Strictly 4 My Underground Homo Deep House Thugs: DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

Sorry to break it to you, donna, but if you look at what is being said in regards to Strictly Rhythm and whatnot, thaemlitz is right on... i mean, i love me some Todd Terry and MAW as much as the next queer, house-loving guy, but Strictly did turn towards a more commercial, filtered sound that betrayed its roots....the same thing is happening with Ibadan right now, one could argue, as is evidenced by many of Dennis Ferrer and Jerome Sydenham's recent sets....

that came out a lot more condescending than i meant it to, j03. sorry-- i just kind of agree with some of the shit that's being said, and also think that people are kind of pressing this too hard as a house record-- it really isn't a house record, imho, but an electronic treatise on house music, philosophically speaking.

anyway...

I don't want philosophy mixed in with my music. It diminishes the number of times I can enjoy the album. I'd have to listen to the album again to tell you specifically what I disagree with and it's not so much that I disagree with too many of his statements but I just don't enjoy having to hear him talk over every song (or nearly every song). I would enjoy it more if he had just written an essay and included it in the liner notes and left the album instrumental.

I really like the talky bits. I think it's kind of funny to half this pseudo academic thing grafted on to the dancing body, and I think the synthesis between what he's saying and how the music expresses it works pretty perfect. I don't really understand this thing I've realised on ILM lately that people seem to get really annoyed when some piece of music (or whatever) espouses a different opinion to theirs, as though that were some flaw in the music that the guy making it just doesn't understand or whatever. I mean fine if you think, I dunno that this record is a bit too STRICTLY VOCAL or whatevs with all the talking and just with the guy would be quiet so you can keep dancing, I mean I can respect that, but all this "I'm glad you can barely hear what he's saying because it's hella stupid" kindof annoys me for whatever reason. I guess its because I can enjoy something without necessarily agreeing with it and it seems a bit, well narrow-minded maybe?

dj sprinkles is the gay moodymann

i guess that i just don't really hear this as a house record, as i mentioned above, and thus don't really think it can be criticized in the same way as a house record.

it's clearly a house record though

and yeah, i mean, i love moodyman's rants on his records, and tend to like the rants on this record, too. i feel like it is somewhat important to have someone addressing these issues who is actually a practicing musician rather than just a critic-- so what KDJ is to Detroit and the African-American roots of house music, Thaemlitz is to New York and the polysexual roots of the New York house scene.

yeah i think TT regards this as a corrective to what he dislikes about house music in 2008 so in that sense it's def. a house record

xp

After going back through the album briefly, there aren't as many annoying spoken parts as I remembered but the Midtown Intro and the end of the Madonna thing really bother me. He was sitting at a table with the person who taught Madonna to vogue, he was outside the Loft, he was the king is his mind and he's bitter that he hasn't received the attention he thinks he deserves. I may have overstated my annoyance at the spoken bits since they don't seem to be all over every track like I had remembered but I still think this album would have a longer life if he hadn't included those statements over the music. Liner notes is the place to rant and complain about your lack of fame.

not in the same way that Ron Trent's new album is a house record, r1o--- yeah, this is more housey than "Raw through a Straw" and etc, but i find it hard to imagine people really jamming to this in a big room, with or without the vocal bits/

also I don't sense as much bitterness as most people do from this record. in a sense, i just think thaemlitz is raising the idea that a lot of popular house music is based on conceits of love, unity and togetherness, when much of the actual house music world is based on exclusion and capital. i don't necessarily agree with these ideas all the way, as i find that house music is what you want it to be, but the points that are raised are interesting sociologically and historically. that's all.

xxxps Blue is probably a pretty good soundalike actually (bigshot in any case) prefer this tho

I do kinda like the "fuck you, it does matter if you're black or white, it just doesn't matter to you because you're on the right side" attitude a little bit, but the losing my edge for the paris is burning brigade angle rubs me the wrong way too.

Sisters, I don't know what this world is coming to sounds like water coming down a staircase btw

table is sorta right tho, you can't really dance to this I mean

Sisters, I don't know what this world is coming to sounds like water coming down a staircase btw

this track is so amazing

thats my fav track

yeah frankly i dont know how u can really get like offended by what hes saying here, i dont agree w/ all of it// its not my worldview but then i listen to rap so im used to this sort of thing.

i think that the spoken bits really make sense to the album & i def cant imagine the album without them -- that would be weird

'this sort of thing' being 'views i dont actually agree with' not inferring that TT's views here are even close to the level of 'offensive' some rappers are

can someone recommend me some more faggy jazz echoey piano music that you know of while we're at it.

I'm listening to Drive-By by The Necks right now which ALMOST fits the "faggy jazz echoey piano music" description to a T.

In that it's literally (1 60-minute piece of) echoey piano jazz with an amazing groove.

checking it out!

not to be jerk, but you can get that entire Necks track here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?z0mzbe1ujwq .

i also highly rate it.

lol at "yes just one track"

One of my very favourite albums / tracks of the decade, without a shadow of a doubt.

Back when I ran the library film & music department and we'd play music, this was the single piece of music that garnered the most "wow, what's this, where can I get it" comments from both students and academics. Everyone loved it.

^^^bolsters my theory that Drive-by aurally (orally?) simulates (stimulates?) a good round of the sex...

It gets really spacey about 20 minutes in

Their debut album was called Sex as I recall.

i 4got this album existed

i don't hate it by any means but it's not all that, really now

. He was sitting at a table with the person who taught Madonna to vogue, he was outside the Loft, he was the king is his mind and he's bitter that he hasn't received the attention he thinks he deserves.

I don't necessarily agree with this, and also, even if Terre is bitter then so what? I'll afford his the right to be if that's what he wants to put out (not to mention this is a very personal document, there's autobiography in the arguments and vice versa).

Am I the only one that thinks putting essays in liner notes is more pretentious/annoying than putting it in the music. It seems more. . . underhanded (that's not the right word but I can't think of the correct one)

And yeah, this album is all that.

if you're making a record with a 'message' these days, when the music itself is being increasingly disassociated from the physical medium, you're probably not going to get the message across with sleevenotes.

he'll also release a 30 hours piano solo as mp3 (on a data DVD). and only 30h because of FAT32 limitation.
Midtown 120 Blues is gorgeous btw.

no idea what this sounds like but i just love the title of the thread.

"To preserve the dynamic range of the original recordings this album was mastered without compression and is intentionally quieter than some. Turn up your stereo volume for best playback."

And indeed it does sound AWESOME when pumped loud through a pair of B&W 685s with a meaty amplifier. It's about space and depth and sensuality.

As much as I don't really like listening to music on headphones, you can swim in the depth and richness of the production on some good phones (e.g. the hats on ball'r, which you can feel as much as you can hear)
Terre (in general) has quite a knack for drawing an emotional response through his sound design.

Another vote for those Motor City Drum Ensemble remixes. Great, great stuff.

The various DJ Sprinkles material on Mule (Grand Central, Pt. I, Brenda's $20 Dilemma, Midtown 120 Blues, Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To) is one of the strongest bodies of work any electronic dance music producer has assembled this past year.

okay, after listening to this in my car very loud for the past couple of days, i do declare: this is the best thing i've heard all year. everything about it is perfect, from its more ranty moments to its pulsating ambient moments to its totally unbelievably DEEP DEEP house bits. i would really love to hear this album on even better speakers than the ones in my car, or my m-audio studio monitors. might have to go to oakland to do so....

EDB totally OTM, this album is really spacious on headphones..

some of the spoken bits make me think of bogdan raczynski's "fuck you dj"

Thematically it's like a queer-Pipecock, but musically it's totally undeniable - like Moodymann meets Playhouse meets really lush stuff like early Deep Dish or Dubtribe Sound System at their best.

finally got around to hearing this, and i don't know ... it literally sounds ten years old to my ears, and not particularly remarkable compared to the stuff you cite

i just don't care about this record at all. every time a 12" comes out, i listen expecting it to suddenly be interesting. it's not.

okay, i'm gonna be an asshole here, pipecock, but can you explain why? because to me, this is infinitely more interesting than most of what's come out this year, which has tended to ape older sounds without improving on them much...whereas this record definitely apes older sounds (as in yr right, moonship) but improves upon their aural content-- i mean, just listen to the stereo pans in "house music is controllable..." in the first minute, there are three (if not more) recognizable elements moving back and forth, from left to right to left etc, including the strings which start on one channel and end on another every iteration.

i also admit that i am biased because i am pretty into what Thaemlitz/Sprinkles opines on most of these tracks, and find the persona to be quite fascinating.

yeah but fuck you "most europeans"

huh?

not you <3

Another thing I really like about this is the Big Gay Migration narrative, the move from the country to the city. I think for gay people especially there is the feeling that city is a place for escape and also redemption I suppose. I kind of forgive Thaemlitz for wanting me out of his turf a little on this one, even if it reminds me of a kind of "there first" ownership people try to take with music or "scenes." The sound of the train isn't this man/machine Kraftwerk thing, its more like an echo that brings that brings the possibility of escape from the backwaters leaves a trace, like a line heading home from the city. I'm uncomfortable with how it tries to shoehorn this music into a political statement, I feel like it puts too many words into the mouths of the people vogueing on his dancefloor back in '88, but I can really love it as this intensely personal record of a specific time for him, and how it holds this tentative root of community that maybe people come to the city to find.

"In 1986, at age 18, I left Missouri by train, pulling into Midtown Manhattan's Grand Central Station some 72 hours later. Until that point life had, quite frankly, been miserable, each and every day facing verbal and physical harassment as a queer-fag-pussy-AIDS bait. The climate in New York wasn't really so different. But from within my isolation I saw others isolated like myself. One of the places we met, in our self-containment, was on the dance floor. The nastiest and seediest clubs were located in Midtown. That's mostly where I DJ'ed, at tragic places like Sally's II and Club 59. In the early 1990's, Disney bought 42nd Street, closing the places around which transgendered life revolved for many of us. That "community of isolation" was scattered to other cities, other states, other countries. Isolated, still...."

i think at least some of the ppl profiled in paris is burning (or if not them, then other drag ball regulars) WERE kind of pissed about the madonna thing - hard to tell who the person speaking on the record is tho