Few things grab my attention like a Benjamin Brunn credit on the sleeve, and it’s particularly nice when they fit as neatly as the one here. Area is an alternate guise for Canadian-born, Chicago-reared DJ/producer m50. I’m not sure what the exact distinction is, but this particular EP — for François K’s Wave Music — traffics in forms of abstracted melodic house not distant from Brunn’s esteemed body of work. Assured opener “LLPOD” has a tense dance floor utility and an almost jazzy swing, but what makes it memorable are the sputters, drips and steam jets animating the background, reminding of the atmospheric eddies of Brunn’s “Raymond.” Its abstracted dub grooves also put me in mind of, for example, Anders Ilar’s “Organza.” Little details similarly animate “Respons,” a simple techno builder that works small wonders with a robotic tintinnabulation bubbling brightly at the track’s surface.
review
Various Artists, Prime Numbers 11
Trus’me’s Prime Numbers label may only have notched a handful of releases in 2009, but counting Linkwood’s System and Trus’me’s own In The Red albums among them, it was a successful year for the Mancunian independent. Barely into the new year and Prime Numbers 11 hits us with three further reasons to count the imprint as one of the most exciting purveyors of house music around right now.
Planetary Assault Systems, Remixes
If Luke Slater’s Temporary Suspension reminded us anything, it’s that the rough techno waves being made by your Dettmanns and Levons are not without precedent, and that techno veterans are keen to be still be part of the sound they, in many ways, defined. For every Delta Funktionen or Frozen Border looking to offer their new take on techno there’s a Regis, Robert Hood or James Ruskin picking up the 909 again and getting back to work. Ostgut Ton chose Hood and Kenny Larkin to remix Ben Klock; and so, in a sort of antisymmetry, they choose some of the most influential producers of the past couple years to remix one of the 90’s more influential figures.
DJ Qu, Party People Clap
With DJ Jus-Ed on permanent impresario/wood-cutting duties and Levon Vincent releasing a near-constant stream of contemporary classics, New York house’s flagship positions look pretty well locked-down as 2010 gets cracking. It’s a bit more of a tossup for the underdog slot. Fred P., whose Black Jazz Consortium long-player and singles for his own Soul People Music imprint were among 2009’s most coveted dance records, makes for something of an easy bet, though I can’t deny his talent at cranking out tense, minimalist house trips. And Anthony Parasole, who’s already proven himself a formidable selector, will almost certainly raise his asking price when his first solo production credit drops later this year. But I’m throwing my lot behind DJ Qu, the New Jersey man and former dancer born Ramon Lisandro Quezada. His latest, “Party People Clap” for Vincent’s and Parasole’s Deconstruct Music, has a whole lot to do with it.
Mathew Jonson, Ghosts In the AI
If one were to single out an overarching narrative for the trajectory of electronic music in 2009, it would surely be the emphasis on the past — on the founding myths and legends that electronic music emerged out of — as a source of inspiration. With disco breaking out from small-scale revival to established Room Two, even Room One fare, with deep house announcing itself as the heir apparent to the ubiquity of mid-decade minimal, and with the cavernously retrospective, Detroit-flecked techno of the Berghain/Hard Wax crew dominating tracklists, it seems that in 2009, the only way to look forward, was to look back. Accordingly, Mathew Jonson chimed in with his take on the theme for Ghosts In the AI, his last Wagon Repair release of the year and the decade.
I.F.M., Back In The Days
House and politics, and indeed music in general, are a funny mix. For every Bob Dylan you have a Bono, and for every Big Strick you have a Sascha Dive. We’ll leave Dive’s ill-advised Black Panther references for now, but the cousin of Omar-S’s “A Walk Down Linwood” powerfully proved politics in house doesn’t end with Moodymann or MLK speeches laid over “Can You Feel It?”. All this is by way of introduction to the A2 on I.F.M.’s “Back In The Days” EP.
Nina Kraviz, Pain In The Ass
Although hip-house is no longer a genre many dancers think about, its demise has not halted the dozens of house tracks whose schtick involves ranting, loosely scripted spoken vocals. Sometimes the master of ceremonies is trying to make a point, othertimes it’s more like being a fly on the wall. I’ve rarely bought into the concept that producers’ conversational prattle is much more interesting than my own; whether it was Villalobos enjoying sushi on “Andruic & Japan,” Diddy pleading for longer tracks on “The DJ,” or the vulgar boasts of Pimp Jackson, these diatribes often seem more distracting than helpful to dancers’ attempts to get into the groove. Nina Kraviz, who was one 2009’s big gainers and affiated with others as part of the Underground Quality stable, has proven not to be immune from the appeal of chatter, as evinced on “Pain In The Ass.” First appearing on REKIDS owner Matt Edwards’ Fabric mix, the flippant track has been paired with “I’m Gonna Get You” for Kraviz’s solo REKIDS debut.
BBH: Silent Phase, The Theory of Silent Phase
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.
Bas roR, Fixed Purpose
Fostered by the hungry eclecticism of The I-F’s legendary Cybernetic Broadcasting System and the music communities that have gathered in its wake, Bas roR has been DJing around Rotterdam for some time (in clubs and on the radio) and has already notched a memorable EP with Kubra’s “Control Issues,” a collaboration with DJ Tim for Arne Weinberg’s AW Recordings. Like much of the Kubra record, Bas roR’s solo debut recalls the deep and the weird of 90’s techno — Dan Curtin, Ultradyne and Stasis all come to mind, as well as some Rephlex sounds. The brushed percussion, bright melodic squiggles and brooding chord patterns of the title track, for example, are pure zero-gravity, practically describing a slow drift through a meteor shower.
My My & Emika, Price Tag EP
2009 was a particularly quiet year for My My. With Nick Höppner busy managing Ostgut Ton and Lee Jones still riding the waves made by his acclaimed 2008 album, Electric Frank, it’s not all that surprising their output was limited to “Going Going Gone,” their contribution to the All Night Long series, and the Price Tag EP. The last two years have also proven somewhat stylistically problematic for a pair who breathed new life into the sample-heavy micro-house sound as more and more producers spiked their subdued house tracks with sampled snippets. Inviting the Berlin-based producer/vocalist Emika to appear on “Price Tag,” then, seems a fillip for audiences who’ve relied My My for unexpected sounds, providing human depth that’s difficult to evoke with even the deepest sample vaults.
Frozen Border, Frozen Border 04
As its sub-label, Horizontal Ground, is quickly defining its own brand of stripped back, DBX-style techno, Frozen Border continues on its own trajectory north, getting colder and more restrained with each release. While its counterpart seems to have developed a coded number system to “identify” the artist behind each release, no such identifications are available for Frozen Border, and thus each release can only be contextualized in terms of previous installments. Whereas Volume 3 seemed like the summit point towards which the first two were headed, the fourth issue in the Frozen Border series diverges from its predecessors in sound but not in temperature.
Bottin, Horror Disco
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 (Ã 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.
Vince Watson, A Very Different World
A couple months ago Vince Watson posed a question to the Facebook massive wondering if he pressed his upcoming album on vinyl how many would actually fork out the cash to purchase direct from him. The hook being that you would not only be buying a copy of it on vinyl but it would be a personalized version made more special and could include yet to be determined “extras.” This seems to be a growing trend with label owners who realize that in the battle against digital you’ve got to deliver a more satisfying experience to set yourself apart.
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.
Valmay, Radiated Future
The mnml explosion wasn’t particularly kind to hard techno. As the cleaner, reduced ethos of the music proved more popular the harder geared sound fell out of favor for a while, prompting certain labels to go into hibernation or dissolve completely. The pendulum has certainly swung back the other way of late and one of the stalwart labels of hard techno, James Ruskin’s Blueprint re-emerged this year after a good five years of dormancy. Paul Mac, a vanguard of techno for nearly fifteen years, didn’t suffer the same fate as some of the record labels, but for the past couple of years his releases have almost exclusively been limited to digital format. His latest excursion under the new moniker of Valmay on Blueprint strikes another win for the label this year and finds Paul Mac in top form.
MLZ, One Cycle
2009 must have flown by in a blur for Miles Whittaker. When he wasn’t invoking the spirits of local witches and making painstakingly pieced together but chilling soundtracks with Sean Canty as Demdike Stare — Symbiosis was a slow burning album highlight of the past 12 months — he was attempting to and largely succeeding in reuniting techno with the analogue grit it so patently lacks together with Gary Howell under his other witchcraft-inspired project, Pendle Coven (the evocative, sometimes menacing swagger of the duo’s Self-Assessment album should also feature prominently in any discerning “best of” list next month). In between all this group activity, Miles found the time to fly solo as MLZ to deliver a storming, spiraling acid take on Peter Van Hoesen’s “Attribute One,” and now “One Cycle.”
Al Tourettes, Dodgem/Sunken
Apple Pips sure do have an odd release schedule. After “Humber” appeared in April following a couple months of delay, the Bristol based label was silent until late June, when Brackles’ “Get a Job” and Ramadanman and Appleblim’s “Justify” appeared within just two weeks of each other. Cue more radio silence until late, at which point two new Apple Pips 12″s appear from nowhere in the same week: Instra:mental’s long-anticipated “Leave it All Behind” and “Dodgem/Sunken” by frequent Appleblim collaborator Al Tourettes. Apple Pips have proven exceptional at providing little-known artists with much needed exposure, and Al Tourettes seeks to impress with “Dodgem/Sunken,” the label’s eighth record.
STL, Check Mate
When the time comes for year-end wrap-ups, count on STL’s pursuit of techno’s humid depths to be one of 2009’s leading stories. The past eleven months saw Stephan Laubner following other creative muses as well (and prolifically), but between the “Silent State” EP for Smallville and a mix CD tellingly titled Dub Techno Explorations, it seems safe to declare a new chapter in the STL legacy. Despite its reverb and grit, “Silent State”‘s bass lines were so buoyant that many notched it as house, but Exploration‘s seventy minutes of dub techno oxidation aimed more for texture and atmosphere. Appropriate enough, then, that the Echospace crew took interest, helping Laubner issue — by my count — his tenth record of 2009.
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.
Jens Zimmermann, A/B
You’d never guess by listening to his raw, tripped out, minimal take on techno but Jens Zimmermann’s start in electronic music came via the ultra cheesy Euro-dance hit-makers Culture Beat. The keyboardist and programmer’s tastes obviously evolved somewhere along the line and he began concentrating his abilities on the more subtle rudiments of techno. Zimmermann’s latest for Snork Enterprises finds the producer at his most inspired with two abstract cuts that are — while modern in their detailing — suffused with a raw edge that harks back to analogue banks of gear and real time knob-foolery.