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Yeah is one of two new platters of tasty wax from DFA Records, certainly the most name-checked label since anyone gave a shit about Warp Records. James Murphy's LCD Soundsystem hasn't released a new 12" single since 2002's "Losing My Edge," even though private edition tracks like "Tribulations" and "Where Is Love?" have been popping up on file-sharing services over the past year. Rather than officially releasing one of the aforementioned tracks, Murphy's Soundsystem has crafted a new track aimed straight at clubs: a massive, obnoxious punk-disco meltdown destined to be the set-closing favorite of DJs everywhere in coming months.
The song is irresistibly epic, beginning in familiar snotty dance-punk territory and gradually transforming into a jagged, overamped slab of retro acid mayhem. The appropriately titled Side A is called "Yeah (Stupid Version)," which begins with cookie-cutter disco basslines and snares, with Murphy et. al. intoning the irritating, repetitive lyrics over and over. Gradually, the track builds momentum and slowly replaces its organic elements with acid-house artillery. By the end, the pupil-dilating synths and ricochet rhythms are riding roughshod over the blissed-out dancefloor. Side B contains the "Pretentious Mix," which transorms "Yeah" into a sophisticated excursion into urbane, metropolitan electro-disco, not miles away from Metro Area's R&B-inflected lounge music. I liked this one a lot, and it makes me wonder if LCD Soundsystem might be able to pull a full-length LP out of their collective ass at some future point. 
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DFA's other 12" release comes in the form of a double-sided vinyl from Delia L. Gonzalez and Gavin R. Russom. "El Monte" is one of the most convincing evocations of the synthesizer throb of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream I've ever heard. Plenty of artists aim for this—Anthony Rother, Pete Namlook and the entire FAX label roster come to mind—but few ever come close the intrigue and majesty that Gonzalez and Russom accomplish with this 15-minute mindbender. Hearing it, I immediately contacted my local planetarium to arrange a cosmic laser-light show synchronized to El Monte's dark electro-progressive pulses. They hung up on me, but that doesn't change my feelings about this track. Beginning in a rainstorm and ending in a dark alien jungle landscape, Gonzalez and Russom's dark, propulsive synths swoop and rotate, gathering momentum in the same way as Tangerine Dream's classic "Circulation of Events." The DFA Remix of "Rise" cannot help but be something of a letdown after Side A, but Murphy and Goldsworthy manage to balance their dance-friendly instincts with Gonzales and Russom's retro-space arpeggiations, turning in a good approximation of The Orb circa "Blue Room."
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Russell's original singles — released under a variety of monikers such as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints and Indian Ocean — frequently trade hands for exorbitant prices. He worked with all the important figures of the nascent disco scene, notably Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan, and he co-founded the influential Sleeping Bag records. But more importantly, his work from this period is hauntingly beautiful, showcasing artistic focus, inspiration and genius rarely heard in dance music. Aside from the odd track appearing on recent compilations such as Strut's Disco Not Disco series and Soul Jazz's New York Noise, the bulk of his catalog has remained hopelessly out of print for two decades. Soul Jazz moves to rectify this situation with the release of The World of Arthur Russell, an essential disc collecting 11 of Russell's greatest avant-disco sides. As if this weren't cause enough for celebration, Soul Jazz made the smart decision to avoid rehashing the Russell tracks already made available on recent compilations, and they include many extended versions and alternate mixes that are particularly rare. It's far from an exhaustive collection, but the brilliant re-mastering and sequencing make for ideal listening, so it's hard to complain. The peculiar genius of Arthur Russell's idiosyncratic masterpieces is enticingly intangible, and cries out for deep listening and deconstruction. Tracks like the "Schoolbell/Treehouse" and "In The Light Of The Miracle" have an oceanic soulfulness that is entirely uncanny. Russell's palette is deceptively simple: clipped percussion and polyrhythms, scattered horns, the odd guitar or cello part, impressionistic keyboard improvs and the liberal use of echo. Arthur Russell was clearly influenced by the production techniques of dub reggae, unsurprising for an artist who entitled his personal album of solo cello compositions World of Echo. Russell takes his dub influences into previously uncharted waters, however, into psychedelic territories alien to the dance floor. When Russell himself contributes vocals, his bizarre, throaty delivery is pregnant with soul and detached sexuality. The stunning "Let's Go Swimming" utilizes odd time signatures with its skewed percussive throbs, forming an unstable foundation for Russell's space-cadet muttering. The chorus echoes and reverberates, bouncing off itself and forming concentric whirlpools that resolve themselves with each atonal swell of keyboard. There is a jarring, unobvious quality to this music that makes it unpredictable; I never really know what's coming next, a true rarity in beat-oriented dance music. "In The Light Of The Miracle" is a 13-minute plus epic, vaguely African percussion and elliptical melodies which leisurely transform into a laidback tribal groove that truly hypnotizes. The abstract sexuality of "Pop Your Funk" uses fingerpicked cello as a basis for a series of random instrumental fills that hold together tenuously, constantly threatening to fall apart, but miraculously forming a tight, tense groove. The more dance-friendly Paradise Garage favorites, like Larry Levan's remix of "Is It All Over My Face?" and Francois Kevorkian's mix of "Go Bang" are clear progenitors for the diva-driven house music that dominated the 1980's. Most classic disco, even the most flawlessly realized tracks by Giorgio Moroder or Cerrone, is ultimately self-referential and dependent upon its connection to borrowed nostalgia for the excesses of Studio 54. Arthur Russell's work stands virtually alone in its ability to transcend the familiar tropes and imagery of disco - it is music wholly redolent of windswept cornfields, banks of luminous whispering clouds, vast undulating oceans and the ghostly echoes of outer space.
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- Z'EV - If only that love lets letting happen
- Toshiya Tsunoda - Layered
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Prolific sound artist John Duncan's newest disc finds him in a kind of half-collaboration with Asmus Tietchens, whose readings from two E.M. Cioran texts become sources for the voice manipulation that has characterized Duncan's work as of late. Cioran's name should sound familiar to Tietchens listeners, as quotes from the modern philosophe/aphorist frequently appear on the musician's sleeve notes. Duncan's notes here, however, express a clear distaste for the fatalism that dominates Cioran's philosophy, a kind of a-philosophy often abbreviated in cheeky, opaque aphorisms like the one displayed on Tietchens' new FT+: "It is simple to be "deep," just follow your own false bents."Die Stadt
Part of Tietchens' reading for Da sich die Machtgier? comes from Cioran's examination of tyranny in the modern world, explaining the hamster-wheel trend in which humanity submits to the will of a great and "pitiless" dictator, degenerates into "primal disorder", and then begins again by embracing another tyrant. Strange that Duncan, who disagrees with such fatalism and actually did not even receive a translation of the text until after finishing recording, has produced a record that feels much closer to the man's doomed words than anything Tietchens ever prefaced with a Cioran quote. For three of the disc's four tracks, Duncan completely obliterates not only words themselves, but any evidence of the vocal origin of the sounds. He's taken Tietchens' original recording, presented "more or less intact" on the remaining track, and transformed it into three utterly inhuman compositions. Inhuman not because they are desolate in composition, or even because they lack expression or an emotional core, but because of the obtrusive and unforgiving way each one crowds the listening space. The noisy opener "Freih zein hoem macht" pushes miniscule fragments of vocal sound into endless repeat, a bombardment of clicking surges that somehow resists the retreat into a more atmospheric or patterned industrial space. Each sound arrives in charged, unhesitant succession, as if eager fill the gap left by its predecessor. Silence in this music, rather than offering relief or resolution, seems only to emphasize the void, offering nothing but a blank stare into the next numbing assault. Duncan's other tracks are less abrasive, though no easier to ignore. The closing "Aber..." is essentially a short, buzzing drone cycle, molded and amplified over the song's 30-min. length, but the sprawl never reaches an apex of textural complexity, nor does it develop in any kind of organic fashion. The fuzzy hum of the tones have more in common with Tietchens' voice than the other two tracks, but they are far from sounding human or even comfortable. The track becomes an endless churn, like faraway factory noise, or the sound of Cioran's wheel of history, scraping on and on. While Da sich does not lend itself to similar repetition, it does make for a thoroughly alien experience, especially in conjunction with the textual foundation.
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