http://villagevoice.com/issues/9847/sotc.php
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Week of November 17 - 23, 1998
The Sound of the City
No Guts, No Glory.
Dance music in a club setting
functions on a visceral
level, quite literally: disco,
techno, even trance all get a
groove going when pumped straight
into the nexus of
nerves at the solar plexus, the
body's center of kinetic
energy. This is why "party" begins
with "PA."
Last Saturday's Basic
Channel/Chain Reaction party (the
kind that you don't find out the
location of until a couple
of hours before the event; it
materialized in low-ceilinged
digs in Dumbo) sported a superb
set of woofers that was
all but wasted on live
performances from Pole and Scion.
These acts, like the others
affiliated with the fastidious
Berlin label Chain Reaction (Basic
Channel is its now
defunct parent organization),
regard club mix as
centrifuge? starting with deep
house?techno repetitions,
titrating out any vestige of
melody, and dropping the
beats and bass out from underfoot.
The remnant: a
powerful pulse pinned to its
rotating perimeter. When
this works? as it does dizzyingly
well on releases by
Porter Ricks (two people), Various
Artists (one person),
and Vainqueur (another one person,
Rene L?we, who's
also half of Scion)? it spins you
right round like a record,
baby. So much for the low-end
theory.
Except that it's quite difficult
to get the Chain Reaction
method to work consistently. For
instance, the problem
with Pole, the solo project of
Chain Reaction's dub plate
engineer, Stefan Betke, is that it
strains toward a purely
digital version of dub: an
interesting contradiction in
terms conceptually, but one less
than fascinating to hear
actually played out. It half works
as effervescent
analgesic on Pole's new
self-titled album (Kiff), on which
a constant, fizzy crackle tickles
Cab Volt?Suicide throb in
a lukewarm bath of lurching
synthetic bass that aims for
King Tubby but barely meets the
Residents. Live and
loud, the Pole set actually hurt a
bit; shuddering spasms
landed stinging blows mid sternum
like a bad case of
acid reflux.
Scion, the next act, aimed closer
to the heart, pummeling
away with velvet-gloved blows that
were dreamy,
insistent, definitely danceable,
and not so darned hard to
digest. Afterward, Peter
Kuschnereit, a/k/a Substance
(the other Scion guy), commenced
an interminable set on
the turntables so fraught with
error that whenever he
successfully matched a beat,
obliging audience members
clapped (having necessarily given
up on dancing, what
else could they do?). His
retro-electro selections gave a
hint of what '80s nights must
sound like on the continent
(Laid Back's "White Horse" figured
prominently). Finally,
L?we took over turntable duties in
the wee hours; it was
a shame that he didn't proffer a
Vainqueur set instead,
to revive the pulse of the
by-then-dying party. ? Sally
Jacob
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