There’s something about the name Greg Wilson that tends to inspire awe in even the most hardened of musos: His legendary turns DJing and creating re-edits from reel to reel tapes through to spreading the sounds of electro-funk throughout Manchester via his 1983 residency at The Haçienda. That’s combined with his abandonment of DJing at his pinnacle to concentrate on producing the likes of the once timely Ruthless Rap Assassins and Yello. As one would expect, he made a rather loud return to the fray in early ’00s during the heady days of nu-disco, dropping the killer LP, Credit to The Edit, on Tirk. Consisting of hand cut edits a la 1983, one saw a number of tracks which harked back to the ’70s and ’80s. Cuts such as Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You,” “I Can’t Turn The Boogie Loose” by the Controllers and “Rockers Revenge” all made an appearance, complete with the excellent, seams ‘n all cuts and bounces. The LP was such as classic that after speaking to one of the Tirk chaps, apparently it’s still shifting units today. CTTE 2, however, is something of a different breed — as if Wilson’s been fully updated with the contemporary technology and his forays back onto the dance floor have provided him with some new inspiration.
album
BBH: Various Artists, Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave
There have been plenty of Detroit techno compilations over the years; True People would probably rate as my favorite for its sheer comprehensiveness and myriad pieces of vinyl, though its spot at number one has often been contested in my mind by this compilation on Astralwerks which came out the same year in 1996. Packed with ten tracks of exclusive material from the creme of Detroit’s third wave of techno producers, it showcases their many different sides, from deep and hypnotic through to raw, jacking soul and clinical, electro funk. Though many of the producers on the album were familiar to me already, there were others like Ectomorph, Will Web, and Mode Selector I was discovering for the first time. Throughout it all can be heard strains from their mentors mixed in with the new directions in which these younger guns were taking the music.
Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Frictionalism 1994-2009
When reviewing Anthony “Shake” Shakir’s first release in four years last April, I quoted an interview in which Shakir described himself as “the forgotten man of techno.” I wonder how he feels about that statement now. The record reviewed, “Levitate Venice” ended up in any year-end list worth reading (including LWE’s), and was widely played and supported by artists and DJs from across the electronic music world, from Ben UFO to Ben Klock. Following up this renewal of interest in Shake’s work, and perhaps conscious of the inflated prices his music was beginning to fetch on the second-hard market, comes this full-fat retrospective from the good folk at Rush Hour. In the past, the Dutch label have given the anthology treatment to Rick Wade, Daniel Wang and Kenny Larkin amongst others, but never before in such exhaustive fashion.
Lerosa, Dual Nature
Releasing a debut album on a TDK cassette only format limited to just 100 copies seems like a peculiar career move for an ascending electronic artist. And for someone like Lerosa, collaborating with Further for the release is even more puzzling. Since 2005, Lerosa aka Leopoldo Rosa has established himself with a string of critical 12″s that could be declared loosely as house, but have incorporated stylistic markers that span from acid and techno to jazz and electro. Stamped with a quirky identity, Rosa’s productions may nominally fit the deep house billing their often filed under but there’s much more hinting at expression. On the other hand, the newly formed Further label has established itself with digital-only releases that are aimed at progressive house and the trance end of techno audiences. In other words, adding Lerosa to the roster stands out like a sore thumb. But according to Rosa, the release and format was a deliberate move by the label owner to allow for more freedom to the artist, less financial risk by label while still producing a tangible object, which Dual Nature accomplishes.
Martyn, Fabric 50
We all know about the current state of mix CDs. Fabric, however, stands strong in the face of adversity with milestone release number 50. Fabric has cemented its position as one of the mix CD series of all time, not only for its longevity but for containing classics like editions 13 (Michael Mayer), 36 (Ricardo Villalobos) and 39 (Robert Hood), just to name a few. How the London club would celebrate release number 50 was a source of much speculation, and their choice of Martyn was both an inspired and daring one. Shaking up the rigid 4/4 that has defined pretty much every Fabric CD, Martyn’s dubstep sensibilities and love for techno breathe fresh air into a series that has struggled to maintain its cutting edge cachet.
BBH: Silent Phase, The Theory of Silent Phase
Coming through at the end of the second wave of Detroit producers, Stacey Pullen fell under the direct tutelage of Derrick May, who not only mentored the young producer in capturing the essence of his sound but also gave him a taste of life as a traveling DJ. In the early 90’s, Pullen decamped with May to Amsterdam and ended up staying a year with the Detroit maverick, playing their native techno to hordes of appreciative Europeans. May had previously signed Pullen’s “Ritual Beating System” under the Bango alias to his Transmat offshoot, Fragile. Buoyed by the critical acclaim it met, he was offered a deal by R&S records while in Belgium to record a full length album which would become The Theory of Silent Phase under the Silent Phase sobriquet. With publishing duties falling between R&S and Transmat, Pullen claims that he never got the album to sound quite as he wanted it to due to analogue copies being shuttled back and forth across the globe for mastering, though there is no denying that contained within is the music of a truly inspired and gifted musician.
Bottin, Horror Disco
As if names and nationalities really meant something, Italian producer William (Guglielmo) Bottin’s Horror Disco erects a monolithic mass of exceptionally crafted and intricate Italo-disco that might not send you shrieking into the night, but most certainly horrifies — in some sense of the word. While its obvious historical lineage begins with the oft-intertwined horror movies and disco of late-70s Italy (Ã la Claudio Simonetti), the conception of Horror Disco was largely the result of a chance encounter with a vintage Italian-made Farfisa Syntorchestra synthesizer that resulted in the title-track and then served as a blueprint for the work as a whole. Essentially a collection of variations, the album’s fourteen tracks, each around five or six minutes long, thematically bring Bottin’s horrific vision to light. It is at times groovy like a Munich Machine, campy like the B-list, and lurid like a Dario Argento film, but never forced, inane, or boring. Horror might be a genre better filmed or written, but with Bottin’s sound it reveals striking dance floor potential.
2562, Unbalance
Just a year after releasing his debut album, Aerial, Dave Huismans is back for more with his sophomore long-player under the 2562 moniker, Unbalance. So far the the critical consensus has been that Aerial was overcast and perhaps a bit brooding while Unbalance is chipper and full of color, but those looking for a smile should head elsewhere. Indeed, Unbalance does find Huismans allowing the most color yet into his steely palate, but more than any other dubstep album this year it demands you sit down and listen; there will be time for dancing later. An appropriate title as any, Huismans’ beats are rough and shattered, tipping every which way while defeated synths descend in their own time.
Cio D’or, Die Faser
Cio D’or is intricately tied to a different response to the Berlin minimal that, for better or worse, has been the previous decade’s most powerful force in shaping electronic dance music. Her music is a lucid exploration of the gaps between Saturday night minds and Sunday morning bodies, and Die Faser is the culmination of that trend to date. It is also a rare full length from a motley international crew who are reshaping attitudes about the relationship of foreboding sonic aesthetics and pleasure, and pointing out, to those of us who might have missed them before, the horizons of the challenging and rewarding style that I would rather call anything else but “headfuck techno.”
Various Artists, And Suddenly It’s Morning
“Smallville ist nicht Dial.” A De:Bug review of an early Smallville release (DJ Swap’s superb “The Walk”) made this clear, but until last year, many people still persisted in treating it as a mere sub-label of the more established Hamburg imprint. Of course, this is understandable, given Peter Kersten (Lawrence/Sten)’s involvement in both, not to mention the similar influences and palettes. Both have grown out of the Hamburg scene, share a reverence for Afro-American music, and have a sophisticated yet melancholy European air, but this past year has seen Smallville come gloriously out of Dial’s shadow. Where Dial releases music as much for the couch or even concert hall as the club, Smallville is more firmly dance floor-orientated. Still, as this CD compilation And Suddenly It’s Morning proves, their music is equally at home, well, at home.
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.
Cassy, Simply Devotion
When Cassy Britton released the inaugural Panorama Bar mix back in 2006, her selection preempted attempts to blur the boundaries between deep house and minimalism. However, as her sets so fluently attest, the devil really is in the detail. The prevailing flavour on Panorama Bar 01, after all, was a tendency to fuse timeless reduced techno — Ø, DBX, Baby Ford — with the warm tones of Rick Wade, D5 and Redshape, not a convoluted combination of one-dimensional tinny mnml and coldly rigid interpretations of deep house. Given her previous form, it’s no surprise that she employs a judiciously sharp approach to track selection for Simply Devotion, her mix CD for Cocoon Recordings. This time however, it seems Cassy has been caught in the house headwinds.
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.
Demdike Stare, Symbiosis
Brrr, did anyone else just feel the temperature drop a few degrees? Autumn is on the way and the days are getting shorter, but there’s no doubt Symbiosis adds to the gloomier atmosphere. A collaboration between Miles Whittaker (aka MLZ and one half of Pendle Coven) and Sean Canty, Demdike Stare draws on a range of influences to create a subdued yet menacing collection of mood music. There’s an underlying sense of dread audible here, with Whittaker’s love of sampling obscure music — something Canty probably enjoys too — giving Symbiosis a familiar yet eerie feeling. The fact that the project’s name, like Pendle Coven, references witchcraft and the supernatural, and is accompanied by album artwork featuring skulls, white roses and a lone eye suspended under a woman’s wig while an arm holds what looks like either a small wand or a big needle, only adds to the occultish theme.
Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras, Catholic
To Italo disco and Hi-NRG heads, Patrick Cowley will always be revered for his definitive remixes of “I Feel Love” and CBS favorite “Hills of Kathmandu,” as well as megahits such as “Menergy” or Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Despite this cult status, Patrick Cowley’s music hasn’t received the critical acclaim afforded to a certain other disco auteur. The reasons for this are quite apparent; while Cowley and Arthur Russell’s back stories are superficially similar (experimental backgrounds, disco and Larry Levan, tragically young AIDS victims), their music is not. Cowley’s music seems too epic, too gay, too flamboyant, or even too “disco” for hipster appropriation; I mean, you’ve seen your uncle dance to “Do You Wanna Funk” at a wedding, right? All that may be set to change now that the good people at Macro have unearthed Cowley’s incredible, late ’70s new wave project, Catholic, made with Indoor Life singer Jorge Socarras.
Linkwood, System
Prime Numbers has surfaced from the wading pool of deep house labels at a remarkable rate. Considering the apparent nonchalance of Prime No. 1 David Wolstencroft (best known as Trus’me), the consistency and quality of PN’s catalog is almost surprising. Developing an identifiable sound around a close-knit and capable collection of producers in just a few years requires equal amounts of luck, astute determination, and obviously, trust. Both eerie and warm, indivisible and expansive, reflective and current, the Prime Numbers sound boogies down like tears in rain. Prime producers like Reggie Dokes (owner of Detroit’s Psychostasia Recordings), Linkwood (Nick Moore), and Fudge Fingas (Gavin Sutherland) share Wolstencroft’s ethos to the point of near interchangeability (as evinced by the mixed disc of last years PN comp), while maintaining fresh takes on the sound. But with only bits and pieces thus far (albeit bright and poignant ones), and with Trus’me’s second album In the Red yet to see the light of day, it’s still to be seen how this collective drive should play out in greater detail. With System, Moore has slow-brewed just such a model, while further rendering his thematic preoccupations and once again proving his consummate production style.
Juju & Jordash, Juju & Jordash LP
It’s widely known that pulling off a dance music full length is a difficult proposition. The cards are inherently stacked against a genre that is dictated by the quick fix that fits neatly in the mix. Juju & Jordash’s music, however, seems to be tailor made for the album format. Their productions are based ostensibly in the house/techno arena but the Amsterdam-based duo’s background playing in jazz bands and predilection for several other genres heavily inform the outcome. Live instrumentation gets mixed with keyboards, laptop and psychotropic effects resulting in unpredictable variations. In other words, what passes for a Juju & Jordash house track nary sounds like what falls under the Beatport house charts. You only have to listen to one of their Off Minor radio shows to get a feel for what goes into their own blender and comes out in a refreshingly new shape.
Audision, Surface To Surface
Among the Vince Watsons and Arne Weinbergs that slot comfortably into the “Neo-Detroit” section on the Hardwax website, Audision are probably one of the less well known. “Gamma Limit,” “Vanish” and their exceptional, bass-heavy remix of Tensnake’s “Around The House” are all minor classics in their hometown of Hamburg, but the pair have struggled for recognition elsewhere. This may be because they wear their influences so shamelessly on their sleeves. Why buy the copy when the original is easily available? Even their press blurb admits Niko Tzoukmanis and Tobias Schmid bonded over a shared love of Basic Channel and classic Detroit techno, inspirations that are frequently all too apparent on debut album Surface To Surface.
Vladislav Delay, Tummaa
When we last left Sasu Ripatti he was serving as the all-important drummer in Moritz von Oswald’s trio of electronic-jazz explorers. Before that he was serving up another slice of experimental-techno-poetry-pop with partner AGF in the form of their debut album, Symptoms. And in late 2008 we received Luomo’s Convivial, his fifth album which was noteworthy for its numerous collaborators and vocalists. See a trend? The man I’ve always pictured a loner, producing during cold, lonely winter nights, has proven to be quite the collaborator. Luckily for us, this has proven to be a welcome development. Not only is his name popping up more often than ever, but Mr. Ripatti’s projects have evolved and new ones have been born, and old standby Vladislav Delay, his main and perhaps most critically acclaimed identity, has not been spared. In a first, the new Vladislav Delay album is partially the work of a trio: Ripatti, Lucio Caprece on clarinet and saxophone, and Craig Anderson on the Rhodes. The final product, however, is all the doing of Ripatti, who manipulated and rearranged recordings of Caprece and Armstrong as the basis for Tummaa.