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

. 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

and i guess you could argue "vogue" might not have happened at all were it not for PiB (some were pissed about the movie, too)

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/pib.jpg

major crush on this guy btw

agree!

"okay, i'm gonna be an asshole here, pipecock, but can you explain why?"

i don't think asking why makes you an asshole.

"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.

― gonna be a long hot summer for the MS Word paperclip (the table is the table)"

so stereo panning is that big of a deal?!

to me, the technicalities of a record are as close to meaningless as possible. i'm interested in the quality of the music (no matter if it is supposed to be "old school" sounding or brand new sounding), and this just doesn't cut it. and it's not that i disagree with the politics of it, if anything that makes me want to like the record more than i would have knowing nothing going into it. the music just doesn't move me, especially not when compared to so so many great records that have come out this year. i would much rather listen to many other "retro" style releases like the Ron Trent shit for damn sure.

Pipecock even though i love this record it vaguely pleases me that you don't as I wouldn't have expected that.

Though perhaps I should have? Haven't listened to this in a few months but from memory this guy's production style reminds me of Losoul. Do you like/dislike Losoul? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say not much?

i don't own any Losoul records, but i'm not against their music. it can be alright. i guess the same is true with this, if someone was playing it i wouldn't be irritated, but i wouldnt be running up to ID the tracks either. the hi-hats and things are a bit clicks-and-cuts sounding for my taste, but thats the only obvious problem i have outside of the melodies and shit just not grabbing me.

pipecock, stereo panning of three different elements in a syncopated fashion creating aural illusions of space might not be a big deal, but it's good sound design.

i also don't buy your technicalities line, that's complete bullshit.

"pipecock, stereo panning of three different elements in a syncopated fashion creating aural illusions of space might not be a big deal, but it's good sound design."

not really anything to write home about though. i just don't hear anything in these tracks that is any more or less "old" sounding than any other record of its type.

"i also don't buy your technicalities line, that's complete bullshit.

― gonna be a long hot summer for the MS Word paperclip (the table is the table)"

is that right? i mean, i did just release a record that was mixed down to cassette with hardly any EQing or stereo shit on it. and i mix it with some of the most beautiful and technical shit out there like the MVO3 record. none of it matters, its what's in the tracks that makes me buy it.

yeah, and the Disco Nihilist record would sound a fuck of a lot better if the sound design was of any concern at all. being an obstinate technophobe doesn't make one's sound any more authentic or hard, it just makes one seem like an obstinate technophobe.

and just tio clarify: i own the Disco Nihilist record, and fucking love it, but it could actually sound better. still one of the better releases of the year.

I finally got to hear some of this, and I really like the spacious and soft feel of the production overall. I was a fan of his ambient stuff in the early 90s, and this album doesn't seem a far cry from that stuff in mood. Stand-outs for me are 'House Music is an Uncontrollable Desire', and Grand Central pt. 2.

also I really want to thank the table is the table for that The Necks song. it is fucking great.

yeah, and Second Annual Report and Radioactivity would sound a fuck of a lot better if the sound design was of any concern at all. being an obstinate technophobe doesn't make one's sound any more authentic or hard, it just makes one seem like an obstinate technophobe.

and just tio clarify: i own Second Annual Report and Radioactivity, and fucking love it, but it could actually sound better. still one of the better releases of the year.

ha ha ha are you srsly comparing yourself to TG and kraftwerk? your boundless egotism fucking takes the cake, my man!

i'm sorry if that sounds mean, of course it is your prerogative to follow the methodology of whatever heroes you choose, it's just that like lenny bruce and bill hicks i am bound to speak truth to power.

also the sound design on Radioaktivität is amazing.

Also surely it was the highest of high-tech at the time?!?

Likewise with first wave Detroit Techno - now we might say "oh it was so much more authentic and soulful before protools and ableton and etc." but it's not like the original producers thought of themselves as technologically primitivist.

What I was getting at was the idea that if you aren't doing super high fidelity work, you aren't doing sound design. My decision not to use a Mac with NI Software and a copy of Ableton was a conscientious decision. Not using effects and limiting myself to four tracks was also a conscientious decision. It is sound design, even if it isn't a 5.1 mix at 24/96 with 16 aux sends of VST effects and 32 tracks of vsti's with painstaking automation.

Second Annual Report was recorded live in a room with a single cheap condenser microphone straight to cassette. Most of the electronics and effects were build at home by Chris Carter. They were about as far away from something like Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream as you could get at the time. They were doing sound design even if they were working with cheap equipment at home.

A little Kraftwerk trivia: Ralph and Florian screwed over Conny Plank after Autobahn. Because of this he severed all ties with them and would hold a grudge against them until the day he died. Autobahn was extremely pristine and layered compared to Radioactivity. It was recorded in a first rate studio with one of the best engineers/producers in Germany. After Autobahn became a hit Kraftwerk started a world tour on it's success and they became even more in demand. Since they burned their bridges with Plank and they had money to spend, they made Radioactivity in their brand new studio during six weeks of downtime between tours.

If you go back and listen to Autobahn, Radioactivity and Trans-Europe Express in order, there is a fidelity drop on Radioactivity. That drop was them figuring out how to do it on their own. It sounds really grimy, not clear, reduced, and pristine like the albums on either side of it.

I love 2ndAR and Radioactivity. I think they sound amazing even if they aren't super polished. I think they have a lot of character and personality and I don't think they suffer from being a little rough around the edges. I don't think they have any less sound design than say The Wall by Pink Floyd. I don't think they contain any less sonic content than an ELO record.

I don't agree with Tom that sound design has nothing to do with the quality of a record but I also don't think that a good tune is ruined by not slathering on every last bit of production technology you can get your hands on. I think they both have their place and good music has been made in every shade of the spectrum. You have to be reasonable and take things on a case by case basis.

Re Vahid:

A. uh, no I don't think I am in the same league as TG and Kraftwerk.

B. You are not speaking truth to power, you are just dying to misinterpret what I said so you can say something nasty. I am glad that I could provide you with a victory in your life. You did it, man!

Also surely it was the highest of high-tech at the time?!?

― Tim F, Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Not by a long shot. Even with the money from the credit card scam, their facilities were pretty rough early on. They had simple project studios and took their demo's into low budget commercial studios to record and mix. By the late 80's it was more about doing everything in a home studio. The 1st wave had money by then and the second wave was just coming in raw.

You have to remember that it was really expensive to put a studio together back then and there was a lot of borrowing going on between people in town. They were on the bleeding edge of prosumer equipment but their facilities were nothing compared to a Peter Gabriel or Feetwood Mac record of the time. It would be like comparing a Celine Dion record to Ellen Allien record. Sure, Ellen has some nice stuff but she doesn't have a six or seven figure budget for studio time and engineers in a multi-million dollar studio.

The underlying ideas of early Detroit records were extremely cutting edge, but their facilities were not.

Likewise with first wave Detroit Techno - now we might say "oh it was so much more authentic and soulful before protools and ableton and etc." but it's not like the original producers thought of themselves as technologically primitivist.

― Tim F, Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:16 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Again, their ideas were cutting edge at the time, it just that they were executing them with as little resources as possible. If you read interviews from the late 80's the Detroit guys acknowledge that their equipment was behind the times and cheap to begin with. Again, it wasn't about the gear, it was about the ideas.

The one thing they had going for them was that this stuff was brand new and they had functional urban scenes to pay them and keep them inspired. 25 years later it is easy to forget that feeling used to surround this music and inspire it's creation. A lot of crap records came out but a lot of brilliant records have some of that feeling locked into them. Some of it is the record itself and some of it me projecting that feeling onto the record. There is definitely something to those old records.

That being said, there is a ridiculous amount of great music being made these days. It isn't like the past has a monopoly on good music. The problem with today is that it is easy for music to seem cheap and worthless in an age of instant access to production tools and distribution. It's great that people who never would have had a chance to get out there can make their voices heard, the flip side is that there is an avalanche of stuff that is less than fantastic.

It is easy to get jaded when your buyers lists are filled with garbage week in and week out. It is easy to forget that they were always filed with garbage. Even during the golden eras there was still more bad than good. If you are willing to look there is no shortage of gems being dropped right now. Some of those gems are even being made on computers...

one of my favorite things about may or atkins (or aphex twin) records is that you can hear the imperfections of the early equipment: 4 or 8 bar quantized sections but on the 16th or 32nd beat there are ragged edges around the loops or samples. on lesser tracks these things would be detrimental, but for me the songwriting and joie de vivre of the tracks more than makes up for the imperfections. i agree that this in itself is a form of sound design.

Display Name: i get your point, and in fact agree with what you're saying. i was mostly reacting against pipecock's claim that sound design means nothing and trying to hit him at home, that's all.

wow, massive derail... let's see if we can get back on track.

pipecock wrote:
> the hi-hats and things are a bit clicks-and-cuts sounding for my taste, but thats the only obvious problem i have outside of the melodies and shit just not grabbing me.

"reverse rotation" is the only one that sounds clicky to me, and that's the kuniyuki collaboration, so maybe that had someting to do with it... the rest sounds like old-school samples and 70's drum machines. i think i read somewhere he used a lot of old, non-standard drum machines for this, but i can't remember where. in any case, terre'd probably get a kick out of your comment because he is definitely not a fan of clicks-n-cuts, as testified by the bonus track to the otherwise electroacoustic album lovebomb, "chng yourlove," which was done in a clicks-n-cuts style (and the title is written in the style of mille plateaux labelmates snd), apparently in protest to mille plateaux's shift away from abstract music towards the clicky stuff.

re: "being there first" and authenticity
some people were saying they thought terre was claiming to have been there first, mentioning the story at the loft, with the queen who taught madonna to vogue, etc.. i just kinda took it like weird stuff he experienced. i don't think terre is at all interested in authenticity or claiming to be an "original" in anything... which is also why this album sounds so "familiar" rather than "groundbreaking" (which several reviewers complained about). his whole project seems to be about the impossibility of origin, authenticity and roots (he even had that other house album titled "routes not roots"). over the years he's also talked in interviews about using different kinds of language in different projects, like academic-speak for computer music, and poetry on a lot of house ep's, as a comment on the kinds of discourse used around different genres. i took the didactic monologues in "midtown" like a play on old house record monologues ("this is jack's house," etc.) which are so over the top... for people to say terre is up his own ass, but at the same time not really feel anything one way or another about the quasi-religious rants in most house classics, is probably his intention - to trigger that kind of listener resentment within a musical context that is not supposed to be about resentment, and to actually "feel" a reaction to what is being said. in other words, breaking the numbness within a genre who's mantra is "can you feel it?"

there was some interview - can't find it now (i thought the xlr8r article, but don't spot the line) - where he specifically said "dj sprinkles is a signifier of the unheard dj's," which is about invisibility and goes against the "individual greatness" interpretations. i think any signs of individuality here are playing with our commercial expectations to see musicians in that way, and they bring out the problems of discussing anonymity/secrecy (which is vital to his queer/transgendered concept of house) within a marketplace demanding personality.

i think when listening to his records, he wants us to go beyond the normal point of deciding how it made us feel (loved it, hated it, didn't care, etc.), and actually think about how we came to be conditioned to feel those reactions in the first place.

anyway, i find it really funny that people are acting like this is filled with his talking, when his voiceover is only in 2 tracks! (midtown 120 intro - hello, INTRO WITH A TRACK ID TO CLEANLY SKIP TO THE MAIN TRACK! and the very end of ball'r - hello, THE END OF THE TRACK!). it seems he took all the courtesies possible to let people pass them over. at the same time, it's true the album is filled with vocal samples - most of them taken from those classic didactic house monologues, but NOBODY here has commented on how they manage to NOT be intrusive even though he chopped them up to say his own messages (having jesse jackson only say "sisters" instead of "brothers and sisters," and cutting up the "house is a feeling, no one man can own house, uncontrollable desire, blah blah" classic monologue [by i don't know whom, but you know the one i mean], so that it says "house music is controllable desire you can own")! which voices are intrusive and which are not seems to be a MAJOR point. (the shadows and fog re-edit so it sounds like she's talking about a drag queen being beaten up is sublime... and yeah, that classic sample "deep into the vibe of house" does sound like he's saying "deep into the bowel of house" ha ha!)

lots of humor in this album - which i think offsets a lot of stuff others seem uptight about... but i can also see how it sounds smug to those not expecting sarcasm. still, pretty funny if you ask me. :D

but... about the production quality - you really need nice speakers for this. otherwise it sounds totally strange. i can imagine people hating it simply because they haven't heard it on good speakers.

i haven't heard this on good speakers but it sounds awes on my alritish headphones.

the production is deceptively great on this. when i first heard it, it sounded kind of thin, but after listening on some really nice headphones I'm impressed. the lack of peak limiting and obvious compression makes it seem really spacious.

my biggest complaints are that his voice sounds really thin and awkward in the first track (maybe not really a production critique), and the break in "House Music is Controllable Desire You Can Own" seems just a few milliseconds off to me. That may be intentional, though, to make it sound more old school or something.

I don't like his monologue in the 'intro' track at all. I find it the lowest point on the album, and I always skip it.

Xposts Good analysis.

I've been thinking a lot about this record lately, mostly in adoration. Ultimately, I can't think of a dance record that makes me think quite so much as this has, it's ability to give birth to discussion is nothing short of admirable, far beyond most records where the discussion ends when you decide whether it'll work in a club or not.

Irregardless: it really isn't a house record, imho, but an electronic treatise on house music, philosophically speaking.

― gonna be a long hot summer for the MS Word paperclip (the table is the table), Tuesday, July 14, 2009 12:42 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think is pretty OTM. Critiques of it being just a rehash of older sounds, I think, are taking a not so great reading of it. It seems to me more that this work is more a collection of the canonical signifiers of House music, turned on their head, than any attempt at making something new within the traditional category of House. Stop me if I start sounding like I don't know what I'm saying, but it's almost post-house in this respect: it resembles house because house is it's referent (take Grand central pt 1. which buries very traditional drum machines and synth sounds under abstract sounds. It's not a house track per se, so much as something that makes house its subject), it sounds like it because it is addresses it as such, hence the voice overs, samples, self-conscious use of 808 in GC pt. 1, etc.

And I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't separate the autobiography and the arguments. This is an incredibly personal document (i.e. Grand Central pt. 2), and I admire Terre's ability to be so open. I believe this to be more the story of one individual's experiences than any sort of diagnosis of the problems of house (and of course the latter is articulated in the former, as someone who has presumable experienced and seen a good deal of disenfranchisement and marginalization).

Also, it really does sound that good.

Most, if not all, great political music is personal.

Yes.

Also, I forgot to talk about the end of the album, The Occasional Feel-Good, which, more than just a very nice track is such a perfect end to the album: Despite the pain, suffering, the disenfranchisement and disillusionment, after all of this there still remains those occasional moments of ecstasy you find on the dance floor or in your room listening to records.

It's kind of optimistic and beautiful, really, as a re-framing of a raison-d'etre of the whole thing.

> my biggest complaints are that his voice sounds really thin and awkward in the first track (maybe not really a production critique)

yes, his voice is thin and hard to hear/understand in other albums, too ("trans am" and "silent passability" from couture cosmetique, "lovebomb" from lovebomb, etc. - even in his two radio dramas filled with voices, the voice mixing is often not up-and-front). it always sounds like he mixes it "inside out" compared to how normal voices would be inserted. i assume this is some kind of statement against artistic ego - a half-baked solution to get his voice into the track, but to do it uncomfortably.

according to a recent interview on soundslikeme (where terre talks about omd's dazzle ships), the discomfort is probably his as much as the listeners... sounds like he has voice hang-ups:

Q: Do you think there is a reason why so many Synthpop bands of the 80’s have this combination of electronic instruments and very distinctive voices?

A: It’s a very British male vocal reminiscent of Gary Numan, Pet Shop Boys, etc. Actually, my own voice is very similar to these voices, and listening to their records tends to make me uneasy in the way hearing one’s own voice is uneasy. In fact, it’s one very private reason I have just always fucking hated the Pet Shop Boys. I can’t get over it....

http://www.sounds-like-me.com/news/terre-thaemlitz-on-dazzle-ships-by-orchestral-manoeuvres-in-the-dark/

maybe terre skips the "midtown 120 intro" when playing the album, too, ha ha! it is kind of awkward to listen to, performatively. but that is also a kind of "underground" thing - not an image of underground, but really underground in terms of non-professional voiceover. kinda cool in that sense, just to think the document exists as it does.