Rephlex Records Knocks Techno Off Its High Horse
This Ain't No Disco
by Hobey Echlin
ith last year's swan-song-cum-video "Windowlicker," Richard "Aphex Twin"
James retired from music-making, which was just as well. As electronic
music's resident funnyman, he hadbecome more its Rich Little than its Andy
Kaufman, shtickishly pantomiming his role in the usually humorless scene.
First there was 1996's"Girl Boy Song," its spazzy breakbeat dry-humping a
classical interlude, as much a punchline as an ersatz "Swan Lake." Then came
his remix of Beck's "Devil's Haircut," rechristened "Richard's Hairpiece"
after he stripped the low-end off and sped up the vocal to a grating ping of
hi-hats. But "Windowlicker" was the crowning glory, its spare, rubbery
rhythm serving up as good an excuse as any for a pimp-playing James and
director Chris Cunningham to ride around in a block-long stretch limo,
indulging and subverting T&A imagery like gender-challenging director
Matthew Barney making a 2 Live Crew video: Teases of string-bikini-clad
curves end up belonging to women that all have James's grinning, bearded
mug. As the old Chas and Dave song put it, "Nice legs, shame about the
face."
But if James has moved into pop culture proper with his megabudget videos
making fun of other megabudget videos, his Rephlex label carries on the
Aphex Twin aesthetic on the underground techno front. Founded in Cornwall in
1991 by James and partner Grant Wilson Claridge, Rephlex (www.rephlex.com)
has in the last few years shifted from its initial rave-era renaissance,
when it boasted releases by Squarepusher and ?-Ziq, into its current
post-rave, post-everything mannerist jag, putting out music by artists who
sound as if their only contact with electronic music is from listening to
squelchy ham-radio broadcasts in remote parts of the world: Ovuca in
Finland, proudly representing North of the Arctic Circle with his chilly,
scattered, free-range tundra-jungle version of soul music; Lektrogirl in her
native Tasmania making infantilistic electro, from the sounds of it, while
reading the software manual on her lap; Bogdan Raczynski in Poland or Japan
or (judging from his album Thinking of You's poster insert) wherever he's
wearing that flowered dress and pushing that shopping cart, with his
battered laptop full of stream-of-consciousness bleeps and broken beats over
which to rant about DJs and Ibiza, buoyed by the oddly sentimental segue of
embittered lost love to lull him to sleep, those Brit bastards be damned.
Then there's DMX Krew, who evidently have never heard music made after 1984,
at least any made with guitar. This has yielded an alarmingly consistent
string of albums-that-time-forgot that sound like the Monkees trying to be
Kraftwerk: obliviously, and-your-point-would-be-edly reactionary, blissfully
free of all that herky-jerky future-retro irony that fuels smirky
neo-electroids like Add N To (X).
Likewise, compared to the running commentary of IDM (so-called Intelligent
Dance Music) about other, one infers, less-intelligent music (current IDM
poster boy Kid 606's new offering scrambles N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police"),
Like A Tim's Rephlex release Red and Blue Boxing seems beamed in from some
parallel universe where laws of 4/4 tempo, melody, even simple coherence,
sometimes brilliantly, usually annoyingly, don't apply.
But as wildly varying as Rephlex releases are, they all share the na?ve
eccentricity of their label founder, so uncannily that if all these folks
were really just elaborate aliases for James's own schizophrenic output,
nobody would be shocked. But if it is all a joke, dance music, and music in
general, is finally getting it. As lines blur between "good" and "bad" with
the emergence of the so-bad-it's-good category of "amazing," usually favored
by brainy critics to excuse guilty-pleasure love of dumb rock, Raczynski is
indeed amazing, fueled by a brave (everybody has those weird minutes
squinting in the bathroom mirror half-singing embarrassing songs; only
Raczynski makes albums of them) and occasionally shocking confidence (his
misogynistic hate-rants against British consumerism have gotten him banned
from England). Though inspired by dance music, he's free from its
shackled-to-club-play tunnel vision, even if, for now, he's defined by
it?not unlike the insanely un-punk Butthole Surfers playing hardcore-punk
clubs in the mid '80s.
James and Claridge themselves prefer to call their post-dance aesthetic
"braindance." But as a recent spate of dance records exhibiting Rephlex-ian
eccentricities shows, this post-dance "amazing"-ness is converging with
dance music's need to find the funk in new ways. The best Detroit techno
single in 10 years, the helium electro sex-up "Sandwiches" by Detroit Grand
Pubahs, owes more to Dr. Demento than Derrick May, while techno granddaddy
Sven V?th and France's Mr. Oizo have both released records of
no-it's-not-a-joke kindergarten techno more kindred to Lektrogirl than Jeff
Mills. Even house homeboy Armand Van Helden's new Killing Puritans album,
with its street-person conspiracy theories, human beat-boxing, and rampant
middle fingers to the dance status quo (in between requisite jiggy tracks,
of course), sounds more like Bogdan Raczynski's Thinking of You, itself full
of noisy beats and hilarious "Fuck you DJ" lines ("lazyass DJ shit . . . my
dog could make better beats than you . . . and I don't even have a dog")
than, say, the last Basement Jaxx record.
Dance music more and more lets us down with tracky albums that bounce
between ever more hermetically sealed genres. (Question for house producers:
Is disco the only thing worth sampling in the last 25 years?) So when, after
an afternoon of braindancing to Raczynski, a colleague of mine commented,
"This is what your parents hear when you play them techno . . . a bunch of
noise," all I could respond with was, "And your point would be?"
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at
http://www.hotmail.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org