DETTMANN | ROTHLEIN

I had the distinct pleasure this past Friday night of sitting on a bench on North 6th in Williamsburg for an inspiring chat about living and breathing techno with Marcel Dettmann. I followed this distinct pleasure with another one: listening to this literal giant of classic jams play straight into one bright, blue Fourth of July morning. You may know Marcel as the dark prince of a dance floor infamous for leathered-up public sex, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t let more than a little sunlight into his grooves this time around. The conversation has been entrusted to Little White Earbuds, so watch that space for our interview in full.

Mix Appreciation: Nihal Ramchandani

Houston’s Nihal Ramchandani and I share a pivotal piece of our respective dance music foundations. Nihal’s older brother, Ranjan, was my roommate during my first two years of college. While most of us were still perpetually shitting our pants over the Arcade Fire, he was interning at Astralwerks, espousing the wonders of Steve Reich, and gettin’ smart to Hawtin’s first DE9 record. (Not that Ranjan didn’t enjoy the Arcade Fire, or that there’s anything inherently wrong with enjoying the Arcade Fire; he just had a fuller sense of what was up.) Around the same time, Nihal — barely out of middle school — followed his brother’s lead and taught himself to DJ and shop for records. When I decided to give it a go myself (after Ranjan’s techno boosterism finally stopped flying over my head), I emailed Nihal first thing for his tips on mixers and places to buy vinyl online.

For the last two years or so, Nihal and I have swapped emails and instant messages every so often to discuss our favorite new slabs. As a DJ, the dude is impressive as hell, and that goes well beyond any age-related gimmick: his technique is formidable and his track selection is nothing less than exquisite. I had Nihal do an hour-long guest mix for Table Tennis last summer, and you better believe he killed it. But while that mix flexed biggest-room muscle, his latest mix — a recreation of a recent warm-up gig, he tells me — takes quite a few steps inward: save the occasional shit-talking Rastafarian/Bedouin, you’re all alone in this sizzling, ping-ponging, pitch-black wilderness. I’m always impressed when DJs do more with pacing than the obligatory loud/soft, high/low, maximal/minimal binaries; here, Nihal moves deeper as his signature smooth transitions tease each new track out of the one that preceded it. Bottom line: get familiar quick, before Mr. Ramchandani’s next hot mix winds up as Fabric 82 or something. Dude is goooood.

Nihal Ramchandani: Cash Money Mothafucka (192 kbps / 50 minutes)

Tadeo – Feel The Vibrations
Move D & Benjamin Brunn – Radar
Ricardo Villalobos – Minimoonstar (Shackleton Remix)
Rhythm & Sound – Never Tell You (Version)
Gaiser – Eye Contact
Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts – Ndank Ndank
H.O.S.H. – Drums of Spring
Dan Berkson & James What – Reflections feat. Robert Owens
Mountain People – Mountain001

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Do you have a mix that’s as good as this one? Do you want it written about on a site that gets approximately six hits a day? Hit me up, and perhaps I will Appreciate your Mix as well.

Insane in the brane

Last night a, uh, producer saved my life? A Dial producer at that??

I really don’t hate Dial by any means. But as my occasional associate Momo pointed out to me Thursday night, Dial is kind of the West Elm of German techno: clean lines, whiff of easy class, turtleneck-ready. In other words, just a bit stiff, though not at all pejoratively stiff. (In case you think I’m covering up some kinda stanky hatin’, full discloure: I have a couch from West Elm.) Carsten-forenamed producers Jost & Klemann’s “CC01 (Detroit)”, from the label’s new You Are My Mate doublepack, finds their aesthetic loosening its tie a little. Referencing both Morgan Geist and Carl Craig (and potentially MyMy, Klemann’s most famous project), the track sweats without losing its cool entirely and/or starting to sound artificial, and creates some wild tension in the interim. It’s the kind of transition that tells the floor, “Take off your handcrafted shoes and wander further into the forest.” Just not in a creepy way.

- DISCOGS

- MYSPACE

Still going…

Happy Easter and whatever … Jordan LLC’s new studio is coming along, dammit.  I swear.  Thanks for the patience.

Keep in mind:

RAEV 2 *** APRIL 19 … The mother of all basement dancemusic happenings returns to South Williamsburg, this time with visuals!  Expect peak time, all the time.  (For my part, I think this is gonna be unavoidable.)  The flier and Facebook invite should be on their way soon.

*** UPDATE: I FOUND SOME VIDEO FROM LAST TIME…

 

NEW MIX! … Ruminations/permutations/blasphemy on today’s techno currently in the works from Herr Jordan.  Of course, you’ll hear it here first.

BEST NEW MUSIC … Yeah, that’s right.

So I peeped the Bunker last night

The elegant universe … When I first saw the above-pictured dude last night, he wasn’t yet crouched over an electron cloud of patch cables; no epic-ly epic ping-ponging had overtaken all semblance of the beat. (Full disclosure: Spinoza, the Bunker resident and, so I’m told, former WNYU kingpin [holler], hadn’t exactly brought a beat to the table in his excellent opening set.) Rather, he was sitting a few seats over from my friends and me in the back of the back room, trying his god damndest not to get noticed. I don’t know if this is some kind of Finnish thing (I’m not in an English department anymore, so I totally have free reign to be essentialist), and maybe it’s some freak of cellphone screen light, but Mssr. Ripatti — mnml chunky hooded sweater in full force — looked pretty angelic. He seemed to be hidden from just about everyone around but me, though I a) read the Wire, whose cover he recently graced, and b) I’m way more shameless than most techno fans. So yeah, fuck you I was staring and fuck you I don’t give shit. How many glitch celebs do you see on a day-to-day basis?

But Vladislav’s set was the product of a hidden mind, of headspace that is not your headspace. His music is mnml in that it’s quantum. So stripped, the usual rules governing musics are overridden by far stranger rules: reverb and delay affix themselves unpredictably; 4/4 is postulated and summarily disproved. I took two, maybe three bathroom trips throughout the hour, but don’t let that be some testament to my boredom. (My bathroom breaks during Kate Simko’s live pa, however, were certainly due to extreme boredom.) Walking back in the room after a brief absence, I found myself thrust into an environment entirely different from the one I left. Had I really been gone long enough for that to decay into this? Do I now have grandchildren, or am I younger than I was before taking that piss? Only Lee “Scratch” Perry and Columbia superprofessor Brian Greene — perhaps on Charlie Rose for a conversation on the merits of Sibelius — could properly answer that question.

The rest is noise … Meanwhile, Seth Troxler, the Spectral DJ/guy who came on later, didn’t raise nearly as many stoner-philosophical questions. (Thanks to him, though, I also have now heard “Enfants” played out and also found myself pleasantly moved despite also not being that excited about said prospect. Also.) I must hand it to him, though: guy’s got some serious balls. Unless I’m mistaken, he played “Revolution 909″ in a party-techno set at a time when Daft Punk allegiance seems to mean blog house allegiance, and I truly appreciated it. Like — and I risk being hackneyed in my argument, though I haven’t up until this point put it in writing — someone’s gotta call these Ed Banger mofos out on their weak misreading, and even if a protest to this prevailing ascendancy happens only in a back room in Brooklyn, it’s the right thing to do nevertheless. So thanks for the context, buddy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have like five missed connections to draft.

DISCOVERY
The Bunker
Vladislav Delay
Seth Troxler