[Macro]

When I reviewed Elektro Guzzi’s debut 12″ last March, I commented that Viennese techno power trio Elektro Guzzi came off a bit like an analog-only traditionalist rant taken to “ultra-extremes.” Bernhard Hammer, Jakob Schneidewind, and Bernhard Breuer — guitarist, bassist, and drummer, respectively — go about as far as anyone has yet in distancing themselves from machine encroachment in dance music production. It’s easy to read their press sheet and pigeonhole them as the latest mnml reactionary fad, the techno equivalent of vegans who refuse to eat honey. But as I’ve thought more about Elektro Guzzi’s project and had a chance to soak in their debut album, I’ve started thinking that’s not the band’s intention whatsoever.

See, I think these guys respect digital technology, if not kind of love digital technology. These three Elektro Guzzi guys don’t just play their instruments like they’re machines; they turn them into ones and zeros. It’s imitation to the point of near-worship, and their embrace of loops and microsamples — purely as a compositional aesthetic, as YouTube proves they don’t use either — might very well make them an analog hardware junkie’s worst nightmare. Like The xx, recent digital worshipers from the indie rock sphere (though they’re admittedly grabbing far more from Timbaland than M_nus), the band takes the chilliness and distance of software — heretofore pretty damn unpopular — and runs with it. And in doing so, Elektro Guzzi goes quite a ways toward warming it up.

As meticulously arranged as the ten jams on Elektro Guzzi’s self-titled debut album are, and as totally nifty as they sound at points, the album does succumb to some of the problems that plague long-players of the bedroom producers they imitate: an hour-plus of repetitive, tiny sounds tries just about anyone’s patience outside the stony environs of the club no matter how those sounds come into being. Yet the tracks themselves are by far some of the craftiest minimal tracks I’ve heard in a minute. “Hexenschuss,” first on the band’s Macro 12″, still sounds fantastic. (The B-side from that 12″, “Elastic Bulb,” it must be said, still sounds a bit meandering and flat.) And the band’s new tracks reveal a range of creativity and contemporary techno knowledge that A-side only hinted at. “Black Egg” grinds in a way Audion hasn’t in years; “Sediment” would have slotted well on Planetary Assault Systems’ or Marcel Dettmann’s LPs. But the band is undeniably at its best when it pairs its love of techno with that certain something only a rock band can deliver. More abstract moments like “Loq Pul” and “Clapping” recall a moment in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when bands, best exemplified by those on 99 Records, used the raggedness of punk to infuse dance music with an experimental flair that was missing from disco. At their very best, Elektro Guzzi resemble Liquid Liquid for a digital age.

The band is undoubtedly an exciting addition to techno, but I can’t help but feel like they’d be deployed best right now as a live act. Their album, while certainly not lacking in great tracks (not to mention some ultimate riffage), lacks the kind of bomb that typically sends producers into the stratosphere. Yet how cool would it be to attend a live set and dance your ass off while having no questions about what’s happening on the other side of that laptop screen? Unfortunately, I believe Elektro Guzzi’s approach to making techno will become its calling card, which ultimately renders them a gimmick. The band prides itself on not needing a recording studio to do something resembling production, but perhaps they could benefit from a little studio magic, maybe in the form of a collaboration with someone (Ewan Pearson, perhaps) who values live and electronic music equally. But for now, bring on the world tour. I for one will be at the front of the queue.

As you could probably tell from our review of their debut single, LWE is enamoured with Elektro Guzzi. The Vienna-based trio transforms their classic rock trio line-up into an engine for electrifying dance rhythms and mind-melting textures — all without overdubs or computers. On May 17th the group brings their unique vision to the album format with their self-titled debut LP, released on Macro. LWE and WhatPeoplePlay want to share this incredible album with you, so we’ve made five copies of their CD available to five lucky entrants.

For your chance to win, all you have to do is email the name of your favorite dance music group who uses or used rock equipment to editor[at]littlewhiteearbuds.com by Tuesday, May 18th at 10am CST. Five winners will be chosen at random and notified via email. No late entries will be accepted. Good luck!

[Macro]

Three or four dudes hunched over laptops, MIDI controllers, and a tangle of cable — is that a band? With relatively few exceptions (the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Theo Parrish’s Rotating Assembly, and Innerzone Orchestra all come to mind), that’s about as close as you’ll get to one in club music. Plenty of red-blooded guitar wielders have owed a massive debt to house and techno; some, like Animal Collective or Hot Chip, owed one massive enough to make us reconsider the genre to which we’d had them pegged. But has a power trio — the “rock band” in its most elemental form — ever tried to straight-up play techno? On their 12″ debut for eternally unpredictable Macro imprint, Elektro Guzzi do just that, and they claim to do it without overdubs, loops, or laptops.

There’s no question that Elektro Guzzi (featuring guitarist Bernhard Hammer, bassist Jakob Schneidewind, and drummer Bernhard Breuer) has passed the threshold of truly embodying — and not just filching from — the techno aesthetic. “Hexenschuss” and “Elastic Bulb” both rise and fall, tense up and release, and groove just like every electronically produced side in your record bag. The band’s trick (their co-producer and mixer, Cheap Records honcho Patrick Pulsinger, surely deserves some credit for this) is harnessing the unpredictable variations in organically generated drum hits and guitar stabs to lend their techno an exciting layer of sonic uncertainty. “Hexenschuss” proves especially adept at this trick. Once Breuer’s kick drum settles into a 4/4 thump, his partners ramp up the tension, putting their instruments in the service of atmosphere rather than melody or rock-out. While it’s undeniably impressive how well the trio holds together during the track’s two big breakdowns, their choice of gear becomes only the faintest of background chatter; as a subtle techno burner, “Hexenschuss” transcends any inherent gimmick. A good deal longer and less interesting than the A-side, “Elastic Bulb” shows that Ableton Live isn’t the only cause of loopy formlessness in tech-house these days. But their full-band grasp of the sort of tech-house weirdness their label boss Stefan Goldmann made his early career out of — not to mention the detailed sounds only perfectly miked live instruments can leave on tape — renders it a worthy listen regardless. Like a Pipecock rant taken to ultra-extremes, Elektro Guzzi proves that analog really might have more to offer than your average bedroom producers’ ones and zeros. I’m not sure this power techno trio concept will catch on like comic book movies or nü-deep house, but let’s hope these Elektro Guzzi boys maintain their chops.

To start off our year end coverage, LWE correspondent Chris Burkhalter breaks down the top five labels of 2009

Dance music enthusiasts are almost certainly the most label-conscious people in the record-buying world. How else can you explain the bickering over new Perlon signings, the ubiquity of the compound adjective “buy-on-sight,” or the hastily depleted stocks of anonymously-produced 12″s? We follow our favorite DJs and producers, naturally, but a record publishing operation with vision and taste is very often the best guide to the sounds we thirst for. 2009′s cream of the crop — labels like Running Back, Uzuri, Prologue, Dial, Sound Signature, Blueprint, Apple Pips, and Time To Express — did more than narrow the field of available records, but sharpened our expectations of what new music should achieve. And the mushrooming of secretive private presses (many of them fostered by Hard Wax’s distribution) yielded results that were just as rewarding. But from where I’m standing, these five labels loomed largest.

In some circles, Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” might be reason enough to include Scuba’s imprint among the ranks of the year’s most important, influential, and exciting labels, but there was a lot more going on at Hotflush than just one huge track. Between the mid-tempo melancholy of Mount Kimbie’s “Maybes” EP and Untold’s trio of bubbling rhythm tracks, Hotflush pursued curious new paths for bass music’s future. Meanwhile, records from Sigha and Pangaea showed that, with a little personality, the label’s more tried-and-true sonic templates still bang plenty hard. And Scuba himself turned out three discs worth of material, continuing his steady creep toward techno, and delivering one of his finest tracks to date in “Symbiosis.” Hotflush’s quality control team is certainly due for a raise, as their 2009 strike rate was virtually unrivaled.

Was any label as enigmatic as Macro this year? Unpredictable and often challenging, the label’s 2009 run sometimes seemed to provoke its audience, but it was all essential listening – whether the goal was meeting the latest challenge or verifying fierce objections. The elusive Stravinsky edit left even ardent supporters scratching their heads, but it was Goldmann’s grandiose/kitschy remix of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade” that was most contentious. Macro still trades in proper dance music, of course, but on its own terms. Raudive wove stately jazz abstraction into his twisting techno single for the label, while the promotional blurb for Peter Kruder’s tense 12″ name-checked Tchaikovsky. And the original version of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade”? Electrifying techno quicksilver, and a proper classic. The label’s most notable releases, though, involved a trove of previously unheard punk/new wave/proto-techno that Patrick Cowley recorded with singer Jorge Socarras in the Seventies. An expansive archival project that seized the label’s full resources for the second half of the year, it felt more like a gift to dance music than a market product.

Four months after announcing the end of publishing activities, Clone found a whole mess of music they wanted us to hear — and too much for just one label. So Clone switched the lights back on and splintered into half a dozen niche sublabels. Combined, they turned Clone’s “going out of business” year into one of its most prodigious. In general, the new imprints are founded on retro tastes, with Clone Jack For Daze and Clone Loft Supreme styled after vintage Chicago and New York house sounds, respectively, Clone Basement Series taking on classically-minded techno, and so on. The artists showcased came from all over, and had their own creative itineraries, but the records generally presented minor updates on beloved house and techno sounds. The least of these were skillfully-executed, stylish homages, and the best were astounding. For myself, the highlights were A Made Up Sound’s fresh reconfigurations of house, Reggie Dokes’ “Chicago Pimp,” and the Mike Dehnert records (including the deliciously garish Levon Vincent remix). Your own year-end list might not include those tracks, but it’d be hard to believe that it escaped Clone’s tentacles entirely.

2009 began gloriously for Hyperdub with Joker’s “Digidesign” and Kode9′s own “Black Sun,” and the label hasn’t let up since. The beefy 5 Years compilation officially celebrated the label’s five-year anniversary, but its eclectic disc of new material doubled as the announcement of Hyperdub’s transition from a hungry young label to a confident musical institution whose reach now extends well beyond the garage continuum. Artists well-known to Hyperdub fans — Zomby, Darkstar, Samiyam, Ikonika, and yes, Burial — turned in potent new material, but it was the first-timers to the label that really got people talking. The aforementioned Joker track stands proud beside the label’s finest releases to date, and was backed by that slinky, R&B-steeped track from 2000F & J Kamata. Mark Pritchard’s drunk 8-bit “Wind It Up” was utterly unavoidable. And then there’s Hyperdub’s newest star, Cooly G. Add to this a full album from King Midas Sound, and visits from Martyn, Mala, and Flying Lotus, and we wouldn’t blame you if you were still playing catch-up in January.

This Hamburg label’s handful of records (totaling just fourteen tracks) traded in light melodies, gradual builds, and mild flavors, capitalizing on the allure of warm glow over searing heat. There was always a thumping functionality for the dance floor, but a subtle one easily concealed by the elegance of the often melancholy compositions. The And Suddenly It’s Morning compilation appropriately arrived in autumn, and went a long way toward characterizing the label’s sweater-and-scarf aesthetic, but the highlights of the year were the two EPs that preceded it. STL brokered with Smallville for one of the finest entries in his exhaustive catalog, a record of bright, layered melodies and brooding dub atmospherics. And the label’s only remix for the year, Jus-Ed’s scrub of Steinhoff & Hammouda’s “You Are,” positively smoldered. As we got to know these records, Smallville emerged from under the long shadow of the kindrid spirits at the neighboring Dial, and grew to be a cherished favorite of DJs, critics, and fans alike. And, just like Dial, Smallville’s wares worked at least as well on headphones as in the club, so that if Smallville wasn’t responsible for an indelible moment toward the close of your best night out this year, there’s a good chance they soundtracked a memorable walk home.

[Macro]

With a resume including releases on Perlon, Classic, Ovum, Innervisons, and his own Macro imprint, as well as a reputation for being a clutch DJ, Stefan Goldmann is one of the more pedigreed producers on the scene. Goldmann may be well-respected and popular with listening audiences and other DJs alike, but he hasn’t reached “superstar” level by any means. With that in mind, the release of the two-CD set The Transitory State provides ample evidence both as to why Goldmann deserves to be mentioned in the same breath alongside the shortlist of power players, and why he likely never will be.

The first disc, Works, is a collection of Goldmann’s vinyl releases dating back to 2005; and it’s here he shows his uniqueness, primarily through his startling, strange and diverse sonic palette. “Lunatic Fringe” fuses a bulbous bounce to a female choir of extraterrestrials; “Radiant Grace” works a classical guitar riff that sounds a bit like the Law & Order theme with a horror-show string run that would make Bernard Hermann proud; “Sleepy Hollow” is a shimmering robot getting down with itself; “Blood” is uptempo funk mayhem, disintegrating discos with a stuttering laser-beam of a riff and clattering percussion. Nothing sounds quite like the next thing, but it’s all united by its utter weirdness and daring inventiveness. These aren’t your standard variety tracks; these are songs set apart from the norm with purpose.

The headiness continues and is expanded on the second disc, Voices of The Dead (also released as a limited-edition 5×7″ vinyl set), a concept album that “searches for the common root of all music in an electro-acoustic setting.” Roughly translated, that equates to nearly an hour’s worth of bizarre, squirm-inducing “ambient” music, far more suited to a walk through Arkham Asylum than to any chill-out room. Uncomfortable nature aside, you can’t keep your ears off it, as textures burn themselves out under heat lamps and melodies turn themselves inside-out in fun house mirrors. This isn’t background music; this is the soundtrack to a drug-fueled nightmare that’s as brilliant as it is unsettling.

In terms of fusing the avant garde with the dancefloor, Goldmann is one of the few who consistently gives Villalobos a run for his money. It’s brilliant, challenging work — the kind that doesn’t exactly put you at Sasha and Digweed level. Regardless, as with most capital-A Artists, perhaps Goldmann is just ahead of his time or a mad scientist. In either case, The Transitory State deserves your time and attention.