You’ll read a lot about how house music and in particular vocal tracks, lift you up, carry you along with a feeling, make you moist around the tear ducts. For me, most of that carries about as much weight as hearing kids in California harp on about P.L.U.R. back in the mid 90’s while they sucked on pacifiers and sported gargantuan, street sweeping baggy jeans. But I have to be honest that there are a select few vocal house tunes that can, to this day, send a shiver up my spine and have me dabbing at the corners of my eyes. Roland Clark’s South Street Player alias only graced two releases, but throughout his entire career that has spanned over twenty years this Strictly Rhythm release under that name is undoubtedly the highlight.
big black headphones
BBH: Circuit Breaker, The End (1991-1996)
February 17, 2010 – 11:01 AM
He may be a media-savvy new technology evangelist these days, but back in the mid 90’s Richie Hawtin was the kind of sketchily dark character you would think twice about leaving your kids with. The Canadian producer was known during that period for the gloriously haunting ambient techno of FUSE — which occasionally and unforgettably on “Substance Abuse” veered into the kind of deranged acid that this installment of BBH focuses on — and the complex poly-rhythms and LSD-referencing menace of his Plastikman project. Yet despite the rumors of acid tabs embossed onto copies of his debut Plastikman album, Sheet One, there was a far more belligerent side to his character: Circuit Breaker. This double pack, released in 1996, charts the laying to rest of the Probe Records sub-label, an outlet that had allowed Hawtin to explore this grungier, edgier identity.
BBH: V/A, Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave
January 27, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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.
BBH: Silent Phase, The Theory of Silent Phase
January 6, 2010 – 11:01 AM
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.
BBH: Major Problems, The Effects Can Last Forever
November 25, 2009 – 11:01 AM
There’s been a lot of talk on LWE recently about people stealing or, uh, creatively sampling other artists’ work. Melodic themes (Rodriguez Jr.) and even whole tracks (Joe Louis) being appropriated without due credit to the originators seems to equal pissed off producers and fans alike. So how would you feel if one of your favorite records of all time (and a worldwide hit and bona fide classic to boot) had its bass line jacked wholesale without so much as a “by your leave”? This is the situation I was faced with a few weeks back. Having popped into one of London’s Music and Video Exchanges, done my usual trawl of the racks, and come out delighted with a Nu Groove record for a mere £2, I put the needle to the wax of Major Problem’s “The Effects Can Last Forever.” After thirty seconds of fuzzy beats and John Lennon intoning, “take this, brother, may it serve you well”, the familiar dungh-dungh-dungh-durr-dungh of “No Way Back” comes crashing through. Did I feel ripped off at Adonis being ripped off?
BBH: All, Alltag 1-4
November 11, 2009 – 10:01 AM
Wolfgang Voigt has rushed back in the spotlight recently, in part thanks to the release of the beautiful Nah Und Fern box set collecting his four ambient/classical Gas albums, as well as a reissue of the minimal techno inventing/perfecting Studio 1 CD on Profan. Gas and Studio 1 have always been, with Mike Ink, Voigt’s most well known pseudonyms, but one must remember this is a man with 33 monikers other than his own listed on Discogs (counting only his solo projects). It’s with that in mind that I delve in the past to unearth one of Wolfgang’s hidden gems, All’s “Alltag 1-4″ on his own Kompakt.
BBH: Pelon, No Stunts
October 28, 2009 – 10:01 AM
When Basic Channel ceased its transmissions and gave way to Chain Reaction, the label’s fans were introduced to further faceless techno by a new wave of producers. While Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald used the former label as a breeding ground for their own Basic Channel tracks, Chain Reaction was set up for other artists as the pair digressed towards their own new projects. Chain Reaction threw up a fresh wave of unknown dub techno producers, and while some of those went on to become rather prolific, one of the best releases on the label marked the only release for its author. Henner Dondorf, better known as Pelon has since gone on to master a number of releases for Stephan Mathieu, but “No Stunts” on Chain Reaction is his only contribution to the canon of dub techno we have so far.
BBH: Joe Louis, Back To The Beginning
October 14, 2009 – 10:01 AM
When I bought this 12″ back in 1996, I had no reason to believe it was anything other than a release by early Chicago house producer Joe Lewis. He had already released under that surname variation on his own Target label a decade earlier and had accumulated three releases on Relief. What I didn’t know was that Lewis had come into possession of these four tracks by way of a trip to the UK, during which Jaime Read gave him two DATs of music with the understanding they would be handed to Relief on his behalf. The truth of which was never widely recognized, allowing further releases of more of that music on Basement 282 and a retrospective album on Peace Frog years later. I had heard rumors of this fact for several years but never got full confirmation until researching for this review. In addition to a thorough telling of its history on Discogs, Read has made his regrets and frustration known publicly: “I gave Joe Lewis my DATs when I was young and naïve, so there is an expensive lesson learnt. Shame there’s no music journos with any bollocks.” But if you can put this release’s ignominious underbelly aside, there is music contained within that deserves celebrating.
BBH: Steve Bicknell, Lost Recordings Number 1: Why? & For Whom?
September 30, 2009 – 10:01 AM
It was 1996. The UK’s techno scene was reaching the tail end of its “golden” period. By 1998, the landscape would have changed irrevocably, with the one-note loop dullards dominating, flooding the scene with cheap knock-offs of Purposemaker’s dynamism. However, just as the lights started to fade, Steve Bicknell, the resident DJ and promoter at London techno mecca Lost stepped up with the Lost Recordings series (confusingly, on the Cosmic label).
BBH: D’Pac, Everybody/Wouldn’t Lie
September 2, 2009 – 10:01 AM
It’s the deepness that first gets you when listening to this early Detroit house classic on the short lived Vicious Music label. The pads float on and on like endless clouds filling the sky, the bass burrowing beneath your feet, urging them to raise up and move. This 1992 record was one of only a handful of releases for the British born D’Pac who together with his brother had emigrated to Detroit via Toronto in the mid 80’s, before they moved back to Canada to focus on their Immigrant Soul project. Backed with the upfront house of “Wouldn’t Lie” featuring Terence FM on vocals, the cuts also had a helping hand from Chez Damier on production duties, which goes some way to explaining the unmistakable Detroit house sound.