[Ojo de Apolo]

While Jorge Cortés’ Ojo de Apolo label may not get the kind of press another renowned Chilean label garners, it has slowly been picking up steam by moving in an entirely different direction. Cortés’ approach stems from a conscious effort to reach out beyond the South American country’s small house scene and tap into a global network of other like-minded artists. But maybe more importantly is an aesthetic that steers away from the region’s inherent tropical, ethno-tribal leanings to focus on deep, minimal house and techno. And with a recent 12″ by Reggie Dokes and remixes from Kai Alce and Hauke Freer on two previous releases, the label’s scope has begun to migrate to even deeper terrain. This newest release strikes a path somewhere between the label’s early minimal techno and its newer deep house sounds.

After the Detroit house-centric Más Música on Matrix in 2009, Cortés returns under the Jorge C alias to expand his take on deep house. “Up Up Up” is a bouncy rhythmic track delving into percussive sleight of hand as it changes patterns between measures. A repeating series of keyboard melodies and a springy wah-wah effect add slightly to the bass and rhythm textural exchange, but a final pay off is never achieved. On “A Little Beat,” Cortés takes up a similar tact but employs a more pronounced sub-bass, shimmering open hi-hats and delayed cowbell to develop the groove. But it isn’t until the breakdown and a build up that the track really takes off, building the intensity of the rhythm, highlighting the Rhodes organ and bringing the bass line up in the mix to create a rewarding interplay.

Terre Thaemlitz’s “The World Is Over DJ Sprinkles Megamix” is appropriately transported to the DJ Sprinkles sonic universe while managing to retain some of the major elements of the original track. Where Thaemlitz diverges is by extending it to nearly 16 minutes and introducing a kaleidoscopic piano melody in the first couple minutes that has a great fluidity, enveloped by soaring pads, before stripping it down to the original’s Rhodes echoing chords, flittering hi-hats and rotund sub-bass pulse. A series of classic and urgent vocal samples provide a touchstone to Thaemlitz’s own oeuvre and ends up sitting comfortably next to the dynamic rhythm flow. The mix may seem too long to some but there is an amazing cohesiveness to it that mirrors much of her own productions and compliments the original. With more well thought out collaborations like this, Cortés’ label may well change perceptions on what it means to put out records in the southern hemisphere.

10 years before Midtown 120 Blues captured hearts and blew minds, Terre Thaemlitz was already making and self-releasing house music under a variety of guises. Unlike the critically adored album, however, most of these releases slid below the radar of most house fans — not least because they lacked the distribution Mule Musiq releases enjoy. With many more ears now tuned into her particular variety of lush, political house, Thaemlitz has released the Masturjakor single with Mule and the B2B/Hush Now 12″ for Parisian label Skylax. Yet this latest record is more of long desired reissue of sorts than an all new release. Culled from his 2006 Routes Not Roots album as Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion K-S.H.E (“B2B”) and the digital-only A Silence Broken compilation (“Hush Now”), it hosts two of Thaemlitz’s most potent and timely dance floor tracks on vinyl together for the first time.

Given that both tracks were originally released in 2006, Thaemlitz’s choice of accouterments and arrangements prove rather prescient of today’s sonic landscape. On “B2B,” K-S.H.E. builds a maze of perfectly positioned vocal loops chanting “brother to brother / brother to brother” that dance in your brain, tucked tightly into brisk hand drum patterns and open hi-hats. Thaemlitz lets loose sumptuous, aquamarine waves of synth tone that glide over the frisky rhythms like a breeze across a naked body. Even as whistling synth leads and strident piano vamping appear, “B2B” feels like the missing link between Main Street Records and some of the best of deep house music since it returned to prominence. You could buy the record for this track alone but its companion track renders that unnecessary.

“Hush Now” belonged to a project on Ultra-Red’s Public Record label that meshed AIDS activism with dance music with “Silence = Death” as its main precept. Thaemlitz (as DJ Sprinkles) leaves no room for silence, as even the crackling noises at the beginning are programmed and looped throughout. Once he begins adding elements it seems hard to stop, as layers of bongos and drum breaks, Fingers-esque bass strides and commands to “hush now!” stack up until little room remains in the stereo spectrum. Another chant grows from within — “Silence equals death!” — which eventually beats back the percussion until the shuffle of a crowd and the chant are all that’s left. In his LWE’s Jon Dale’s interview with Thaemlitz wondered, “Why do so few house projects ask us to struggle along with them, as opposed to always positioning themselves as doorways of escape from our struggles?” The track embodies the sentiment that we can’t dance away problems like AIDS or intolerance — they’re still with us in the club. Thaemlitz and Skylax were wise to package “B2B” and “Hush Now” together, as they, like all Terre’s best house tracks, have listeners thinking as hard as their bodies are jacking. An essential release of 2010.

It is with an especially heavy heart that we inform you that our 14th podcast, a live DJ mix from DJ Sprinkles (aka the inimitable Terre Thaemlitz), is heading off to the archives. It’s a loose but lovingly crafted set which had our comment section denizens scratching their heads trying to put together a tracklist, and we can say without exaggeration that it’s one of our favorite podcasts in the series. Make sure to grab it before it retires this Friday, June 11th, at 10am CST.

If house were a nation and LWE its president, Terre Thaemlitz is the first person we would look to when filling our cabinet. It would be difficult to decide where to put her, though, as his abundant talents make him perfect for many roles. As a top notch producer whose roots are tangled in the history of house, she’d make an excellent minister of culture; as a great thinker who elucidates hidden truths in media, gender, sexuality and our interactions with them all, he’d fit well as secretary of the interior of our heads. Midtown 120 Blues, his first album delivered under his disc jockey alias, DJ Sprinkles, brings these departments together, recontextualizing house music to the tune of sumptuous deep-house (easily nabbing the #3 spot in our top albums of 2008 list). So we’re very pleased to have Thaemlitz curating LWE’s 14th podcast, which is actually a live DJ mix from his Deeperama series.

LWE Podcast 14: DJ Sprinkles (73:35)

Where did the name DJ Sprinkles come from?

Terre Thaemlitz: It’s a combination of a lot of stupid things. I started DJing in a very Queer environment, dealing with a lot of safer-sex education outreach in clubs, some of which were sex-worker hang outs. I wanted a name that was totally anti-macho to go against the whole “bad boys behind the wheels of steel” thing. This was around ’87 or so, I was living in NY’s East Village and the hip-house boom was going on, and a key phrase was “it’s in the mix.” By coincidence, Pillsbury or somebody was putting out a cake mix with candy sprinkles for the frosting, and their TV commercial’s slogan was “Sprinkles in the mix!” I thought to myself, “That is so fucking gay!” Of course, the sex-work performance artist Annie Sprinkles was a kind of landmark in the East Village, so the name also conjured associations with sex work, golden showers, etc… So “DJ Sprinkles’ Deeperama” was born. These mistakes stick with us. (laughs)

Do you by chance remember much about the night this mix was recorded?

It was my first time in Fukuoka, May 2nd 2007. A few months earlier, the organizer at the club Decadent Deluxe had sent me some really nice DJ mixes to explain his event, so I was glad to be there. It was a mid-sized club, maybe a little on the small side — that’s something else I like. I don’t like big parties — those ones where packs of people come in super-hyped to hear somebody, and will scream and whoop it up regardless of what music is actually being played. I understand the social function of that kind of event, but it’s not my interest as a DJ or producer. I like small events where the audience consists of people who know what they came to listen to, as well as people who are wondering what the hell they stepped into. It was raining — it almost always rains when I DJ. The weather was a bit cool. I liked the sound, although I think there was some problem with some frequency or other – I forget exactly. Some brilliant contractor decided to build a condominium for the current wave of baby boomers near the club, so they were having problems with noise complaints.

I got a chance to listen to half of it today. Honestly, I was a bit surprised it wasn’t more… mixed, but I liked the selections.

No, I play tracks from start to finish. I guess some call that “Loft style.” I’ll use delay effects or something within a track, and keep mixing two copies of the same track to extend it (like in this mix I did it with “The Key”), but I’m not uptight about fade outs and silence on the dance floor. Part of it is that, as a producer, I’m interested in the way others structure their music in the studio. Every track has a certain structure, and when you edit that out as a DJ you also edit out that climax or anti-climax intended by the original producer. Also, I love long tracks — 10 minutes or longer. Especially when you do long sets of 4 hours or more, you have to allow for a different sense of time. Let the music create the moment. As a DJ, I don’t like the idea of the moment being about “me” or my mixing or whatnot. I’m interested in the music, and I prefer the audience be more interested in the music than in the DJ. I think it also has to do with frequenting roller disco rinks during elementary school in the ’70s, and then being a teen in the early ’80s, when mixers were not common. If you went to a “dance” (not to a “club”) you had pauses between cuts, maybe every fifth song was a slow jam which was always so exciting and depressing at the same time, ha ha! And before today’s style of record distribution, record shop selection was really poor – especially in the Midwest. DJ’s spun from a wide selection of genres.

Even when I first moved to New York in ’86 there were no genre-consistent “House Parties.” House Music was not a genre, it was the records owned by the club — by the House — and that meant a lot of old disco and other things collected over the years. J.M. Silk’s “I Can’t Turn Around” and LL Cool J’s “Rock The Bells” were two of the biggest house hits when I arrived in NYC, and I doubt anyone would mix those in the same set today, the tempos are all wrong, the genres are wrong…. LL Cool J as house? But yes, in that moment, it was. That’s how my ears were trained, I guess. There are some things that really are generational. Like, there are many young Japanese DJs in their late 20′s with amazing collections of classic NY deep house from the late ’80s and early ’90s — much better than my own record collection in that sense — but they are missing the LOSER TRACKS! The embarrassing tracks that SUCK SHIT! Reality was not going to a club and hearing classics all night. Reality was hearing that one fucking amazing cut in the middle of hours of shit. I try to bring that dynamic to all of my sets.

Who are a few of your favorite DJs, past and present, and why?

Although he is not really a DJ, I really loved the few sets I heard by Kuniyuki (aka Koss) from Sapporo. His sets are totally different from his releases on Mule. Very deep and soulful, but a bit dark. Also, DJ “Napalm” Tadokoro in Kyoto is brilliant — always very eclectic, yet somehow classic and deep. He organizes the Deepa-Licious events I play at in Kyoto, which are deliberately small and off-center. He’s a really interesting guy, very cross-genre. DJ Primula in Tokyo is really good for and ’80s techno-pop-ish kind of lounge setting. I used to try to get him to play at the Deeperama parties in Tokyo whenever possible. I really like DJs who share their collections with people — I prefer this kind of intimacy of selection over slick mixing skills.

What can we expect from you for the rest of the year?

2008? Well, I hope to finish the MP3 archive of everything I’ve ever released, called the “Dead Stock Archive.” It includes over 400 tracks in about as many genres, spanning two data DVD-ROMs. And in 2009 I hope to finish a new electro-acoustic album called “Soulnessless,” which will be a two-disc set. Disc 1 is a 30 hour piano solo written as a single 4GB MP3 file — the world’s first “full length” MP3 album. Disc 2 is a video DVD of separate materials because these days a 30 hour album is never enough. The idea of putting out an album you cannot immediately play in a CD player or home stereo is calling into question the relationships between media formats and the album format. In effect, the links between performance duration and media duration have been severed, so what does this mean for producers? Not only compositionally, but also financially, if we must produce increasingly longer albums for smaller advances and royalties? These days everyone feels ripped off if they buy a 36 minute CD album, but that length was the standard from the ’30s through the ’80s because vinyl can hold about 18 minutes of audio before the grooves get too close and the sound quality degrades. We’re now producing “double albums” for less and less money than old “single albums.” Oh, and b_books in Berlin is supposed to finally come out with a bilingual English/German compendium of my writings to date, called “Nuisance: Writings on Identity Jamming and Digital Audio Production.”

Download: LWE Podcast 14: DJ Sprinkles (73:35)

[Mule Musiq]

Like disco before it, house music was born in queer club culture, one of the few places its artists and patrons — mostly gay minority men — could be themselves without fear of reprisal. And also like disco, house was co-opted by ever larger audiences, shedding its ethnicity and sexuality along the way. With this in mind, Terre Thaemlitz begins Midtown 120 Blues with a challenging statement: “House isn’t so much a sound as a situation.” As she dismisses popular perceptions of what informs house — “life, love, happiness” — in favor of more concrete ones — addiction, sexual/gender crises, queer-bashing, censorship — and frames house geographically in “East Jersey, Loisaida, West Village, and Brooklyn” rather than as a universal phenomenon, the situations which defined the music for him become clearer.

Thaemlitz left the American Midwest in 1986 for New York City, where he DJed in midtown Manhattan transsexual clubs as DJ Sprinkles and witnessed the first bloom of deep-house. Roughly twenty years later, as the sound and definition of deep-house has expanded immeasurably, Midtown 120 Blues serves as an elegy for the scene as she knew it and a kiss off to its current de-contextualized form. Although countless tracks and dozens of artists vocally revere the roots of house music, few offer more than platitudes about its origins. By pointing out its blanched, commercialized trajectory in a series of no-punches-pulled monologues and samples, Thaemlitz bravely confronts listeners with oft glossed over issues and participants in history. Given the scarcity of house tracks which address any sort of social issues, an entire album cast in such a light is a rare, engrossing treat.

Whereas the concepts Thaemlitz presents are provocative, the music of Midtown is more serene. Draped in lush, droning chords, punctuated by crisp, mechanical hi-hat dashes and synthetic snare ellipses, and hovering instead of stomping, its deep-house sound is so deep it’s practically ambient at times. Piano is splashed across many of the album’s 10 tracks in broad, resonating chords carrying listeners forward as much as the percussion. Flute, acoustic guitar and drums and a few other elements round out the sound, underlining particularly emotional motifs and pushing the material towards self-described “fagjazz” on “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To” and “Reverse Rotation” with Kuniyuki. Taken together, it’s a gorgeous, twilight aesthetic that hits notes of sorrow, longing and contemplation.

Nominally a house album, Midtown flirts with the dance floor only on a few songs, though it’s quite satisfying each time it does. “Midtown 120 Blues” is simple and effective, colored by two massive piano chords that decay slowly, as alacrative percussion carves out the groove. Joined by pulverizing sub-bass, depth-plumbing bass notes and a disembodied diva’s single-word refrain, the track’s subtle tweaks keep it continuously compelling. “Grand Central, Pt. I (Deep Into The Bowel Of House)” and “House Music Is A Controllable Desire You Can Own” have fuller sounds and rest at the dance floor’s edge. Thick with sub-bass and gently modulating pads, Thaemlitz’s use of limber bass tones, catchy little progressions and endlessly refined percussion patterns draw listeners through their bountiful lengths.

Other tracks like “Brenda’s $20 Dilemma” and “Grand Central, Pt. II (72 Hrs. By Rail From Missouri)” have the hallmarks of house but are content with ambience, blanketing listeners in sublime pads marbled with wandering synth melodies and sampled vocals. The album’s most emotionally evocative song, “Ball’r (Madonna-Free Zone),” is also its best, layering drag queens’ playful leering atop interwoven melodies undulating in and out of focus. Mournful yet tinged with hints of past cheer, it’s a candid reflection of the vibe Thaemlitz misses. Even if the listener doesn’t yearn for the same things, the concepts, mood and slowly unfolding chapters of Midtown 120 Blues create an atmosphere ripe for reflection on people and places which no longer exist as they once did.