As Basic Soul Unit, Toronto’s Stuart Li has earned a reputation as something of a producer’s producer. Combining the rough-hewn trackiness of underground techno with hazy atmospherics of deep house (not to mention a healthy pinch of low-end and DFA-style synth wackiness), his releases for labels like New Kanada and Mathematics have shown they can play chameleon in practically any discerning record bag. But 2009, which saw his “Dank” single released by Philpot and his track “Things Pass” included in Ostgut Ton’s Panorama Bar 02 EP, scraped away at Li’s underground status, raising the bar on his studio prowess while placing Basic Soul Unit on a whole host of new radars. Whether you call it a 2009 victory lap or harbinger of a stellar 2010 to come, LWE’s 39th podcast, an exclusive mix of heavy, organic, and thoroughly trippy house grooves, gives us a rare and tasty showcase of Li’s DJ chops.
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The Year In: “Records”
Forget the rise of mnml, the revival of deep house, the Berghain, civil rights vocal samples, the very existence of Richie Hawtin — was there any more rift-causing development over the last couple of years than the ascendence of digital technology in dance music production, dissemination, and DJing? While the vast majority of club revelers probably couldn’t have cared less what was happening behind the DJ booth, DJs and the journo-bloggers who obsess over them spent the years after Serato Scratch Live (the hardware/software package that most successfully merged a ones-and-zeros music collection with the technique and physicality of spinning real vinyl) debuted in 2004 wringing their hands over what this all means for dance music. We wouldn’t have the word “techno” without “technology,” but is soul not an equally weighty part of the equation? And isn’t vinyl culture a pretty big part of techno’s soul? To paraphrase what practically everyone inclined to grapple with such a thing grappled with: When we put the quality of the tunes aside, can a 300 gigabyte drive stuffed with ID3-tagged files not too fundamentally different from Word documents begin to approximate, to use Dapayk & Padberg’s phrase from their 2007 album of the same name, the indominable “black beauty”?
Basic Soul Unit, Basic Necessity EP
“Tool” is almost exclusively used dismissively in dance music criticism, but must every track hold up unlayered, unmixed, or otherwise isolated? Some brilliant club tunes deserve your headphoned attention, but I think we critics sometimes lose sight of where classic moments in dance music occur — on the floor, with a deft selector manning the decks. Toronto’s Stuart Li, known in grimy house music circles as Basic Soul Unit, has become a DJ’s favorite for the very reason many of us might usually click the skip button: save his “Panorama Bar 02 | Part I” A-side, “Things Pass” from this fall, which found Li in veritable anthem mode, they’re unabashedly tracky. While Basic Soul Unit’s recent “Basic Necessity EP” for New Kanada might not contain a DJ’s main event, its contents provide the sort of sinews that hold great sets together, bridging the gap between the energy of one showcase track and the next.
Jenifa Mayanja, Close Encounters
Jenifa Mayanja, wife of Underground Quality impresario DJ Jus Ed and veteran DJ in her own right, has released house singles and “mix albums” over the last couple of years almost exclusively on her own Bu-Mako label. While buoyant and imbued with energy, much of her self-released output has owed far too big a debt to New Age for me to really get behind; the rawness that has made so much recent New York house such an invigorating listen has been lost on her 12″s behind an impenetrable wall of incense smoke. So what a pleasant surprise “Close Encounters” — Bu-Mako’s twelfth release — is, both for anyone who would rather sweat while dancing than taking a Bikram yoga class and for New York house as a whole.
Ghostleigh, Continuum
One of the top reasons for my continued patronage of record stores is getting to gab with the people behind the counter. Blogs and forums certainly offer a wealth of information about choice new releases, but it’s pretty hard to beat a recommendation from someone whose job involves listening to practically every piece of wax that passes through the door. I can’t think of a more consistently awesome way for getting new sounds on my radar. So on a recent trip to Dope Jams in Brooklyn, when a clerk preferential to classic house and techno slipped the new (and unfamiliar to me) Ghostleigh 12″ into my stack and uttered something to the effect of, “I’m not usually into dubstep, but holy shit, dude!” I certainly took notice.
D. Quin, At The End of the World
All the hippest wax this year has reached techno heads with as little adornment and explanation as feasibly possible. “At The End of the World,” a single-sided oddity from Brooklyn’s Slow To Speak label and unknown producer Dan Quin, offers white label followers something unexpected: a wealth of information. Tucked neatly into the paper sleeve behind the hand-stamped vinyl, a note entitled “Dan Quin Background Analysis” on Old Antarctic Explorers Association letterhead details the spiritual and scientific journey of the producer in question. It could all be a gas, but here goes: while covering the Antarctic seal-mating beat for “a prominent U.S. nature magazine,” this “anti-social Steve Irwin” abandoned human society to become one with his desolate surroundings and ultimately find “his igloo of inspiration.”
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.
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.
Curator’s Cuts 02: Jordan Rothlein
LWE’s Curator’s Cuts podcast series features our reviewing staff mixing together recent favorites and providing explanations for their selections. Contributing writer Jordan Rothlein steps up to the decks for Curator’s Cuts 02. We will post the tracklist later in the week, as each curator discloses and describes the tracklist as part of the podcast.