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At a certain juncture of electronic music fetishism, control freakishness reigns. Whose track is it? Which remix is it? Fandom becomes curatorship and curatorship
becomesgatekeeperpretention. Which brings us to mix discs. Everything we love started with the mix—we’re trusting the DJ, in his finite wisdom, to take us someplace we don’t necessarily know but we hope we’ll like. Paradoxically, the DJ got us into this in the first place, but we no longer take his word for it, thinking ourselves superior pickers for our own lives’ soundtracks. In this era of personalized playlists, a mix executed wrongly can be an affront to the long tail. Sonic fascism even. What’s so easy in the club context—just listening—becomes an ego-banishment exercise on headphones.
But goddamn, M.A.N.D.Y. can select ‘em. Better than you or me, guaranteed. Whether it’s a Body Language cut, their Fabric 38 or M.A.N.D.Y. at the Controls, Berlin heads Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung bring a sense of maturity, smarts and cohesion to the mix that is rare these days. Renaissance is no exception.
You know the story: The year is 1976. Brian Eno hasn’t yet collaborated with Bowie on Low, and is looking for a project. Eno had already shown huge Krautrock interest with Roxy Music and (possibly apocryphal) quotes from the era have him calling Harmonia “the world’s most important rock band” at the time. What is clear: He loved the band, a group composed of musicians from Neu! and Cluster. And so as the leaves in Forst, Germany, turned from green to gold, Eno and the boys lay down what would become Tracks & Traces.
And then it was forgotten. Not to be heard from until 1997 when the original masters were discovered in a climate-controlled space capsule hovering over Berlin. (OK, I made that part up.) Either way, they were released by Rykodisc more than a decade ago. And rereleased this year on Grönland Records. And the results—if you don’t already have them in your amniotic playlist—are pretty much as to be expected. Wistful, chuggy, fun, sad, corny, shimmering, eschatological—and above all, pregnant with the sounds would set Detroit and Manchester afire in just a few short years. Durutti Column fans, this is the Nag Hammadi Codex.
Tiga is a lot of things—a genre ironist, a gender jockey, a genius debatably—but subtle he is not. On his latest, Ciao!, he waxes obvious about information overload “All I feel is in this data stream / I see the eyes in the computer screen /Misinformation is surrounding me / It brings me down, I’m on my knees”—but the big joke is that song itself (“Beep Beep Beep”) is frenetically overproduced mess of Purple One invocations, Basement Jaxx snipes and inch-deep pop profundity.
Enter Loco Dice with a dub that doesn’t even deliver anything close to the song’s hook until about six minutes deep into the cut. A persistent little string flick and some mechanically feisty bongos building to Tiga himself exhaling are all that remain. Now, I love taking something overdone and underdoing it for effect—but this is the remix equivalent of Garfield Minus Garfield.
Parisian mnml producer Kaine goes the opposite route—instead of dialing back Tiga’s enthusiasm—he organizes it. What was funky and goofy on the original becomes all New Romantic lush and dark. Tiga James Sontag’s “beep-beep-beep” refrain stops being a reminder of technological interruption and starts to be the sexy pulse of the cyborg nightlife. The message is lost, but who cares? This B bangs. [<-----------read more @ RA------------>]
You know how when you’re a kid, everything is absolutes? Modern dance music is kinda still stuck there, flipping between the night-and-day of dour seriousness vs. punch-your-mom-in-the-face party ethic. It makes it hard to find music that does more than soundtrack individual emotions.
Somewhere between the Juan Maclean’s raucous four-on-the-floor formula and chamber vox techno of the likes of Imogen Heap or Bat for Lashes, there lies a fabled land called subtlety. Most the time, only Brian Eno lives there. But for goddamn once in our lives, a new guy, Vitalic, nee Pascal Arbez, hits it. More than hits it. Owns it.
Vitalic’s debut full-length OK Cowboy made waves back in 2005 with its woozy blend of smarter-than-average synths and weirder-than-average samples. But there was this one track, “The Past,” that came on like an Adderall-powered freight train loaded with paperback copies of Steppenwolf. (That’s a metaphor for being rad and subtle at the same time.) And it left you being all “Why can’t he make a whole record like that?”
Wish granted. Our boy Arbez is back and he’s got a danceable Enola Gay filled with subtlety bombs. Eponymous cut “Flashmob” feels like the bastard child of Justice and Lindstrom—detuned and headfucked, but not too far gone to exude shy thoughtfulness.
