. I think that it’s interaction that’s the most important thing. Whatever equipment you’re using, I think that the actual ability to interact with another musician is really what we’re talking about. Plus, sound design is really important, but we’re also really burdened with it. I think that sound design can be something quite simple. The whole idea of sitting down and mapping out a track on a computer, and it’s just being sketched, y’know, that’s not where Stefan and I are coming from. It’s actually about performing and then recording the results, and so it’s an interaction between us. And we’re not super technical people, I think.

Stefan: Those machines give you the ability to start working very quickly. You don’t have to have like a big knowledge about… you don’t have to read through the manual. It’s not like software, like Max MXP, which you have to study for one year before you get something that you can create with almost any synthesizer. I think that it’s quite important that immediately you can start working, so that whenever we meet, after one or two hours, music is rolling.

Jay: It’s musicians playing together, and I think that’s the difference. Obviously Stefan and I are both hugely influenced by or interested in groove, but it’s not just… you know… something that is sexless. I find so much music so fucking cold in a way, and for us it’s more of a warm conversation. We see these moments happen, and they become other things.

You can kind of hear that, especially on the first EP. The tracks sound like pieces of a session, with clear connections from one track to the next. I can sort of imagine ellipses between tracks, as though we come back two or three hours later to hear, not so much a different song, but an evolution of the previous one.

Jay: Stefan and I both hugely love dub, and also I love this kind of cyclical repetition that changes slowly over time, because I think that’s a little bit more human, a little bit more hypnotic. And you gotta remember, too, with house music it’s the same groove. You’ve got drum and bass, which is largely based around the “Amen” break, techno has its rhythms… and everything’s being versioned. So I guess with Hauntologists we just kind of cut to the chase and said, “This is our rhythm.” Like reggae always has a rhythm. And we just versioned that rhythm.

Stefan, you’ve talked about “taking a step back” in your music, letting your equipment make some decisions. I can imagine with the Hauntologists sessions, this also means giving a groove some duration, some space to breath and to develop that hypnotic effect. You guys included Ricardo Villalobos’ remix of Shackleton on the mix you’ve given us, and that’s a pretty good example of this as well, letting the rhythm pattern draw out. Was this something you set out to do originally?

Stefan: There was no concept we had before we started. We just gave it a go — see how things come out. I think that was one thing that was very seductive to me, that those tracks would be more or less clearly addressed to the dance floor. I’m still working in a field, either with To Rococo Rot or with Mapstation, that people always consider as “exploring the edge of the dance floor” — if you think of a club, the place between the bar and the edge of the dance floor. And so I find it very exciting to move with Jay more to the center of the dance floor.

Jay: In Berghain.

Stefan: Even in the center of the dance floor, there are a lot of possibilities for experiments.

Jay: Club music is kind of a beautiful and simple thing. I mean, so many electronic musicians over-engineer dance tracks. At the end of the day, it’s a really simple formula that you can kind of do anything in. I do know why people bitch about it sometimes and, yeah, things need to evolve but, ultimately, if there’s a rhythm that people can dance to — and, for me, it has to suit the nighttime — everything else is wide open.

Talking about repetition, you mentioned Ricardo. Ricardo’s a master of repetition and subtly changing grooves. And so were Neu! And so is Lee Perry. These subtle changes made huge impact on the dance floor… okay, obviously Neu! weren’t huge on the dance floor but, y’know, there’s a lot of freedom. It’s a combination of being meditative, and also, I mean, people wanna move.

Stefan: Neu!, for instance… I met Klaus Dinger some years ago in Düsseldorf, and he always said that the music, it has to keep on. It’s supposed to never stop. That was the force behind the Neu! tracks, especially like “Hallo Gallo” and “Für Immer.” “Für Immer” is…

“Forever.”

Stefan: Music that never stops. It’s also like your idea of a dance floor, that the club night is going for like a weekend. Or a week, or a whole lifetime.

Jay: I live in Kreuzberg. The Berghain is five minutes away from me. I love that club, I do go a lot, and this kind of “endless” music is kind of happening every weekend there. So aside from musical touchstones you have in the past, like what Stefan was saying about Klaus Dinger, in one sense that kind of endless groove also happens in clubs like the Berghain. It goes all weekend. Of course I’m not in there for forty-eight hours, but I will go one night, go back home and go to bed, and then go back for the Sunday session. And when you see that still going, it’s such an amazing thing. It’s this groove that just… doesn’t stop. That also informs our music, its what we’re trying to say. So it’s a combination of records we like, our interaction, and also experiences we’re directly having. Likewise what Stefan is experiencing in terms of his performances. In a way, Hauntologists is pretty much us, and us communicating together.

Traditional African music, in various forms, seems like a thread running through the mix you’ve done for us. What bearing does it have on Hauntologists’ own music?

Stefan: African tradition, that is something which I find very interesting. I listen to a lot of traditional African music and field recordings from the 50’s and 60’s from French or English ethnologists.

Jay: And your new Mapstation album is also informed by that.

Stefan: For my part, that is something that is totally on a fantasy level. I don’t try to create authentic African music. It’s just something that I imagine to be like African. I think that there’s Africa the continent, but there’s also the Africa of the mind. For instance, last year I was in Brussels and saw a super-lovely-looking stamp shop where nothing has changed since 1955 or something. I went in and spoke to the old man sitting in the shop and we had a little chat. And he said, “This shop, this is my Africa.” I found that very interesting — like Africa is wherever you want it to be. That can be an island you totally absorb yourself into, or a place where you connect to like traditional music of the fifties, or a place maybe also for the unknown and the unexpected. There’s a number of meanings for that Africa. That is my take on that Africa connection — something rather in the mind. It could have a connection to African music, but it’s not something that I could explain to somebody from the Ivory Coast. Maybe I could, or I would love to, but it’s nothing that needs to be authentic.

And how about the cover images for the Hauntologists EPs?

Jay: It’s all Stefan. He’s the visual designer. I’m rubbish at visuals.

Stefan: Nearby Brussels there’s a big museum called the Africa Museum — huge monstrous buildings where the Belgians show the history of colonialism and Leopold II. I gathered a few images from that and combined them for the first EP. And the second one is taken from a black-and-white photograph of two people dancing under a blanket. I cut these apart and took photocopies, and that was it.

Jay: I think what appealed to me about Stefan’s images was that I guess I always looked at Chicago house and Detroit techno as, I don’t know, some sort of fantastic genetic memory. It was African Americans with boxes creating these rhythms to make people dance. You can kinda hear Africa in the soul in a lot of that stuff. Combine that with our healthy interest in reggae, and Stefan’s knowledge about African music… I mean, after a while this stuff just seeps into you. And then when you start communicating as musicians, I think your influences come out.

Stefan: But there’s nothing that we want to put in front of the music, or nothing that should be seen as conceptual, like “African Detroit techno” or something like this. It’s just somehow in the room when we create music.

Jay: Yeah, the spirits enter the room.

That kind of connects to the name of the group. How did you decide on the name Hauntologists?

Stefan: That was Jay’s idea.

Jay: I think it was…. I guess three reasons. One: for years, even though Stefan and I knew each other, he didn’t know that I was doing Add Noise, because this is typical Hard Wax philosophy — you have all these ghosts making records. The other thing is that, yes, I’m aware of “hauntology” as a musical definition for certain sounds, and I like those sounds, but I’m also aware of Derrida’s original meaning. And, okay, I live in Kreuzberg now, but I used to live in East Berlin and, politically, in Berlin you can definitely see two histories — well, more. In terms of the West Berlin-East Berlin thing, in the East you’re surrounded by… I mean what was the quote? Marx said, “The spectre of communism haunts Europe…” One wonders, as time goes on. But it’s not a big political thing. I think it’s just me being playful, and trying to sort of put a finger on atmosphere and geography.

I’ve never heard the philosophy of techno anonymity described that way — this idea of “ghosts.”

Jay: I’m the new boy, in terms of releasing music through Hard Wax, but the fact is, it’s not a studied thing. It’s just that people are… the music. If the music is good, let the music speak for itself. Promotion can just be so silly, and I just think that it’s about releasing records, and letting people find the music. I think that’s kind of an attractive in a way. As a result, there’s a lot of ghosts at Hard Wax.

It allows these interactions like you two had, as well. Where Stefan, you were excited about this Add Noise record, and mentioned it to Jay without realizing that he’d made it. Which is quite a different conversation than if he handed you a record and said, “This is my new record, what do you think?”

Stefan: I find it interesting these days how people find music in general. Maybe that’s exceeding your question, but for instance I’ve found mixtapes or mix CDs of friends very helpful. I love to receive mixtapes or mix CDs to explore music that I wouldn’t necessarily find in the record shop. I’m not a big radio listener, but I like the idea of surprises, of someone introducing something new to me.

Jay: Stefan and I are both diggers. We like finding music. And I guess we wanted to release stuff in a way that people hopefully people found it as well. Sure, there are giant philosophies behind how music is marketed, because some people make lots of money for it. But I think that if you have a real interest in music, and you’re a musician, and if you’re releasing the stuff yourself, you present it in the way that you are. And there’s so much hype! No disrespect to certain dance labels, but some of that stuff, I mean, man, it’s so pushed at people, so hyped. I just think that if you’re on a search for personal authenticity in terms of what you’re doing, or exploring musical dialogues in a way that’s really from the heart, you don’t want to present it to people in a way that’s complete bullshit. You just kind of hope that they’ll find it. Hopefully that makes a refreshing change from the way a lot of other stuff is presented.

Stefan: I also quite liked the fact, the way Hard Wax distributed our records, especially with the first one, that nobody knew who was behind it. I found it very refreshing, because I’m pretty fed up with, whenever I do something new under a different name, there’s always the image of To Rococo Rot. Whatever you do, it’s “kraut rock” or “post rock.” I was really happy to find reviews of the first Hauntologists in the techno sections of some magazines. And as soon as it was revealed who was behind it, we got the first reviews, people saying, “That’s ‘kraut techno,’ what you’re doing.” That’s the way it goes. So I was quite happy that, for the first record at least, we were ghosts. That was very refreshing.

Jay: We’d just made a musical document, and wanted to let it stand on its own two feet, as it were. It got to a point, though, with the first Hauntologists record, that there was so much wild speculation in terms of who’d done it. That was really fun. And Hard Wax told nobody, I mean absolutely nobody. They really were super cool about that and didn’t leak it at all. But then, obviously through the course of Berlin, people start talking to you, you meet people, there’s other musicians… and eventually one day on Discogs, it showed up that Stefan and I had done the record.

And that didn’t come from you two?

Jay: That was a surprise. I had a friend email me that, “It seems your secret has been revealed.” At that point we said, “Okay, let’s take charge of this. Let’s try to control it and just say, ‘Here’s our stuff, and yes it’s us.’” Because what else could we do at that point?

Stefan: We’re talking about a very small circle of people anyway.

Jay: And we had fun. It’s nice to talk to you. It was lovely to be able to make Hauntologists tracks available on the web, for blogs — and we controlled that — and just see how the music spreads from there. I think we’ve just been very fortunate.

Do you feel that reception has changed, now that people know who you are and can dig through your back catalogs?

Stefan: No, not really. As I said, we’re talking about a very small circle of people. The reception hasn’t changed. It has, rather, changed because the second EP was different than the first one. And I’m very much looking forward to the reception of the forthcoming stuff, because we are looking forward to releasing our next EP this winter, and then there might be some more music coming up next year, maybe an album or something.

Jay: And we’ve also got some friends — people who we respect — who, when it was revealed, offered to do mixes for us. So we’re really excited about that too, because we do love club music — a particular type of club music, but…. So I don’t think it was a disaster when people found out who we were. And no, I don’t think perceptions changed at all. It’s actually quite nice being in a club and people coming up to you, and they tell you that they really like your record or something. I guess no man is an island! It’s nice to get feedback from your peers. So all’s well that ends well.

And you’ve already recorded a third EP?

Jay: Yeah, we’ve done the third EP. We’re in that kind of Hauntologists idea of “versioning.” We have two distinctly different tracks, which Stefan mixed in Düsseldorf. We do the recordings in Berlin, and then Stefan takes them back to Düsseldorf to do the final mixes. And Stefan had just two fabulous tracks that I passed on to… I’d love to tell you who it is, but you will hopefully be pleased when the record comes out. Basically two producers that we respect very much doing versions for us. So rather than Hauntologists versioning Hauntologists, we’ve got two tracks and then there will be two versions by other artists. It’s cool.

Did you approach this session any differently?

Stefan: No, that is also what we did for the first and the second EP. We record the sessions here at Jay’s place, and then I take the original tracks to my studio and…

Jay: It’s kind of like this is Channel One, and he’s King Tubby…. Sly and Robbie work here and…

Stefan: Right, I take it to the White Ark in Düsseldorf! For the moment, that seems to be quite a good way, but we might change it next year when we work on other stuff. We will see. The recording sessions, in the way that we did them, were not radically different. But I think, in the way the music came out, it was a different atmosphere, but it’s quite difficult to put that into words.

Jay: The spine of it, or the skeletal makeup, is definitely clubbier, if I can say that. The tempo’s up a bit, the beats are a bit tougher, the bass is there. This is our perception. To people who hear Hauntologists, it’ll perhaps represent a subtle change of sound, a kind of sharpening of the fact that we also like stuff for the dance floor. I hate using this expression, “the club record,” but let’s just say that our interests are more on grooves and beats on this one, where the second EP was more…

Stefan: …to show some other possibilities with what’s possible with that array or constellation of instruments and ideas. But yeah, we look forward to hearing your reaction on the new material.

You have a lot coming out this winter, between the Cheap & Deep, and Mapstation, and then this new Hauntologists.

Jay: The Cheap & Deep stuff, that was a nice surprise. I’d done Add Noise for so many years, and I was always kind of “faceless techno bollocks,” to use an old techno expression. I wanted to find maybe a language that was more “me now.” And also, with Hauntologists and the interaction with Stefan, I felt I found myself in that. With Cheap & Deep, I’m very interested in club music. Like on the mix that we gave you guys, you can definitely see Stefan and my interaction musically. When I was putting it together, Stefan sent me a selection of records that he wanted to include. And we talked a great deal about it. I mean, I was really glad you guys asked us to do it because, in a way, I kind of saw our personalities interacting. It was just so funny, because it was like a Jay track, a Stefan track, a Jay track, a Stefan track, and when I was done with the mix, I was kind of like, “Fuck, this works!”

Stefan: When I got to hear Jay’s mix, I thought, “That’s what our album could sound like,” almost like a blueprint for different levels of music. So that you mix maybe experimental tracks with a straight bass drum, and bring all these levels together in a very natural-sounding way that doesn’t sound like “multi-media,” but one unit.

Download: LWE Podcast 37: Hauntologists (71:10)

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