Nu Groove, perhaps the most famous name in New York house after Strictly Rhythm, is an infamously difficult label to assess. Frank and Karen Mendez had originally started the imprint in 1988 as an outlet for Rheji and Ronald Burrell, former R&B producers (and twin brothers) who had recently parted ways with a major label. But by the time they pressed their last slab in 1992, the label had released over 100 records in seemingly as many club music subgenres. While the Burrells’ early singles remain fresh (especially Rheji’s, in this reviewer’s humble opinion), and the label provided a crucial early home to the likes of Frankie Bones, Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez pre-Masters At Work, and Victor Simonelli (see below), not all of the mélange holds up so well. Despite Nu Groove’s status as a completist’s worst nightmare, its pervasive underground-ness — disco soul emanating from brittle, staunchly low-tech sounds; a reputation built on a minimum image — manages to tie this behemoth of a catalog together. And as Underground Quality sends similar backroom ripples through the house music universe from the Tri-State Area once more, Nu Groove 12″s will undoubtedly wiggle their way out of dusty used bins at a somewhat faster rate.
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DJ Bone, Sunday Morning/Sunday Night
If you’re an avid LWE reader you may remember DJ Bone’s debut for then unheard of Sect Records that arrived mysteriously in a plain white CD sleeve, which had staff and readers alike speculating over its provenance. Nearly two years on, Sect has introduced the wider world to aspiring techno artists such as Grovskopa, Jolka and even Bone’s own daughter, Aleckxis Jaina — -as well as serving as a reintroduction to the underrated D Knox. Bone, on the other hand, has been keeping steady with his own Subject Detroit label, almost single-handly keeping techno (in a purist’s sense) alive in his hometown.
Kyle Hall, Kaychunk/You Know What I Feel
In a city with a rich and diverse cultural heritage like Detroit, it’s not difficult to understand how so many of its native electronic music producers have avoided being penned into a single genre like techno. Following in the footsteps of artists like Kenny Dixon Jr. and Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Theo Parrish and Omar-S, young turk Kyle Hall is the latest to throw off the yoke of listener expectations and create without concern for categories. Hall was raised by a creative clan who engulfed him in house music at an early age and fostered his innate talents with an education at the Detroit School for the Arts. Add to that unfettered access to a world’s worth of music care of the Internet (something his predecessors could only dream of) and you’ve got a free-thinking, well-equiped producer for whom genre boundaries are as outmoded as landline phone service. So far in his relatively brief discocraphy he’s offered everything from delectable house melodies and grinding techno grooves to loose-limbed hip-hop beats and sprawling jazzy excursions. The genrebusters at Hyperdub proved keenly aware of his capabilities when they asked him to remix Darkstar’s “Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer” and positively prescient in nabbing him for his own 12″, Kaychunk/You Know What I Feel. It’s easily his most accomplished release to date.
Abe Duque, Following My Heart/Disco Lights
Some artists have the luck of being in vogue innumerable times in their career. This can be said especially for the acid loving techno chap Abe Duque. From his brief time as a keyboardist for NYC techno group Program 2 with Gene LeFosse and Victor Calderon in the early ’90s, through to his explosion into the clubs with oft acid soaked solo productions such as stone cold classics like “Champagne Days, Cocaine Nights” on his eponymous label and most notably the 2004 EP What Happened. Indeed, the latter EP was so influential that all three cuts (including “Disco Lights” which gets a retouch on this recent EP), tend to reappear in sets and mixes with an eerie regularity. This EP is simply an extension of his dumbfounding omnipresence.
Oni Ayhun, OAR004
Sometimes you just need to let shit get out of hand. Oni Ayhun seems to understand this perfectly as nearly everything on his fourth record dives right off the deep end. The text accompanying the record on his site discusses both acid and music, but laden with chemical formulas and instructions it’s difficult to decipher. Even the record’s center label is a skewed picture of which might be clearer had I held on to my Avatar 3D glasses. Needless to say, those looking for a return to the melodic stylings of OAR003 should immediately accept that any traces of melody here are accidental: incidents arising unexpectedly from mixing “alkaline component(s), one or more acid salts, and an inert starch.”
Tensnake, Coma Cat
Despite what seems like a rapid ascent for Hamburg’s Marco Niemerski, the man best known as Tensnake has been honing his craft for over a decade. His breakout Keep Believin’ EP for Endless Flight and 2009 smash hit, In The End (I Want You To Cry) on Running Back sounded so fully realized because he’d worked out the kinks on one-off singles for smaller labels like Trax of Interest, Various Delight Recordings, and Players Paradise, as well as releases on his own Mirau imprint. With the Coma Cat EP, released by nu-disco hotspot Permanent Vacation, it appears Niemerski’s sound has crystalized even further around the neon tone palatte and taut arrangements that brought him many plaudits on In The End.
Tom Trago, Voyage Direct Remixes Part 2
Last year’s Voyage Direct album saw Amsterdam’s Tom Trago manipulate his disco-house to fit a variety of templates, establishing himself as a producer unafraid to cross genre boundaries for dance floor success. The first edition of remixes for Voyage Direct
Matt O’Brien/Peter Van Hoesen & Donato Dozzy, Into the Red/Talis
The Belgian label Curle Recordings continues its impressive release schedule with a pan-European heavyweight techno line-up. Representing the UK is the refreshingly unorthodox Matt O’Brien. Favouring a quality over quantity approach that has not yet projected him into the limelight, O’Brien’s selectiveness is nonetheless admirable. Last year, he delivered two of 2009’s best remixes — the eerie take on The Subliminal Kid on his Offkey Industries imprint, and the insane bell chiming cacophony-led reshape of Roberto Bosco on Mowar — along with the excellent From the Periphery EP. While “Into the Red” marks a fresh departure for O’Brien, it sees him maintain the same high standards.
James Blake, The Bells Sketch
I’m not exactly sure how to peg James Blake. But if dubstep professes to be music made for dance floors, then the young British producer almost certainly isn’t making it. His proudly unquantized beats (throbs of crunchy sound more than proper drum-hits) skitter in and out of the mix like confused cockroaches; his melodies, while warm, soulful, and usually ripped from records made in far simpler musical times, float over the proceedings like a minute-old ganja cloud — still pungently present, yet barely there. Despite sounding more than a bit like Untold, who’s championed his productions as labelhead at Hemlock, refashioned as a sleazy lounge act, Blake brings a strangely anthemic quality to productions which otherwise would probably be too experimental (or just downright blazed) for club consumption. Indeed, his latest offering, The Bells Sketch for the seriously in-bloom Hessle Audio label, has already attracted the attention of adventurous jocks like Dub War residents Dave Q and Alex Incyde, who managed to move floors (while simultaneously weirding them out, in a good way) when they each closed out recent sets with the A-side. It’s Blake’s most sophisticated record to date, but that doesn’t mean his dance floor credentials make a whole lot more sense.
Red Rack’em, All I Ever Wanted
I read a review recently that took issue with a release not treading new ground, of sticking to familiar pathways within its genre. Like rock music with all of the best chords already used up, there will always be a certain amount of familiarity within electronic music. The 808 and 909 drum sounds are an instantly recognizable feature within the medium, while there are a plethora of production tricks and sounds that are aped, rehashed and re-molded by the bulk of producers. Red Rack’em may not be breaking new soil with his latest twelve for the coveted Untracked label, but through employing some of the classic deep house sounds and themes on the release he also touches on that vital quality of creating a classic vibe.
Elektro Guzzi, Hexenschuss/Elastic Bulb
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.
Falty DL, All In The Place
The music of New York based producer Drew Lustman, best known as Falty DL, could lazily be described as dubstep, in part because his records have found homes on Planet Mu and Ramp Recordings, two labels that have pushed a sound which could also be imprecisely termed dubstep. So does his appearance on Rush Hour, an old house standby, mean he’s gone and made a house record? No, the All In The Place EP still contains his characteristically fragmented two-step seen through a kaleidoscope of sounds.
RezKar, Cosmos
Rezenio Kariem may not be a name that rolls of the tongue but the reclusive South African producer is slowly building a name for himself under the RezKar moniker. Until last year his output had mainly arrived by way of little known net labels such as Jon7.net Microlabel and Mixomat Recordings, and he may have languished under the radar if not for a stunning contribution to the Meakusma Rüts 2/3 compilation and a couple releases for Altered Moods Recordings. 2010 will very likely see RezKar’s profile heightened with an upcoming release on Running Back and this Cosmos 12″ (also released as 7-track digital release) already out at of the tail end of last year.
BBH: South Street Player, (Who?) Keeps Changing Your Mind
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.
Mike Monday, Yoppul
For the past decade the oft underrated U.K. producer Mike Monday has been busy dropping inspired remixes and tracks which range from understated to bleeding obvious. For those who know his style, the phrase “house music with a splash of humour” tends to ring pretty true. His tracks are all wonk and weirdness twinned with rudely competent production which befits an Oxford music production graduate. And as he’s found his releases on a number of labels of note, from Freerange, Simple, Buzzin Fly and even Om, it’s apparent that label owners are rather partial to his idiosyncratic take on house. This time it’s the Get Physical crew who buy into the Mike Monday experience with Yoppul on their Get Digital imprint. Once again it’s rather impressive, if not as memorable as his releases on Playtime.
Aufgang, Barock Remixes
What kind of music would people like Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, or Johann Sebastian Bach be making if they were alive today? Would they have stuck to their roots and continued to play the music they were famous for and helped make famous? Or would they have updated their existing systems and ideas, used the latest technology and reflected their newer influences? It’s highly likely they would choose the latter (if you can look past the sheer logistical impossibilities of Bach especially surviving for so long). A group like Aufgang may well present us with the closest approximation of what someone like Bach may have sounded like some three hundred years after his time. The combination of Francesco Tristano, Rami Khalifé — both classically trained pianists from the prestigious Julliard school — and Aymeric Westrich, a formidable percussionist in his own right, lends itself to an interesting new take on both classical and electronic music. Taken from their self-titled debut album, “Barock” is reinterpreted by Wareika, Mondkopf and Robert Hood who all personalize the track and take it in whole new directions.
FCL, Vocals For Everyone
East Flanders was a veritable gold mine of house fundamentals in 2009, thanks to the underestimated work of the young We Play House Recordings. With an aesthetic as direct and to-the-point as the label’s chosen name, the line has typically favored retro synthetic palettes and low-slung earworm grooves. And though all of their records have been worth a look, when you start tallying last year’s out-and-out stunners — San Soda’s “Dorsnee,” Dynamodyse’s “Gare du Nord,” Reggie Dokes’ “Dancefloor Spectacle,” Russ Gabriel’s “Le Voyeur,” Ramon Tapia & Maxim Lany’s “Highway,” to name names — you can’t help but wonder how they’ve kept such a modest profile. WPH starts the new year with an in-house affair, a quartet of 90’s throwbacks from the team-up of label founder Red D and the producer behind roughly half the label’s output, San Soda. And yes, as the title suggests, you may sing along to them.
Maayan Nidam, Don’t Know Why/Feels Like
When I first sampled the little sips of this 12-inch on the Hardwax website a couple months ago, I immediately felt that tingly warmth in my chest that seems to indicate something worth investigating. After the release of her debut album Night Long last year, Maayan Nidam left me wondering: what next? She seemed to have shed the Miss Fitz moniker for all but remixes, and in stepping into her own name she had moved, too, into a new era of emotional, mature, and even contemplative dance music. While her productions past were always composed with taste and precision, the artful formulation of the full-length upgraded her brand of dry-but-funky minimalism to an intoxicated, swaying jazzy wonderland.
Martin Landsky, Werkschau EP
“Life moves pretty fast,” were the worldly words of wisdom from Ferris Bueller. In terms of electronic music, trends move pretty fast and depending on the style they are crafted in it’s easy for tracks to sound dated after a period of time. Martin Landsky is putting his tracks to this test with a forthcoming LP aptly titled Werkschau (retrospective). As a teaser we have the Werkschau EP featuring two early tracks from the Naked EP from 2000, and a reworking of one of his most popular tracks “1000 Miles” from more recent years, updated here under the name “2000 Miles.” Choosing to remake a track he only released three and half years ago is an odd choice.
Various Artists, Laid006
In only a handful of months the still fresh Laid imprint has made quite a name for itself. Despite being born in the shadow of its older brother label, Dial, Laid has quickly established its own area of expertise, pummeling record buyers with five solid singles of dance floor-primed house music while Dial vascilates between floor friendly and leftfield sounds. The sixth record to don a lux Laid sleeve is the first showcasing multiple artists’ originals, for which they’ve collected some of the freshest names around for a survey of the current state of deep house on both sides of the Atlantic. Hamburger Christopher Rau and New Yorker-cum-Berliner John Roberts are both members of the extended Dial family while New Yorker Fred P. has earned well deserved heaps of praise for his work as Black Jazz Consortium. It’s perhaps no surprise that Laid006 is about as solid a record as you can get, throwing three distinctive and in vogue sounds on one wax slab.