Bill Converse
Zone Zone
Fixed Rhythms
Things Texas is currently famous for: guns, BBQ, oil.
Things Texas should be famous for: some of the finest outsider American dance music.
Okay, this may be a bit of a caricature, but Texas is a low-key hub for some of this century’s finest producers, including electro dreamer Convextion and sci-fi techno upstart Decoder. And, of course, any list of Texas greats must mention the legendary Bill Converse.
His latest outing, Zone Zone, is a double pack of the mind-melting good stuff. On the A-side, off-kilter electro drums are assailed by 303s, country-fried basslines and the occasional train whistle. These tracks don’t jack so much as they attack. The flip is softer, even gentle by Converse standards, with “lure me” calling to mind the stranger ends of deep house you might find in the Acido catalog.
The second disc, however, is where the magic really happens. Here we get 25 minutes of Converse live and unfiltered as he treats us to a recording from a live set recorded at a party in Denton, Texas. It’s a hodge-podge of dance music tropes run through a broken glass kaleidoscope. Little bits of funk push through dense spiderwebs of acid and synths run deep into the red. This is dance music at its most raw and unhinged.
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