[Hessle Audio]

David Kennedy chose to end 2010 in the same way he ended in 2009 — but who could blame him, it’s a hell of a trick. Sneaking out a twelve on his own Hessle Audio label under his Pearson Sound alias wasn’t so easy this time, however, because after the year he had all eyes were fixated on the man otherwise known as Ramadanman. The 2009 release was the funky-flecked PLSN/Wad one-two punch, precision percussive experiments that laid the blueprint for the unbroken ground Kennedy would unceremoniously violate over the course of 2010. These two Pearson Sound tracks, however, couldn’t be more different than their predecessors. What are they? Well, you tell me. They’re marginally dubstep tempo (at 135 beats per minute, the lowest acceptable reaches of the genre), but they sound much closer to the weirdest moments on his self-titled EP or most recently, his house remix of Jamie Woon’s “Night Air.”

“Blue Eyes” is a patience-tester with mucky clouds of bass impeding the path of a snare/hat combo that sounds like a toy marching band. All the while rapid arpeggios spiral out of the center like an excitable pinball machine, until they’re pushed away by an organ riff that completely sends the track off balance. If it sounds a bit confusing, that’s because it is. The track resumes its march before being interrupted the same way once again; it may be predictable, but it’s nowhere near conventional. “Blanked,” however, is perhaps the ultimate David Kennedy production. It drops quick hats, toms and snares in a hesitant hot-potato shuffle, dodging those distinctive bass drops that congeal as balls of low-end frequencies, detonating when they hit the ground into an impressively physical inaudible range — even on the crappiest of systems. The song’s mercurial, ruthlessly chopped vocal center rolls and rotates in place, coaxing out a blinding synth breakdown that completely overwhelms the track: think the breakdown in “Work Them,” only much bigger. Even better, the self-consciously elegant motif carries with it intensive and punishing swathes of sub-bass, providing a visceral underbelly to the track’s otherwise light-handed touch. As if depleted from such an exertion, the track pitters its way into exhaustion, to the point where even those squelchy bass drops are all dissipating high end. Rumor has it Pearson Sound is the preferred alias for Kennedy, who will be phasing out the Ramadanman name. If it means more tracks like these, it won’t matter what name is on the sleeve.

[Idle Hands]

Even with the overarching dominance of his new electro-cum-footwork alias Addison Groove, Tony Williams still has time for smooth, metallic dubstep under his original name. How old Lost Prophet/Chasing Dragons are remains unknown but irrelevant, because they feel beautifully timeless in a way that’s quickly becoming a signature of the Bristol-based Idle Hands imprint. There’s a glazed-over, aged quality to them, but something undeniably propulsive: one eye half-open towards the future in the ethereal and sublime manner that’s been driving the hardcore continuum since the early 90′s. As such, Headhunter’s tracks don’t sound much like current dubstep (whatever that sounds like), nor do they fit in with his previous output in structure or feel. Rather than focusing on the segmented “drop” structure of dubstep they prefer a sustained buildup more akin to house music.

“Lost Prophet” and “Chasing Dragons” are both lengthy dubstep-tempo workouts, charging out of the gate and maintaining an impressive forward trajectory so smoothly they barely seem to touch the ground. In fact, a few minutes into “Lost Prophet” it lifts off completely, melting midair into soaring sustained chords that seem to radiate from the track’s backdrop like bolts of gorgeous sunlight. It’s a moment that’s distractingly gorgeous, triumphant and undeniably anthemic: in short, devastating to a rave. “Chasing Dragons” plays the slightly downtrodden downer to the peaktime hedonism of “Lost Prophet,” its beat more compressed, low to the ground, skipping where its predecessor glides. It subsists on that same tapestry of gummy sustained chords, but they hover and hold the track down rather than pull it up into the blissful transcendence of “Lost Prophet.” These are two sides of a coin, different moods built from the same elements. Perhaps most impressive is how Headhunter has so perfectly infused the house influences he’s been gobbling up lately into something that still feels decidedly dubstep in a world where things that are decidedly dubstep are dangerously close to extinct.

[Tiny Sticks Records]

If “Giorgio Carpenter” and “Television Train” told us anything about Cage & Aviary, it’s that Jamie Paton and Nigel Hoyle are good listeners. Heavily referential, both tracks relied on in one sense — and racked up in another — some serious musical credit, while somehow managing to skip the bill when it came time to pay the price for the goods. There’s something cool as cucumber about their synthetic style and the slow developmental arc of their tracks. They take ample time to celebrate their collective and contrasting influences (i.e. disco, Italo, post-punk, white-boy funk, indie rock, new wave, all the way up to early Chicago and acid house) without sounding derivative, predictable, or feeling the need to rush headlong into blatantly new territory.

Since we last checked in with C&A, the duo has been slyly making all the right moves. Using a combination of Dissident cred and DFA exposure, they’ve been slowly building their case through featured podcasts (e.g. on Allez Allez, Anthem, DJ History, and Dummy), an unfolding six-part self-solicited remix series on their own The Walls Have Ears label, and releases on Astro Lab and Tiny Sticks. Their most recent flight of fancy, Beat N Path, finds them on top of their form, while breezily turning another corner towards a more succinct house sound.

The A-side version of the title track seems to embody several aspects of the duo’s preferred musical continuum: the decade long post-Comiskey club music cluster-fuck called the 1980s. Beginning with some shoe-gazed funk guitar, the track nonchalantly whistles its way into a comfortable, if jaded, groove that willfully ambles along into an acid-washed breakdown. Things get a bit weird for a minute or two but come back around in time and without too much scandal. The cycle repeats as if to show how matter-of-factly one could walk back and forth twice from opposite corners of the Paradise Garage in under eight minutes. “Low Noise” strikes a semi-anguished robo-tone that quietly broods along the alleys of your mind, until some perky percussion lifts the computer blue mood into a stuttering semi-clear resolution. For all that, the restricted economy of its pace and arrangement make it a bit of a rough diamond that probably won’t catch as many ears as it should.

The exact opposite holds for Brennan Green’s flipside remix of the title track. Banging the original up a few notches (and bpms), Green wastes no time taking full advantage of his 303 in developing the track’s acidic elements. Flat like the makeshift plywood walls at a warehouse party, the track remains structurally consistent — only once dangling Hoyle’s whimsical hook over the dance floor — but is made up of millions of tiny variations. It sounds like an obvious tipping point to the night: you realize you’re either having the time of your life or you’re moments away from losing it completely. Could be the same thing, really. As the title suggests, looking for an obvious progressive bend to this release misses the point entirely. It’s often easy to become fixated with the emergence or perfection of a certain genre in a certain year in a certain place — and there is the temptation to look for similarly fortuitous circumstances on the horizon — but if anything, Cage & Aviary suggest it can be just as interesting reading at length between the genre lines.

[Bear Funk]

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 (à 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.

Taking into account his self-described productive methodology — which relies less on inspiration and more on diligence and studio serendipity — it’s hard to read too much of a conceptual arc into Horror Disco, though his understanding of the genre and how it should play out in strictly musical form is deviously lethal. If anything, the “concept” here is a collection of formal and stylistic techniques developed to give rise to visceral reaction, which could be loosely considered the basis of horror — and dance music — in general. While the developments of horror as a genre have been more effectively visual or narrative, with music serving at best an atmospheric role, Bottin challenges dancers to follow his cues and provide themselves with the appropriately gruesome visual/visceral accompaniment. In the campy context generally set by Italo, the state of mind required to play Bottin’s game is a strange mixture of adult humor and childhood horror. And as the dance floor is a space of (depending on how seriously you take it) “childish” abandon, the tongue-in-cheeky horror Bottin’s pushing takes aim at freakin’ the floor, not exactly freakin’ you out.

Careful listening uncloaks many of the distorted conventions and dimensions that make up Italo-horror according to Bottin. To begin with, erratic modulation is inherently frightening, at higher frequencies mimicking unsteady heartbeats and panicked breathing, while at lower frequencies causing the floor to fall out like rotten wood beneath dancers’ feet. Next, camp vocals on unsettling subjects, which make several appearances in Horror Disco, most notably in “Disco for the Devil,” which finds Douglas Meakin (Easy Going, Crazy Gang) doing his best rip on Vincent Price, and “Bianca,” which takes the cake camp-wise. Third, both triplets and off-beat rhythms are a terrifying way to build tension in any register, and when they accompany staircase pads and leads that rise and fall, twist and turn sour, the effect is unmistakably unsettling as the title-track demonstrate. In fact, all the sounds in Bottin’s repertoire seem to suffer under their own troubled psychological weight, creaking and cracking at random. Supported by the unrelenting tautness of a zombie funk rhythm section (Black Devilry clearly implied on “Venezia Violenta” and “Roger Bacon”), Horror Disco moves briskly from start to finish, albeit on limbs occasionally prone to decay or fall off completely. Exactly how well this might work on the floor is up to the DJ, the set, and the scene. But when you consider that DJing is primarily about manipulating the mood of the room, having this unexpected, horrific flavor up your sleeve is an intriguing idea. And who knows, on the right dance floor one of these tracks might freak you out like peeled grapes in the dark.

[Prime Numbers]

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 break the bank, 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.

Making his introductions with the 2004 release “Miles Away,” in collaboration with Sutherland and Firecracker fire marshal Lindsay Todd, Moore began his exploration of the soulful sounds and sides of isolation, a theme taken further with “Lost Experiment” and “R.I.P.” His flipside contribution “Fate” offered a bouncier consecration of faith and community, themes that resurfaced in “What’s Up with the Underground?” and “Barely Eagle” (another solid collaboration with Todd). System is a more comprehensive examination and formal adaptation of these not so contradictory themes, which draws willfully and skillfully from Moore’s influences. It makes a solid initiation and representation of the LP format on Prime Numbers.

Organized into stylistic and thematic pairs, System starts with the appropriate organic/synthetic tension of “Carbon Units” and “Robot Parade.” In clear homage to the sci-fi fascinations of both Kraftwerk and 313 techno, these tracks facetiously brood and menace with industrial compulsion. More about contextualization than movement, they only hint at what’s to come later. “Tears” and “Falling” introduce Moore’s heartbroken boogieman production persona. Featuring another convincing vocal performance from “Spaghetti Circus” ringmaster Reggie Watts (who even has the courtesy to lower his register while delighting with some fast-mo French flow), “Tears” sports a neck bender of a bass line over which Watts bawls, “I’ve got so much in the way of tears.” If the impulse to boogie wasn’t so clearly the order of the day, we might have time to feel more for him. On top of that, it’s not all tears falling from cloudy skies, as the end of the song makes clear: “Everybody/ Sunshine!” “Falling” seems as bleak and incongruous as a second-class ticket on the Trans-Dystopia Express, until it chugs up to the halfway point, and we realize we’re not taking the boogie train to oblivion, but rather “falling in love.”

Stepping off somewhere between loveless and lost, Moore does what any of us would: head straight for the refrigerator. The bitter, but hearty “Pumpernickel” is a call to “pledge allegiance to the groove,” finding peace of mind in music, but its “Fudge Boogie” that puts the proof in the pudding. With Sutherland’s fingers sticky on the keys, its saucy vocals offer a uniquely pragmatic bit of inspirational prose: “Yes, I need you baby, and I get what I want / If I don’t get it, it’s because I don’t want it.” Marching on a now satiated stomach, the LP heads from its origins somewhere in or around the Detroit metro area to “Chicago,” where things are moving at a faster pace. Here, the robotic menace is less obvious, but there’s certainly something charging up from under the surface of that big, inner-city synth solo (in all likelihood, a replicant recording from the vaults of the Tyrell Corporation’s Midwestern branch office). This one should blow its fair share of minds in coming months, that is, if its big brother “Electricity” leaves any on the dance floor. Sparing no expense in hiring the Peech Boy Community Clap Choir, Moore has here birthed a thoroughbred banger, which Wolstencroft admits gave him shivers upon first hearing. Cresting the peak at just the right moment, we move down into dubbier valleys and dewier pastures. Reminiscent of “Lost Experiment” and Intrusion’s “Miles Away” dubs, “Clearing the System” and “Nectarine” offer an appropriately meditative coda, peaking in their own right by other means altogether. If Moore has taken his time working with the material for System (many of these tracks first surfaced over a year ago), Prime Numbers can hardly fault him when the results are this precise.

The name of Social Disco Club’s monthly party in Porto, Portugal is “Are You Re-Edit?” which up to now has been an apt description of Humberto Matias’s dance floor MO. On the SDC blog, Matias has been exploring the history and consequences of disco and posting choice and cheeky vinyl-rips and re-edits since 2007. His wholehearted enthusiasm (even for the English language) has made the SDC a popular watering hole on the disco blog circuit and eventually given him the opportunity to reach a vinyl audience last year with releases on Spanish label OCSID Music and Belgian label Mindless Boogie. While “The Way You Move” shows Matias trying his hand at original production with X-Wife band member and fellow Porto native Rui Maia, it clearly reflects a re-edit sensibility with some left of center vocal sampling and a restrained, indulging pace that maintains both tension and release.

Bear Funk 040 puts “The Way You Move” under the razorblades of two lauded re-editors, with Greg Wilson applying his Midas Touch to the A-side and diskJokke twisting the B-side around his own sound. While Wilson’s edit never strays too far from the original, something about his shrewd re-composition makes it the prime cut on the release. From the opening drag, we’re left at a loss as to whether this track is building up or coming down. This tension is not absent in the original mix, but Wilson knows how to tease it to tears so effectively that you can’t say for sure if the vinyl’s about to catch fire or covered in frost. On the flip side, diskJokke applies a thick coat of his own sonic varnish to some of the track’s key elements, adding some grit and grain. Snapping the smooth surface of “The Way You Move” like it was a dirty rubber band, he shoots this groove to the ceiling and watches it fall. With both edits successfully drawing on the original, the tables are turned: this re-editor just got re-edited. And with a string of upcoming releases scheduled on labels like Disco Deviance, Hands of Time, Strut, and Permanent Vacation, it might be time to put a revolving door on the Social Disco Club.

On July 12, 1979, during the intermission of a doubleheader between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers, rock radio DJ Steve Dahl hosted an event called Disco Demolition Derby at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Amidst cries of “disco sucks!” a seething army of Middle America, fifty thousand strong, participated in the destruction of disco records, culminating in a near-riot and prompting the appearance of police on horseback. Though the myopic, racist, homophobic nature of such an event should be glaringly obvious, the likes of Dahl have had a lasting effect on popular conceptions of dance music, and particularly of disco. Since then, the efforts of those who produce and play disco are often branded with the faddish tag, “revival,” invoking the “day disco died” as an actual fact and a possible recurrence.

For Eric Duncan and Olivier Spencer of Still Going, the rumors of disco’s demise seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Since about the mid-point of this decade, with projects like Rub N Tug and Dr. Dunks for Eric and Manthraxx, Mr. Negative, and House of House for Olivier, the duo have never ceased to fly a disco flag. When they came together in 2007 for “Still Going Theme” on DFA, Duncan and Spencer prepared a disco-licious platter whose house sensibilities made it as versatile, accessible, and contemporary as any track of that year. Teaming up with comedic vocalist Reggie Watts for “Spaghetti Circus/Untitled Love” brings a welcome new addition to the Still Going formula and offers a bit more insight into the mentalities driving the music. “Spaghetti Circus” rides an impressive arcing trajectory with Watts’ vocals showcased, soaring over a bound up groove teased by “Theme” style piano stabs, complete with enough guitar noodling to knock Steve Dahl on his ass. Watts assures us “everything’s gonna be all right tonight” as the groove smooths out and the track’s intensity gives way to spaciousness. B-side “Untitled Love” erects a velvety musical bed for Watts’ sly pillow talk. His crooning ruminations on the future, love, and the future-love advise that we “get ready for the future-love.” Agreed.

With Still Going’s long-awaited second release appearing on the 30th anniversary of the Comiskey Park riot, the stakes are high for disco. Is this “revival” destined to meet the same fate as its inspiration, perhaps taking an even kitschier tumble? Not with Still Going here to represent. Even before the summer of ’79, “disco” had begun to signify something quite different from what it meant to the loft-dancers of downtown New York. Its underground spirit was soon taken up by house and techno, while the music industry’s facade was held up for abuse. What today’s disco comes down to is less the return of some long forgotten musical form or style and more a simple willingness to call the whole thing disco again. After all, the tracks are still groovy, the energy is still ecstatic, and the message is still love.