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There was a time, sometime in the early 2000s, that New York City lost its mojo. The city’s clubbers had turned their back on hometown heroes in favour of imported DJs from the UK, most of whom played dreary progressive house. The Big Apple’s own producers seemed to be stuck in some kind of time warp, either dropping so-so hip-hop or mediocre soulful house.
One of the more prolific artists in these times, Matt Cutler is back with his fifth album, which is an impressive feat in just five years of releasing music. It’s also worth noting that at this stage, he’s only released one more EP than he has long-players. Lone isn’t a project that seems to demand a full-length release in which to spread itself; the tracks tend to be self-contained nuggets simply bound together by a stylistic consistency rather than some lofty thematic notion.
To the casual observer of Minimal Wave operations, it might seem odd for the Brooklyn label’s lesser spotted offshoot Cititrax to be releasing the new album from Innergaze aka Jason Letkiewicz and his girlfriend, the audio-visual artist Aurora Halal – or indeed, any music of the new variety. Cititrax was seemingly borne out of Veronica Vasicka’s desire to give a proper platform for obscure 80s sounds which didn’t necessarily correlate with the Minimal Wave aesthetic – as on the Italo disco of Sylvi Foster’s If You Are and the 1984 proto Chicago house of Dance Party Album from Z Factor. However the label has dipped their toes in contemporary music, a fact possibly overlooked at first glance thanks to the resolutely authentic 80s neon hue of Medio Mutante’s Inestable.
Gulp, it’s happening again. Ralph Cumbers, better known as Bass Clef, has long been associated with the dubstep scene since its inception, and now he’s releasing an album of analogue 4/4 music. It’s a familiar tale that has been uttered plenty over the last year or so, with good and bad results. In the case of Bass Clef, it’s never exactly straight-forward. Even as he made his name on a rousing live set that fused dubstep weight with analogue tinkerings and in-yer-face trombone action, his output never sat quite in the same rivet that his club-ready contemporaries inhabited. There’s always been something a little more avant-garde about the Bass Clef way that employs the means of dance music, but uses them as a reference point upon which to express deeper, more esoteric ideas.
How Steve Moore has largely managed to fly under the radar over the past few years is something of a mystery. There’s been the odd bit of positive coverage and a fair amount of online chatter, but his profile still remains remarkably low given his impressive track record. As much of his work has been under pseudonyms, you get the impression he probably likes it that way.
“I can’t explain how I made those tracks, it’s just impossible,” Darren Cunningham said when describing the process of making his third album, R.I.P, in a press release back in February. “It’s like painting with button and sliders… Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery.” It’s a rare moment of honesty from a man whose Twitter persona is one of the most baffling of any of his peers – whilst he obviously doesn’t shy away from the limelight like Zomby, happy to undertake quite serious, thoughtful interviews, his online identity is nevertheless filled with misdirection and incoherent half-statements which veer off on tangents as if he’s mentally channel surfing.
Introducing an artist to the world via a set of remixes of material not yet heard is a risky and rarely used method, but it can work. Back when Skudge were cloaked in all manner of faceless mystique, a brilliant Aardvarck remix of their then-unreleased track “Convolution” made for an instant mental entry on this writer’s internal notepad, as it probably did for many others, and possibly made a lot of people wonder who they were.
It’s not been made clear why Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland opted to drop the Hype Williams moniker in advance of this album for Hyperdub. Given the somewhat glib, intellectual appendage-swinging approach us writers have taken to their music since they surfaced, it’s possible they saw it as just another way to have us endlessly theorising. This shift in presence to their own supposedly fake names is the only difference on Black Is Beautiful, a gradually intoxicating album that retains every other aspect of the hazed out world of malfunctioning equipment Blunt and Copeland have occupied across countless releases.
In recent years, Amsterdam house heavyweights Rush Hour have done a good job of reissuing vintage material from the halcyon days of house (or, in the case of their Gene Hunt and Virgo releases, previously unreleased material from the early days of house). Their recent Burrell Brothers retrospective was a particularly good example of this; while much of the material was familiar to those with a keen interest in classic New York house, it was still a timely celebration of two producers who arguably don’t get nearly enough credit for their impressive output.
Parisian producer Julien Auger has never been your average house producer. Over the course of a 15-plus year career as Pépé Bradock, he’s treated listeners to a frustrating trickle of often outstanding releases – leftfield house music jams that eschew the tried and tested in favour of odd, off-kilter sounds and strange rhythms. Sure, there have been moments of intense beauty – “Deep Burnt”, the jazz flex of 2002’s “Cycles” – and genuine bumpin’ floorfillers – “Love Is”, “Burnin”, the Prince-sampling, string-drenched heaviness of “Life” – but these are often a sideshow for his more adventurous creations.
Aroy Dee has long been one of the main European purveyors of deep, Detroit influenced techno – and on Lost Digits, he again reminds the listener why he has earned that distinction. Rather than set trends, Dee is an adept curator, keeping the torch lit for introspective, emotive techno music.
While releasing a record on Hessle Audio arguably carries an amount of kudos that should guarantee an artist’s success, Elgato, whose debut came out on the label in October 2010, has never really received the attention he’s rightfully deserved. Part of that is because he’s only released three tracks until now, but one suspects that it’s perhaps because his music is almost completely at odds with the scene that Hessle has helped establish. The one thing that seems to connect the various strands of bass are their utilisation of tempos from 128-140bpm – speeds which don’t exactly lend themselves to warm up music. As a result, the closer “bass music” heads towards 120bpm to fill those early hours of the night, the more it simply becomes “house music”, or an insipid broken-beat variant thereof that often lacks the defining characteristic of its name: bass.
In a form where anonymity and a seamless relationship between people and technology are seen as desirable, Claro Intelecto’s music oozes humanity. To this writer’s ears, each release from Mark Stewart brings with it a frailty and vulnerability, as if the UK producer has shared a part of his private life with the listener. This key characteristic was what made his last album, Metanarrative, such compelling listening, and the same quality is audible in spades on Reform Club. It would be easy and unforgivably lazy to lump Claro’s work in with the great unwashed of deep/dub techno. While Reform Club does sparkle and shimmer with epic strings, ghostly reversed chords and dreamy synths, it’s the interplay between these elements and Stewart’s unpredictable rhythmic dalliances that make his third album so rewarding.
With those bubbling toms and relentlessly ragged samples firmly fixed in the pantheon of modern dance music, juke and footwork are well and truly here to stay, thanks in no small part to Planet Mu Records and its tireless quest to showcase the authentic Chicago sound to a wider audience. With plenty of compilations, singles and artist albums getting notched up from the key protagonists in the scene, it’s now the turn of Traxman to step up to the plate with his album. Compared to some of his younger compadres, Traxman has been at it for a long time, with roots in Dance Mania 12”s in the nineties among other harder to trace offerings.
Having suitably ripped up 2011 with his emergence as a solo artist (independent of the Lazer Sword production duo he shares with Low Limit), Lando Kal now finds his initial flurry of productivity settling into a more assured and steady trajectory of musical output, and the kind of music he’s making likewise reflects this settling down.
Only someone as scarily prolific as Vakula could possibly elect to surpass a calendar year in which a relentless procession of twelve inches appeared by gracing the music world with three full length albums. In the weeks preceding the release of Vedomir, the Ukrainian’s album for Dekmantel under the same Tolkien-esque name, Vakula still finds the time to deliver a second 12” for his own Leleka imprint.
In a recent interview with FACT, Untold, otherwise known as Jack Dunning, suggested he was “just another dubstep producer washing up on techno’s beach in 2012”. In many ways this is unfair to his unique production style, which arguably has always had more in common with techno than many of his contemporaries – developing on a course outside of either genre over the past four years, culminating in the release of Little Things Like That on Clone’s Basement Series last November. It was an EP that combined the rudeness of a jungle track heard through a grainy FM pirate radio broadcast with the piston-pumping dub atmospherics of the new school of contemporary Dutch techno producers, and remains as compelling an example as any (along with Blawan’s Peaches EP) of the rich potential for bass influenced techno.
The current house strains of Bristol’s ever mutating music scene have become well documented by now, with the Young Echo collective providing perhaps the most compelling output. While it was undoubtedly not his intention, Seb Gainsborough has become the Young Echo focal point for his work as Vessel. The handful of releases on must check labels like Astro Dynamics and left_blank demonstrated an ever growing talent for smudged out, slackened house that fully justifies the swelling expectation from music buyers and overly verbose writers alike. Recently announced as possibly the most intriguing signing by Robin Carolin’s Triangle Records imprint, the interim period before the release of a debut Vessel album is filled by Gainsborough adopting another alias, Panther Modern, and adding the long-running Bristol hub Immerse to his discography.
Gene Hunt continues to tread the line between Chicago house and Detroit techno on “May The Funk Be With You”. The original cut is everything you’d expect from an artist as esteemed as Hunt, but Rush Hour have also incorporated another forefather of dance music, Theo Parrish, on the remix – a person whose lineage takes him from the jacking depths of the Windy City to the tough, industrial techno of Detroit.
It’s difficult to gauge which label FaltyDL’s music is most suited to; he’s graced Planet Mu with two albums and a sprinkle of EPs, and his productions seem equally at home on zeitgeist obsessives 50Weapons, Amsterdam’s house and techno bastion Rush Hour and evergreen UK beats institution Ninja Tune. The fact is his music – a cluttered, intoxicating blend of garage, house, jungle, hip-hop and afrobeat – is suited to all of the aforementioned imprints, yet the most thrilling FaltyDL 12” to date, for this writer at least, was Mean Streets Pt. 1, released via Swamp81 last year. There are a few reasons for this: it was a vinyl-only affair and limited to 500 pressings. The full picture sleeve offered a glimpse of contemporary Brooklyn life, with visual artist and long term Swamp affiliate Ashes57 on hand to take a classy black and white photo. The music itself was bliss, particularly the ephemeral future soul jam “Moonshine”.
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