“Dream Sequence 19” is the highlight of Breaka’s new album Aeoui for me (at least until I listen to “Yolo Bass Rewind” a few more times). I don’t love the record as a whole, excellent cover notwithstanding. It feels caught in the middle of Surgeon-y UK Techno, East Coast club, and something altogether spacier. “Dream Sequence 19” excepts itself by leaning further than any other track into the dreamy soundscape mode the name suggests, without losing sight of dancefloor ambitions. The synths sound like they were put through a thunder tube, the drums are well-mixed and well-programmed, and the whole track has just enough off-kilter echoing shuffle to put you off your balance. It’s not that it’s undanceable, but it’s just far off enough from the peak danceability of UKG or broken beat that I would have to take a second and recalibrate when the tune drops in all the way - and I love that. “Dream Sequence 19” wants you to dance, but you must first answer its questions three.
If Pioneer made DJ decks that needed to be cared for like Tamagotchi, this song would come pre-loaded. “Naive Step One” is a quirky little stepper that’s happy to meander. There is something anthropomorphic about the leads to this one, and combined with the ‘90s jungle-esque seascape chords the whole effect is something like an animalian slice of life. This is the cut that the bugs are getting down to at the watering hole, the soundtrack to a mystical woodland rave-up without a human in sight. I’m excited about the idea of creating small utopian spaces as artistic expression, and this song just about does that all on its own.
Jorg Kuning might be my new favorite producer. Skudde is the second single off his new EP Mercedes, coming soon on Wisdom Teeth, and it sounds like someone ran Royksopp’s “Eple” through a hair crimper. Kuning is apparently a modular synth wizard (the proper term for anyone who can wrangle a full song out of those beasts), which makes his music even more pleasing because this sounds like music that should come out of a mess of tangled patch cables placed by a cackling madman. Kuning also plays live sets, or at the very least hybrid dj sets. I hope one day to see him pop up from behind the decks a la the taken-down Gesaffelstein Boiler Room moment with a mad grin as a shower of cables announces his presence like pyrotechnics.
FM wobble might be the acid 303 bassline of the 21st century: addictively tweakable, extremely listenable, and starting to run out of new ideas. Still, the 303 is as immortal as it is because the thing is fun as hell for producers and for listeners, and “Freeyeyo” certainly taps into that joy. I stumbled into this one at the wonderful Passenger Seat Records a few weeks ago, and picked it up again when my open decks set was unexpectedly extended and I ran out of records to play. Turns out it’s also fun as hell to mix with, and at that point I just couldn’t say no. The wobble in “Freeyeyo” is actually nestled fairly low in the mix, which helps it avoid many of the cliches of tweak-synth music. Structurally, the whole thing is more like a deep house collage song than a pure one-liner tweak song, with good swingy drums and a nice funky bass to hold the track together while the tweaks skitter around on the top. There are 303-esque bloops in here too, which make the track more of a historical document than it was probably intended to be - past and present, coexisting.
I am, unfortunately, a Björk neophyte. I’m working on it, taking my time, album by album. I don’t want to blow through her whole discography at top speed without giving myself time to sit with the music; I don’t want to miss the trees for the forest. A friend recently gave me a guided tour through some of her music videos and I was absolutely blown away, to the point where I may have to start from the beginning with a wider net to not miss a thing -- some, like “Triumph of a Heart” are pure fun, others, like “All is Full of Love” and “Mutual Core” feel essential to the songs themselves. Björk has been ahead of her time for most of her career, and dance music might just now be catching up. She dominates the artificial-natural sound around which this whole episode is built.
Going back to some of her earliest works she confidently embodies a strain of futurism that requires the natural world rather than rejecting it. Even in the “All is Full of Love” video, which depicts a purely machine scene, the core emotion is a physical, human love. The video for the original version of “Oral” stars deepfakes of Björk and Rosalia, who donated all of their income from the recording to environmentalist efforts in Iceland. You can find that interplay of humanism and environmentalism with wary futurism in the visual design of the Portland party Osmosis, in Montreal’s Naff Recordings, in the work of Davis Galvin and Doctor Jeep and Djrum and so many others at the forefront of dance music.
That intersection is in the sound, too. Olof Dreijer flips the relatively slow original into a shuffling, danceable track that sounds like it was grown rather than made. The woody, clomping drums make a fertile soil for squiggly pea-shoot synth lines to explode from and swirl around Björk and Rosalia’s vocals, chopped from their balladic structure into hooky snippets that reverberate around the space and push the song forward. Björk’s music at its best feels like it taps into some primordial sonic ooze, long forgotten but remembered in our DNA. Like Björk herself says in “The Modern Things,” I think this remix has always existed, it’s just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment.
“New New York” is the A side to a legendary B side, to the point that I’m not sure I’d ever heard the track when I bought the record in 2017. I am of course referring to DJ Falcon and Thomas Bangalter’s edit of Valerie by Steve Winwood, the original in a cascade of versions eventually resulting in Eric Prydz’ chart-topper “Call On Me” - or at least it would be if that version had ever seen a release. As far as I can tell the version on my copy is a reconstruction of that original edit by a Swedish duo called (unfortunately) Retarded Funk, who are not credited on the release at all -- and neither is Vallée. “Call On Me” is fun but “New New York” is just as good and frankly more interesting. It trades the bombastic arena chorus for a more understated sample loop cut from Rafael Cameron’s 1981 electro song “Funtown U.S.A.,” but the defining features are the micro-samples of funk keyboards that Vallée uses as punctuation between bars. I love a well-done pause, and the cheeky retro synth wiggle intensifies the impact. Imagine if Eric Prydz had lifted the A side rather than the B, and we had the “Pryda Wiggle” instead of the Pryda Snare…
…ok, this one is just straight up goofy. Roman Flugel was kind enough to ID this for me after I haplessly described it to him as “built around saxophone one shots on the same note with different tonalities.” Well, that saxophone was actually a kazoo, which only raises the goof factor. Good song structure and a genuinely well-deployed bassline save this one from falling straight into the novelty pit, and it sounded legitimately good on the club speakers at Process. I can’t say this is one I’ll play frequently, but it did make me crack a huge grin on the dancefloor which is a success in its own way.
Sweet Spot Radio is a track with international bona fides: label Craigie Knows is from Scotland, Danny Daze is from Miami, and Jonny From Space is from space. The combination of UK dubstep and woody drums is potent and well executed here, though I can’t help but feel that the names involved with this release could have turned out something more interesting. As is, it’s a fun track that I’d be happy to play in a set but I’m not chomping at the bit to hear.
This inclusion was a literal angle on my part. Artificial and organic? Why not a gleaming metallic Doctor Jeep track that samples a frog? As the synthesis in dance music gets more and more complex it almost horseshoes back around to sampling, so why not close that loop all the way and come back to nature? This is a hard hitting track with no nonsense drums and top shelf sound design, but it’s not afraid to dip a toe into a goofy sample and let it breathe without dominating.