[Skylax Recordings]

What skeletons lurk inside of house music? Few styles of music are as associated with parties as house, and yet its history is full of tragedy. Late 80′s inner-city life, Reaganomics, the AIDS epidemic, and more all serve to remind us that house didn’t emerge out of a vacuum but out of a very specific time and place, one full of excitement as well as heartbreak. “House isn’t so much a sound as a situation,” Terre Thaemlitz reminded listeners on his 2008 album Midtown 120 Blues, wherein she reminded a new generation of house producers and aficionados, those who weren’t around for the genre’s formative days, of the context in which house was born. A couple years before Midtown 120 Blues Thaemlitz explored similar themes under the name K-S.H.E. (Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion) for the project Routes Not Roots, released on his own Comatonse Recordings. Given its relative scarcity and the popularity of Midtown 120 Blues, French label Skylax saw fit to reissue the album, something for which we should all be grateful.

Whereas Midtown 120 Blues focused on Disney’s buy-out of 42nd Street and Madonna’s wholesale hijacking of vogue culture (among other things), Routes Not Roots concerns itself primarily with the issues of sexual identity. These themes manifest themselves as found sources, the narration of a transgendered Japanese person (“Saki-chan Pt.1/2″) and a monologue about Terre’s own rough experience with some queens on the subway. As with everything that Thaemlitz does, it’s an album that asks you to think about the sounds you are hearing, the messages you are receiving and the context in which you’re hearing it all.

But what about the music? To be blunt, it’s pretty stellar. It offers immaculately produced deep house that retains a very rugged, almost abrasive feeling. “Down Home Kami-Sakunobe” combines propulsive rhythms and lush backgrounds with upright bass lines, stabbing pianos, and dejected violins, while “Hobo Train’”s crushing hi-hat onslaught and guitar strumming set the stage upon which a found source speaks out about the falling of wages and lack of opportunities for work. “Double Secret” is the most sweetly-melodic of the tracks here, using Terre’s own voice atop the kind of more modern, reduced house that reared its head on Midtown 120 Blues.

These are just a handful of the many treats that Routes Not Roots has to offer, from expansive, slick house jams (“B2B”) to meditative electro-acoustic pieces (“Head (In My Private Lounge, My Pad)”). Rare is the house album that seems to moonlight as a dissertation as well, but Thaemlitz never lets the heady bits of her work distract from the music on offer. The word “roots” is so often employed in house music that at some point it loses its meaning. In our culture obsessed with authenticity, with having “been there at the beginning,” with sticking to one’s roots, Thaemlitz elegantly shows that it’s not these roots that unite us but rather our common experiences. After listening to Routes Not Roots one has certainly shared in an experience.

[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.

[Skylax Records]

In 2006, Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles and several other aliases) released Routes Not Roots, an album on his own Comatonse label under the name Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion K-S.H.E, or K-S.H.E. for short. Being a relatively tiny label with limited runs it’s an album not exactly easy to come by, and admittedly I myself haven’t heard the entire thing. But now French house label Skylax is endeavouring to reissue the K-S.H.E material in a series of newly-curated vinyl EPs and later on CD. It’s an excellent move on part of the label and Thaemlitz, because as stepping stones towards as the landmark DJ Sprinkles album Midtown 120 Blues these tunes need to be heard.

The music written and produced as K-S.H.E is essentially deep house akin to the music released under the DJ Sprinkles banner, though where that LP was often papery thin and soaked-through with melancholy, the beats on House Explosion I are built solid and confident. “Down Home Kami-Sakunobe” coasts on lush pads and gentle drums before Thaemlitz introduces waves of pure, compressed heat in the form of rousing violin riffs that set the track aflame, infusing each layer and element with an irresistible, contagious energy. Contrasting downbeat pads with lively, syncopated percussion, “Double Secret (Dub)” sounds almost cheerful, uplifting even; then the vocal sample is wedged in, dragging things down about twenty fathoms. The song’s tense and surprising push-and-pull between moods is arguably more effective than any simple downtempo number could have been, and it’s a testament to the Thaemlitz’ craft: this goes far beyond dance music, layered with innumerable themes and motifs, both unspoken and unspeakable. On the flip, the 12-minute “Hobo Train” sounds even closer to Midtown, its dust-caked drums, spare atmosphere and rousing vocal sample sounding like that album’s precursor — and considering that album was a masterpiece, this is no small feat. Re-releasing obscure material can often bring up questions of necessity, but there’s no doubting how essential the K-S.H.E material is, providing the once-missing-link in Thaemlitz’ enigmatic persona as well as an early clue to the late-2000s deep house movement.

Podcasts, podcasts and podcasts. They keep on coming and, if you’re like me, it’s tough to keep up with all of them. Semi-regular series like mnml ssgs, weekly series like RA and ours truly, and even bi-weekly series like FACT all roll out the goods, not to mention plenty of other mix sets as well as one offs on Soundcloud and scattered blogs. So while this list is far from comprehensive and certainly from only one person’s perspective, these are ten of the best mixes I’ve heard so far this year, hopefully offering some signposts to where you can find some soon-to-be favorites for yourself.

mnml ssgs mix 50: Peter van Hoesen
I hate to be predictable, but sometimes it’s necessary. The fact a Peter Van Hoesen mix tops my mixes of the year so far is perhaps typical of my tastes, but what can I say? This is undoubtedly the best mix I’ve heard in 2010, straying from the dark, heady techno you may expect from Van Hoesen and into housier territory. Recent favorites from Theo Parrish, Juju & Jordash and Levon Vincent all feature here, as well as Ben Frost’s hospital room experiments and van Hoesen’s own grooves.

Wax Treatment #9: Surgeon
For those of us who spend far too much time browsing Hard Wax’s online bins, the monthly Wax Treatment podcast was a more than welcome addition to our podcast feeds. Dub and techno often mixed by DJ Pete, the ninth edition saw British Murder Boy and all-around badman Surgeon step up to the decks for a blistering set of 140 bpm funky and techno. A prelude to his as-of-writing-forthcoming fabric 53 mix, Wax Treatment #9 sees Joker, Cheap and Deep, and Autechre all get mixed up in a taut 50 minutes. It’s been archived, so if you missed it on your first go around here’s your chance to hear it.

OTAM Mix 23: Kassem Mosse – ‘Workshopmix’
Most of us know Kassem Mosse’s spectacular production skills, but he’s a damn good DJ as well, as proven by this mix he did for blog Out There A Minute earlier this year. It’s quintessentially Workshop: bringing you both back to house sounds of yore while simultaneously forging a new sound. Shedding the past, perhaps? Attach any grad student word you like, but don’t let it distract you from what this mix really is: rough, jacking analog house at its best.

The Bunker Podcast 66: Newworldaquarium
I wasn’t in New York for the premier of Unsound New York festival, and it bums me out every time I’m reminded. If you missed out as well and salivated at my colleagues’ Unsound coverage you should be thrilled to know that Newworldaquarium’s two hour set has been utilized by the Bunker as part of their outstanding podcast series. A trip through some of the finest house music around (as well as some yet-to-be-released goodies from NWAQ himself), you owe it to yourself to download this one stat and dive in. I may not have been there to hear this set live, but at least I know good it was.

RA.203: 2562
Sometimes you stumble upon a mix that isn’t necessarily a major revelation, but just mixes up a bunch of your recent favorites really, really well. For me, that mix was RA’s 203rd podcast by Dave Huismans. Instra:mental’s Mount Kimbie remix, Shake’s “The Other One,” DJ Qu’s “Party People Clap”: they’re all here, and they all work wonders next to each other. There were, of course, a handful of tracks new to me that made me gasp with delight (Untold’s brilliant “Come Follow We”), but this is not a mix that teaches you a history lesson or unearths lost gems. This is a snapshot of the present, a mix of what you want to hear right now, and a really great one at that.

Fred P — Wunderkind Mix
Coming from the tri-state area, I have to say it’s been a great couple years for house music in our region. Not only am I buying more domestic records, but the spotlight has been firmly focused on the New York sound orbiting around Underground Quality. Fred P, aka Black Jazz Consortium, has been a breakout star with his emotive productions and subterranean DJ sets, and this mix for Wunderkind was a standout. His recent appearance at Sunday Best is sure to remain a summer highlight in my mind, so if you’ve yet to get hip to Fred, this would be a good place to start.

Appleblim — Fabric Promo Mix
Since Skull Disco’s unfortunate demise, Appleblim has decided to step back from the mixing desk and become more of an all-important curator for the burgeoning UK scene. He still appears in co-production with friends, but none would doubt that his most important contribution at the moment is his label Apple Pips and his killer DJ sets, of which this promo mix for Fabric is one. Highlighting upcoming Pips releases from Joe, Al Tourettes and Greena, as well as recent favorites from Scuba and Addison Groove, this mix is a perfect statement of the many shapes “dubstep” has taken in early 2010.

FACT 150: Marcel Dettmann
It would be hard to argue that Marcel Dettmann’s Berghain 02 is not one of the most important mix CDs of the past five years, but most of us realize that it’s not perfect. Its incorporation of older tunes, while applause worthy, is still a little jarring. He’s only improved as a DJ though, and FACT’s 150th mix is the best set I’ve heard from him yet. Berghain style techno may be, to some, yesterday’s news, but Dettmann proves he’s more vital than ever, combining vintage Drexciyan electro and Aphex Twin productions with recent hits from Morphosis and Redshape to emerge with a set of truly timeless techno.

RA.188: Terre Thaemlitz
Yes, another RA cast. This one’s much different though, as we’re treated to an hour and a half of blissful electroacoustic ambiance courtesy of the peerless Terre Thaemlitz. Plenty of her own tunes feature, sitting with Oval and Michael Nesmith for a beautiful set that might not be for everyone, but endears itself to those who let it in. The climax has to be the exclusive DJ Sprinkles edit of Depeche Mode’s 1986 Martin Gore-sung masterpiece “World Full of Nothing,” extending to a repetitive, serene ten minutes.

Talking Shopcast 07: Szare
At first I was unsure about including one of LWE’s podcasts, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge what I think was a stunning set of ‘casts. One of the best for me was the blistering Talking Shopcast live set from Szare, aka 19.26.1.18.5. Featuring dark, swinging cuts from his Horizontal Ground records as well as some unreleased tunes, it shows Szare to be a very promising young talent whose take on techno is both classically based and relentlessly futuristic. Tracks from Actress, Dettmann and David Bowie only make things better.

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.

For Terre Thaemlitz, audio is never “innocent.” From Thaemlitz’s earliest ambient recordings, through a series of incredible electro-acoustic projects for the Mille Plateaux label, to a current triple-life as producer of astringently political “radio shows,” deep house auteur as DJ Sprinkles and K-SHE, and writer/polemicist, Thaemlitz’s project has always been to unsettle any putative audience’s assumptions of what constitutes knowledge and politics. Thaemlitz is also possibly dance music’s finest socio-political commentator. Not to mention her continual “queering of the pitch.” With DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues somehow managing to be one of the best dance music albums of both 2008 and 2009 (thanks partly to a staggered release schedule, but also to the ineffectual nature of most any of its supposed “competitors”), it’s time to take the temperature of the “ideology of the dance floor” with our scene’s most articulate outsider.

How did DJ Sprinkles come about? I know it’s a pun on Annie Sprinkle and golden showers, and I know that it was your DJ name while you were DJing at clubs in the late 1980s. Can you give us a snapshot of that era of your life?

Terre Thaemlitz: Yeah, I’ve told the DJ Sprinkles name story quite a few times, and it’s not very interesting to begin with, but…. Yes, Annie Sprinkle was doing her safer sex workshops near where I lived, and I’d have to say the reference to her was half homage, half parody. In late ’80s New York, DJ names had to be tough – so I wanted something totally pussy and embarrassing. The whole “nickname” thing always struck me as weird anyway, especially since most nicknames assigned to me in life were not favorable. Around that time there was a television commercial for an instant cake mix complete with frosting and candy sprinkles. In that commercial the announcer said, “With sprinkles in the mix,” which struck me as a lame hip-hop shout-out… you know, “Sprinkles in the mix.” Weirdly, I heard Paul Miller got his inspiration for the “DJ Spooky” name from a box of Post monster cereal (Frankenberry, Boo-Berry or Count Chocula — I forget which… do you have them down under?). I guess the relation between DJ names and processed baked goods is a New York thang.

Yes, I can’t really imagine there being an Australian DJ named DJ Meat Pie. You began DJing in late ’80s New York — what was club culture like in NY back then? There’s an accepted history of dance music, NY clubs etc but what was the “reality” of the time, from someone in the trenches?

I wouldn’t dare presume to represent the “reality” of the time, since I always felt like an outsider in clubs — partly because I never did drugs or drank. I also never had the knack for sexual cruising or other things. I was more the nerdy wall flower type. If I wasn’t working, then I was just going along with friends. I usually got bored because I was taking everything in sober, trying to enjoy the music but it was mostly too vocal heavy. I think it’s fair to say there were a lot more door policies and exclusionary things going on back then. Race, gender and clothes played a big part on who got in and who didn’t. Drugs were also much more important, which clearly influences the memories of many people when they talk about what euphoric times they had. That’s not a slam, it’s simply so. The genres of dance music were also not so commercially developed and regimented, so stylistically there was also a bit more discontinuity, but major label wailing diva crap was everywhere, even in the clubs people talk about as having been “deep.” In New York, The Loft was really the only club I liked for the music, and the Puerto Rican drag club La Escuelita had the best atmosphere for me. When I first moved to the city in ’86 I remember liking Madam Rose’s and 1018, but what did I know. I never liked the Pyramid and the whole East Village Deee-Lite/RuPaul crowd, although I lived right next door to the club. The East Village scene had a tendency to take itself too creatively.

You still DJ as DJ Sprinkles — see the Deeperama mix disc series. What are you interested in, what’s your approach, as a DJ? You’re not interested in the seamless mix I’m guessing, and I really like the way you let songs play out as wholes, rather than creating non-dynamic plateaus…

I like DJs who play like they’re just sharing their private record collection with friends. In fact, I began DJing because my roommates complained my record collection was taking up too much space and I either had to do something with them or sell them. I like to play tracks from beginning to end because most tracks have a structure to them, and I like the rise and fall. I also like the idea of killing time, letting the tracks take up time, not rushing. Maybe this is partly because my first DJ gigs were always all-nighters, so I had to stretch a crate of records over six or eight hours. I think people are a lot more patient with playing tracks all the way through today. In the ’80s, it was difficult. People got bored and left the floor half way through a track. Maybe part of that is an impatience that came with certain drugs — quick loss of interest, always needing new stimuli. If I’m really in a good dancing mood, I like when a track just goes on forever, totally getting lost in the moment. I mean, the fact that most of my own tracks are in the ten minute range pretty much says what I like to DJ. Tracks under five minutes drive me nuts. I usually re-edit them on my computer into longer mixes so I don’t have to feel rushed making an extended version on the fly by mixing between two copies of the same record. I’ve built up a lot of custom mixes I’ve made over the years. I always love when people come up as I’m playing some totally self-made mix nobody on earth has, and they start going off on how they love that particular mix, how they bought that record for that mix, etc. They’re so sincere and enthusiastic, I just nod and go along with it. It’s cute, really.

The sense I get of any overarching “project” you may have in all of your work is this: generalization is the work of ideology and capital; in order to tease out the implications of power and/for the “margins,” we need to work from specifics. Hence the key thread in Midtown 120 Blues, of disavowing the universalist claims of “house is a feeling,” “the house nation” and instead grappling with the specific politics of house’s origins.

That’s basically correct, but I am not concerned with origins, which are another kind of naturalist claim that relies heavily on identity constructs (who constitutes the “true originator class”? etc.). I am concerned with contexts. Contexts of production, contexts of distribution, contexts of reception. And these contexts are always politicized, and about social relations. Often about consumer relations. The title of the K-S.H.E album Routes not Roots was clearly a reference to this notion of complicating concepts of origin. Because of its autobiographical elements, Midtown 120 Blues can initially come across as a testimonial about a certain era, but it’s really more about how images of a previous era are contextualized within the current music marketplace. It is the process of interpreting those autobiographical elements today — and not the subjects of the stories themselves — that are at issue. This is all pretty much laid out in the introduction monologue. And it’s interesting that a lot of bloggers really hate the parts where I’m talking. I can understand this on a sonic level — my voice sucks — but beyond that I think there is a connection between the way people rant against the intro track, and the marketplace through which they encounter that track. And this is a good reaction for me. To have people debate a little about the album is much more interesting than simply “loving it.” I think it’s good if media involves things other than “entertainment value,” if only a little. The marketplace is not very forgiving, though.

I should have put origins in scare quotes, really. “Origins.” You must find the current nostalgia for deep house within club culture rather interesting.

Yes, the “current” “nostalgia” for “deep house” within “club culture” is “rather interesting.” [Laughs] Hmm, but not really. I mean, it’s heavily filtered through a European (German) lens, and current production techniques are totally different, so it’s culturally and sonically quite divergent from the classic crap sampler based stuff of twenty years ago. As a DJ it’s quite hard to mix a lot of digitally produced tracks with the old vinyl stuff because the sound is so sharp these days. Those keyboard emulator plug-ins are so clean, and everybody’s mixes are so hot (treble-heavy, punched up). When you look at the wave forms, everything is compressed and clipped. I also think everything has become too much about “music” — I mean, musicianship, jazz, artistry, all in the most conventional sense. Then you go to the shopping mall, and they actually play instrumental house as muzak — and it’s not all bad, as far as house goes. That can’t be a good sign.

You mention bloggers hating “the parts where [you're] talking” on Midtown 120 Blues. Which I find interesting, because for me it’s the monologue at the end of “Ball’r (Madonna Free Zone)” that’s most affecting about Midtown 120 Blues, addressing as it does the modes of recapitulation and incorporation that “minority” cultural expressions inevitably experience in their mainstream uptake. Madonna’s line in “Vogue” about it making no difference “if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl” is completely disingenuous — and in a way I preferred Malcolm McLaren’s uptake of Vogueing. Three questions here:

Firstly, some observers argue that precisely this kind of “mainstream uptake” inveigles the underground into the mainstream — a Trojan horse approach. To these people, Madonna turning the art of Vogueing into a number one hit exposes the masses to what was once a hyper-specific dance form for certain parts of the Queer community. I find this idea problematic — what are your thoughts?

Clearly I find it fucked up. But what is really fucked up is the underlying demand for mass acceptance — whether that demand comes from within, or is imposed from without. A lot of drag queens love Madonna, and my little rant at the end of “Ball’r” really described a frequent thing, where people within the vogue scene would request her tracks. Of course, most transgendered cultures are haunted by aspirations for “passability,” which means being able to “pass” as that which is most commonplace and boring in dominant culture. It is about transforming oneself into something totally banal — which is incredibly difficult. Few ever achieve that target banality, and the gap between where one “started” and how far one has “come” in transitional processes involves a lot of radical transgression. Dangerous, physically and emotionally threatening transgression, all in an attempt to reach a point of “safety.”

It’s always fueled by a sweetly romantic desire to simply fit in with that which has excluded us. For me, this is really hard-core. Emotionally difficult. In some ways, maybe the relationships between transgendered communities and dominant cultures are like those of children who continue aspiring to please their abusive parents, if only in the hope of avoiding a drunken beating. So, it would be false to try to represent the “transgendered underground” as something completely against or divested of dominant culture. It would be false to say Madonna has no place in drag culture. Rather, what is her place? I guess this is where we get into post-colonialism and thinking beyond a binarism of “invader/invaded.” This question of what Madonna means to transgendered people is a much more interesting question than what “our” place has or has not become in mainstream culture as a result of Madonna’s mass popularity. Mainstream assimilation as a goal — giving power to the very idea of the necessity for a Trojan horse — is something I don’t want to invest any energy into.

Secondly, I suspect people like to read your address of specific moments such as the one in “Ball’r” as “redress.” But there’s a far more resigned tone to your work, right? Or am I off base?

I’m not sure if I follow your question exactly. When you say “resigned” I guess you mean I’m not proposing a way to correct things, or saying what has to be done in the future. Yes, we’re totally co-opted, even before “scenes” define themselves, let alone represent themselves through histories. I can imagine stuff like the Madonna rant coming across as a “redress,” but she was widely debated back in the day in those terms, and it’s not about hindsight. I mean, I really ranted like that back then to people requesting Madonna. [Laughs]

Right. I guess I meant that some people I know think you’re “taking on” Madonna — righting wrongs. Whereas you’re more about addressing contexts, which doesn’t have that frisson of battling the “enemy” (as such). And thirdly — Madonna, Kylie et al. are surprisingly resilient gay pop icons — what’s with that? What does it say to you about gay culture?

I think it says gay culture is not that strange or distant from pop culture generally. Interpret that positively or negatively as you like, depending on who and where you are.

What’s your take on house’s racial/sexual politics? Simon Reynolds wrote that disco was borne of a “double exclusion,” being black and gay, and of course, house was positioned as “disco’s revenge”…

I think all of these discussions are complicated by the fact that for a long time a majority of house producers have been white Europeans. I mean, I don’t have statistics to back me up, but it sure seems that way to me. And the EU deep house scene is incredibly heterosexual. The presence of women at a lot of events is often framed by “girlfriend” status (as opposed to the equally suspect tradition of “fag hag” status). So we are in an era where there is a dire need to complicate the systems of representation through which we “feel” house as a primarily “black” experience, and to a lesser extent in most peoples’ minds these days, a “queer” experience. This unspoken dominant context, to me, seems to be the invisible drive of today’s racial/sexual politics in the house scene, which is a dynamic in the construction and reception of “black musics” generally. As a listener, are you a fetishizer, or an originator? Neither of these positions appeals to me. In this sense, I don’t think house’s racial/sexual politics offer us anything particularly different or inspiring. But I think aspects of the history of house, and analyses such as Reynolds’, can give us insights into the ways in which cultural acceptance and exclusion operate in relation to an industry focused on the marketing of cultural peripheries to a mainstream.

All of us, of course, exist in multiple social contexts from fringe to center, often with multiple cultural identities. And in saying that, I am by no means saying we are “all equal” within society or that these crossovers neutralize or balance out — to the contrary, I am saying the imbalances of prejudice and discrimination are not as linear as identity-based social analysis implies, and therefore I feel their mechanisms remain obscured. Learning to complicate our simultaneous relationships to seemingly exclusive cultural arenas (often founded in consumerist identities) strikes me as the core issue underneath racial/sexual politics. I think this is hinted at in Reynolds’ notion of feeling a “double exclusion” — as opposed to simply feeling “excluded.” I realize the main interpretation of his phrase is about a double exclusion in relation to dominant white, heterosexual culture. But there is also the complex exclusion of homosexuality within the African American community, the dynamics of which are different from that in Latino and other “black” (ie. non-white) communities, all of these angles are still exploding today. We need a kind of 3D way of looking at social processes, which go beyond the 2D linear identity-based models that over simplify things into oppressor/oppressed — which implies a prioritization of individuals over social processes in the discussion. In the end, “changing the world” is less about a personal choice to “live right,” and more about cultural issues of education (the value systems of which influence those “personal choices”).

Lovebomb (especially the video) and Routes Not Roots (which built most of its “black” house rhythms on “white” country music breaks) were about the problems of trying to complicate the relationships between amorphous issues of race, sexuality and gender when my language is conditioned by my own upbringing under US “black/white” race and identity politics. I think both albums present the limitations of that kind of discourse, and at the same time try to constructively convey ideas through those systems in the personal absence of something more appropriate. Lately, I have had several people come up to me and say when they first saw Lovebomb years ago they really couldn’t accept my placement of race issues in the project, and they had to ideologically reject it initially, only to finally come back to it several years later with a different sense of how they themselves had projected certain issues of race and identity into the film. For someone to have that kind of slow, ongoing relationship to a project is more than I could have imagined, but then again, why is it unusual? Why is it so hard to “hear” house music’s histories? Why isn’t this silence upsetting to more people? 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? It’s like we don’t even fucking try.

You ask, “Why do so few house projects ask us to struggle along with them?” Is it because there’s a canonisation of certain political-historical moments in house culture — i.e., if you want to talk about politics in house music, you can simply mention “Baby Wants To Ride,” or The Children’s “Freedom,” and it gets you off the hook.

Yes, it’s like talking about fine art in that way — the well placed reference speaks louder than actual references to content, and is a cloak for an absence of analysis. But I think it’s also about the genre itself. Like, would you kill me if I simply said straight out, and not as an excuse but as a complaint, “It’s only dance music”? It’s like people in the U.S. trying to talk about the Vietnam war through 60′s rock, or the civil rights movement through Motown. It mistakes a consumer relationship to media of the time for an active understanding of the times themselves. This happens because we are told to perceive music as a kind of testimonial of authenticity — authenticity of the artist, of their context, etc. When we feel connected to the music, we feel we share in that authenticity. And that is a very difficult thing for most people to unpack. Demystifying audio feels like a betrayal of the music and producers — like an insult to them. Or worse, an insult to ourselves and what we have internalized. But it’s not an insult. It’s about realizing the constructed nature of our relationships to media. And that is, ultimately, a key element of all historical analysis.

Unfortunately, even if a producer such as myself has an interest in producing “political works,” the industry has countless blocks set up on all levels. Content gets censored, restructured, repackaged, edited, cut out… The level of historical analysis offered by most dance music is on about the same level as an elementary school first grade history book. That’s a precondition of audio content — that it is inherently dumbed down. Yet, we can read those books in critical ways and elaborate on the cultural dynamics that created the book — what did and did not make it into the history book, what was considered most important, least important, etc. This is how I look at music — not in what it says directly, but what it says about the culture that presented it as saying something to begin with. It is a deconstructive process of listening through which audio analysis begins to offer deeper insights. One of the difficulties of popular music criticism is that it focuses on the testimonial and first-hand knowledge, which are about fictions of “truth.” I am interested in the ways in which “thinking” can be distinct from claims of “knowing,” since there is a common misconception that cultural criticism is about “people who think they know how we should live our lives.” However, in rejecting the idea of “knowing,” I am also not interested in that kind of vague, dismissive cop-out, “but hey, what do I know?” I think we can have knowledge without it resulting in fascism. Fascism is about a specific relationship between power and knowledge — not various forms of knowledge themselves, which are by and large diffused and impotent. Analysis needn’t be oppressive.

When thinking about social problems, I always avoid hypothesizing futures or “solutions,” since those concepts are usually too symptomatic and tainted by the cultural dynamics of the problems they attempt to resolve. It’s also a bit too optimistic for me, to think there are solutions. A “time of peace” does not strike me as a realistic possibility. So, in our symptomatic idiocy, we are left with struggle, historical materialism, and analysis in an attempt to more clearly engage the oppressions of today’s cultural processes. This kind of motivation stemming from a necessity to actively challenge the present is quite different than being motivated by desires for what we wish to happen, and I think the ensuing cultural momentum can also be quite different. But this “devoid of dreams” approach is clearly not about a “way of life for everyone” — and the fact that it lacks an aura of mass appeal makes it all the more well suited as an approach toward challenging homogenization — whether that homogenization be fascist or humanist. It becomes a process of resistance that works with notions of context and limitation, rather than aspiring to transcend them. It’s a middle-finger to universalisms.

A lot of people have leaped on Midtown 120 Blues as your most “approachable” record, or something along those lines, or that it’s another “leap sideways.” But I’m more interested in DJ Sprinkles’ conceptual consistency, whether it be the “Sloppy 42nds”/Love For Sale thread, the way Midtown 120 Blues acts as a “sequel” to K-S.H.E’s Routes Not Roots. Can you talk about this?

It’s nice to hear those threads get followed. The key difference between Routes Not Roots and Midtown 120 Blues is that the former was completely self-controlled and released, whereas the latter was produced for a label with established distribution (Mule). This affected the types of tracks included, the design, the amount of text or other data, etc. I think Midtown 120 Blues has a degree of stylistic continuity that it would probably not have if I had released it myself, which is maybe a part of what people are responding to. But I really think it’s just the first time a lot of people have had access to my dance music, since Mule is fairly widely distributed, and as a genre house is obviously more “listenable” and familiar than some of the other stuff I do. But as you pointed out, there are connections between my projects in various genres. I like reformatting certain themes or ideas into different genres. For example, the dance album G.R.R.L. and electroacoustic album Couture Cosmetique both came out together and have the theme of fractured gender identity, but in totally different languages. There is a graphic connection in the use of silhouette figures on both album covers, but that’s the only real hint they are related. The fact that music distributors and shops are so focused on particular genres means there are often instances where a shop might carry one project but not touch another. Most people in Japan only know my house music. Most Europeans know the Mille Plateaux stuff. Most North Americans know the old Instinct ambient albums. It’s a really simple map of cultural and ideological interests. I like the idea of people having to cross those economic and territorial borders to follow the threads. Maybe that is also about my teenage experiences tracking down electronic music in the American Midwest. The fact that it was hard to trace was what kept it from being pop. That was important to me. It still is.

There’s another thread in your records, the way you splice vocal samples to emphasize the “sisters,” this happens on Midtown 120 Blues‘ “Sisters, I Don’t Know What This World Is Coming To,” K-She’s “Hobo Train”… There are other examples, right? In the words of the horrific Pauline Hanson, “please explain.”

Maybe just to better explain, you are talking about when I edit samples using “brothers and sisters” so that they only say “sisters.” This has a three-fold meaning in relation to feminism (the decentralization of a male target audience within electronic music), queer culture (“sister” as a term of endearment between men, as well as between lesbians), and transgendered culture (you get it already). For me, this is about a specificity of audience identification (how do listeners relate or un-relate to the phrase “sisters”?) — the idea that this record might not have been made for you, as opposed to the all-inclusive invitation of “brothers and sisters”… which, of course, is itself an enclosure in relation to black culture, and more specifically African American culture, etc. The initial phrase itself seems to implode upon itself in that sense.

How do you feel when people respond to your music emotionally? This intrigues me because your materialist approach to sound divests it of emotional content, unless you’re using it as a signifier, to make a specific point, i.e. the ANC Radio Freedom speech that’s molded to fit Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” on Lovebomb.

Of course, we are animals — we respond with emotion. Materialism is not about the evacuation or divestment of emotion. But it does (or can) involve a demystification/denaturalization of the ways in which we interpret our emotional responses. Particularly when we are responding to representational systems, of which I think music is one. The “Apartheid” track on Lovebomb is completely about emotional responses — at first eliciting a feeling of anti-apartheid alliance with the ANC speaker, and then proceeding to challenge that alliance with his increasingly detailed plea for murder and violence. The result is not about going from acceptance to rejection, but to a more intricate investigation of the social implications and responsibilities that come with acceptance — a deromanticization of acceptance back into a material process.

The track is intended as an exercise in re-examining a “natural” or reflexive initial emotional response, and then to think of how we might re-examine other reflexive emotional responses. So for me, emotion is not “bad.” I just think we culturally overemphasize “positive” emotions and place incredible pressure on people to be happy in a world that is, by and large, miserable. Happiness is not a lifestyle, nor is it at the core of acceptance and diversity. It’s a passing emotion mixed in with a million others. Why all the fuss to feel happy when listening to music? It seems incredibly short-sighted and disconnected. Of course, most people use music to “escape,” so that’s part of how we are conditioned to relate to the medium, which also affects how it is produced. Alternate approaches seem annoying and tedious. But I prefer the alternate approaches, and at times there is a joy or pleasure to be found in better understanding one’s oppressions. It doesn’t lessen the emotions. It just filters out a bit of unwanted manipulation from conditioned responses. The fact that we have a kind of cathartic reaction to the genres we like before actually listening and thinking about the specific compositions being played strikes me as manipulation, and makes me uncomfortable.

Sorry, I think my question was a bit messed up. Maybe I’m thinking too much in binaries — that your approach, being not always immediately focused on engendering some kind of emotional identification (“oh, that’s how I feel too”) on the listener’s part, is therefore stripped of emotion. I did just wonder, though, how you felt at being connected to the Clicks & Cuts movement in the late 1990s, through your involvement with the Mille Plateaux label — this kind of post-structuralist, post-musical approach to music-making which for many appeared to privilege the software over “the heart” (form over content etc.) but really ended up completely validating age-old discourses of beauty, seduction etc. Who was it that said, “Oval once subverted software, now they soundtrack perfume ads”?

Do you mean me? Because I think I said something like that about Marcus Popp and Oval, too. [Laughs] Clicks & Cuts was difficult for me because it quickly dominated the Mille Plateaux soundscape, making a-structural electroacoustic projects like mine stylistically incompatible with the label. Towards the end, they were not very enthusiastic about my projects at all, which was a shame since I was really one of the only producers invested in generating social discourse — something they claimed was important to them. Like you said, for the label owner Achim Szepanski, Clicks & Cuts was about a Deleuzian model of a self-generating music machine wherein artistry was irrelevant. As an anti-creative gesture, I can appreciate this. However, the ultimate effect was no different than the disco industry of the ’70s. It offered nothing interesting in terms of cultural production. It simply became a cynical model of how audio distribution functions, which leaves me begging the question, “And then?” That should have been a starting point, but it was their grand finale.

I was recently thinking about DJ Sprinkles as an “invisible DJ.” From what I can tell, Sprinkles isn’t really out there doing the circuit, Sonar, Berghain, etc. Which reflects, in a roundabout fashion, certain ideas about invisibility you’ve discussed before, from the “active invisibility” espoused by The Laurence Rassel Show, to the way you place into question the migratory routes of the DJ as global phenomenon, from NYC to Berlin to Barcelona. Is it a great leap to think about this in relation to the questions about transgender identity and border crossings you raise in Trans-Sister Radio?

No, I don’t think it’s much of a leap at all from DJing to the visa issues raised in Trans-Sister Radio, particularly since employment as a music performer or DJ often involves crossing borders without proper work permits, etc. We all know stories of DJs being turned away from borders because they show up with crates of records and no work permissions, trying to enter as a tourist on vacation. “Yes, I always carry 100 kilos of vinyl records with me –what’s suspicious about that, officer?” But you’re right, I have not really had much success as a DJ in the traditional sense, and haven’t “made the rounds” at festivals. In that sense, my experience as a DJ is entirely average. That averageness is not some cynical experiment — I am not trying to fail. I simply am a kind of failure as a DJ, which, in it’s all-too-familiar banality, has become a part of my “documented” response to mega-hyped DJ culture and it’s pop-star mentality. For me, the late ’80s New York scene was not about the famous DJs with their residencies at big clubs, but more about the majority of people making/playing/buying music and not really “getting anywhere” with it.

Living under capitalism, I like learning to feel comfortable with activity that does not result in success — since non-success is the norm. Trying your best and making it is not the norm — it’s propaganda. Of course I play with notions of hype, too. My over-hyping the “Best DJ” underground grammy from Sally’s II is mostly revenge for being fired a month later for not playing a Gloria Estefan record, but also about playing with the press and promoters’ eagerness for hypability and personality. The entire Comatonse website is a sarcastic hype-engine, sprawling forever, overwhelming the viewer with nothingness. Of course, as the years pass, it all takes on a sense of credibility — as has my image as a DJ in some way. The fact that my name somehow made it into Peter Shapiro’s book Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco is up there on the ridiculometer with my making it into the printed version of the All Music Guide to Rock. WTF. Things like that have completely discredited the music industry in my mind, and I wish to convey that sense of disillusionment to others. It’s about breaking mass media’s hypnotic, propagandistic grip upon us as consumers. Breaking the allure of visibility and pride.

OK. That last sentence is intimately related to your engagement and history with queer politics, I’d guess. And I’m very interested to know where you think queer stands, currently. “Silence = death” was the chant, once upon a time — now I can’t help but feel “visibility = death,” “tolerance = death.” The queer community (such as it may still exist) seems to be off on some weird “tolerance” rap — as though being able to marry makes any serious difference. As though rights can actually ever be “equal.” We’re embarrassed by the specificity of our existence.

Wait, I think some of your math is off. “Silence=Death” was a reference to HIV/AIDS related deaths as a result of U.S. government ambivalence/silence about the epidemic, as well as the effects of our own communal silence/closeting/hiding. So “silence” is negative. But it seems you are using “tolerance” as something considered positive within queer communities — a desire for tolerance with same-sex marriages, etc. In that case, the formula should be “intolerance=death,” right? I’m not trying to be fussy — I’m just trying to figure out exactly which perspective you mean? Because there is a lot of critical work being done on the idea that “visibility=death” — or, that visibility has a down side, and invisibility is not always detrimental; to the contrary, there are ways in which invisibility can provide refuge, flying below radar, etc. Clearly, I feel an affinity for this kind of thinking. Pride movements are totally polluted by Americanization. The same-sex marriage movement actually really only took off in the early ’90s after U.S. HIV/AIDS activists gave up on the idea of the US ever having socialized medicine. As you can read in the current debates around Obama’s health plan, Americans are still too stupid to realize government can be more than a war machine and actually offer social services — they think that would be communism. So, in the ’90s activists turned to spousal coverage as a goal to get health insurance for as many people as possible. The specificity of this need was soon replaced by the more easily sellable humanist plea for romantic tolerance. But, yeah, like you say, it’s more about our tolerance of matrimony than asking for society to be tolerant of something “other than normal.”

Contemporary politics lack revolution, destruction, putting all traditions to the test… no imagination. It’s all about naturalizing our social relations, believing our social relations are the result of evolution, DNA, and other pseudo-science that is ultimately less scientific and more “intelligent design.” It’s totally dangerous. It has nothing to do with building legislation based on our capacity for choice. It’s only about legislating rights for “people without choices” (Who would CHOOSE to be gay? Would anyone CHOOSE to be transgendered? Can you imagine someone CHOOSING to be black? Are you implying anyone would CHOOSE to be a woman?) At what point, and in relation to which “bodies,” do those questions at the root of humanist legislature start to sound ridiculous and insulting to those they claim to protect? On the one hand, we are encourage to feel “pride” in who we are, yet the terms of that pride are completely derogatory and patronizing. It’s not “real pride” associated with empowerment, but a kind of parental pat on the head to the black-sheep child, “Oh, you’re not so bad… be proud of who you are, my little weak one.” This is only about deferring bias, not resolving it, and it will have repercussions.

I guess I was thinking more about a shift in the way I see queer politics playing out — I’d never want to do violence to “Silence=Death” being a fundamental part of addressing the American government’s silence around HIV/AIDS related deaths, but I also saw it working more generally — that the Silence around queer politics both outside and inside the community at that time could enact a “death” of sorts of any revolutionary or emancipatory impulse. There was a need to be seen, to represent community. Whereas now that we’re supposedly visible, I suspect many in the community are interested in something that approaches “being tolerated” — and one way we can fold into mainstream society is by adopting heteronormative tactics like marriage. So in a way, our seeming “visibility” neuters any “powers” we may have. Which is why I like the idea of invisibility being refuge, “flying under the radar” etc. — because I think interesting things can be done at this level. I suspect my logic is fundamentally flawed, and I don’t know if that clarifies what I was saying, but I’m interested in your thoughts.

Okay, so we’re talking about the same thing. But the funny thing about people interpreting something like same-sex marriage as a form of “visibility” is that, on a cultural level, it is not granting visibility to anything new. It is not about visibility at all. It’s just about conformity. Of course, this conformity is about power sharing, and legal protection of certain relations under the law. But it is not about altering the base functions of power itself. And it does not help all lesbians and gays. Assume all nations agree, same-sex marriage is allowed. Then we will all be deeper under the cultural and bureaucratic tyranny of the monogamists, which will then have the support of a larger percentage of queers. And how difficult will that be to legally dismantle? Exposing hypocrisy is our only way out — to show that the legal terms at issue are simply that — representational terms we only engage out of violent necessity. They are not our relationships themselves. Our consolation is in the fact that monogamy itself is a guarantor of secret alliances, below radar rendezvous, invisible connections with tremendous powers. Anyone with open eyes can see all of the industries which facilitate “safe spaces” for such connections, regardless of sexual orientation. Personal ads, websites, chat rooms, bars, clubs, hotels, parks, parking lots, to name a few. Sexual deviance is highly institutionalized. Realizing this also helps us demystify invisibility as a refuge, the over-romanticization of which can lead to other traps (such as lesbian and transgendered pagan witchcraft, queer kabal, etc.).

This issue around visibility and “moving to the centre” also plays out on dance floors — in queer club culture, which so often feels like a repetition of the homogenizing “big room” club phenomenon. I wonder what queer club culture lost when it gained “real visibility” — when the pink dollar began seriously to validate a big queer business on the dance floor.

And how do we talk about what was lost without transforming the “olden days” into some kind of Waldenesque place calling us home? Or, I guess it’s a kind of inverse-Walden, since we are talking primarily about urban oasis. When I go home to Springfield, Missouri, there are the gay clubs that kind of emulate the major city clubs, and then you have the clubs with fifty year old farmers with wedding bands sharing a final drink and embrace before going home to their wives. Disco music sounds a lot different in these latter clubs. I’ve always felt more at home in these latter types of places, where people still live with closets rather than go into some kind of evangelical, prideful disavowal of closets that totally affect our daily lives outside “the scene.”

And also — queer is still treated by most as shorthand for “gay and lesbian.” Often just “gay male.” Where is transgender, multiple gender etc. in all this?

Issues of transgenderism (gender) and queerness (sexuality) are definitely culturally interwoven, but they are also very distinct issues. One is about the body. The other is about your body versus the bodies of those you have sex with. I think it is usually more helpful to discuss them separately, and help people see the ways in which they are separate, since we are so used to the vague “sameness” implied in terms like “LGBT.” If gayness and lesbianism are about sex between partners with the same gender, and heterosexuality is sex with the opposite gender, what is a transgendered person’s relationship to those sexual formulas? It quickly falls apart. As for the term “queer,” I like how it is totally confusing. It means people who use it have to qualify it and explain ourselves, at least a little bit. I think this is different from using terms that so thoroughly speak for us with no need of clarification. But in terms of social analysis, the term “queer” is about a non-binary model of sexuality, in which sexual identity is not a pure state of being, but a state of identification. The easy analogy is, if heterosexuality is symbolized by black, and homosexuality by white, then queerness is about all the gradations of gray between. Most people fall closer to one or the other, and then proceed to identify with one at the exclusion of the other, but in fact our sexualities are much more complex. Consider how many out gay men who say they always knew they were gay since childhood just happened to have been married with kids at some point. To reduce those years into a “mistake” is as dismissive as a straight frat boy who denies ever blowing his frat brothers on pledge night. Shit happens. The homo/hetero system keeps us from being able to discuss it.

“Pride.” What does this mean, now, to any idea of queer?

There are a lot of critical minded anti-pride events in Europe lately, usually the day before pride parades. I’m not really sure I get the point of those, either, but it’s kind of nice to know they’re out there. Pride is simply the binary corollary to shame, which is really what drives cultures, so it doesn’t really offer us much in terms of altering power relationships or addressing the workings of shame. Pride seems to me like just sharing in the arrogance of power. Queer pride is like a lesson unlearned.

Near the beginning of our interview, I asked about an “overarching project” to your work. But this in itself is a universalising claim — the “grand narrative” of your art. How would you rather people think of/about what you’re doing?

I think taking them one project at a time is fine. I like to collect records and books that seem incredibly random and disconnected, even discredited — because that sense of disconnection offers a lot of information about the status quo of a particular time and place. I guess I’d like to imagine my releases working like this, just some random weird thing that a person stumbled upon, and as an object in a marketplace it is somehow more special to them for what is isn’t, rather than for what it is. I guess that’s also how I approach my business and personal relationships, for better or worse. It’s nearly impossible for anyone to collect all my projects, so I like this idea of things being incomplete and unmappable. Even my “Dead Stock Archive” MP3 collected works is designed as a random thing not available through commercial distribution channels or online download. And by including absolutely everything, I think the discontinuity of the projects destroys any ability to read a narrative through them — bringing things together only to show how they fall apart rather than unite into some huge mega-robot. I like to imagine my projects breaking down into smaller and smaller bits like fractals, their patterns making them ever weaker and scattered, divesting of power… because divestment of power is certainly a recurring theme for me. I try to find processes of production that resonate with that theme, strategizing my own failure as a reaction against social pressures to succeed and conform — neither of which are realistic possibilities for most people, no matter how hard we try to believe they are possible.

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.