Charlie Conway
Rudded
Fixed Rhythms
Nashville has arguably been a music town for more than a century now, but the place has never really be known as a techno hotbed. Sure, Nikki Nair grew up in Knoxville—which, for the record, is nearly 200 miles away—but if you do a quick Google search of “dance music artists from Nashville,” I’m guessing that the results will leave you scratching your head. The city isn’t necessarily to blame for that; country music is obviously the biggest game in town, and the dance music industry / press has long had a hard time looking beyond what’s happening in places like London, Berlin and New York. No matter how much quality techno is actually being produced in the region, it’s fair to say that many of even the most open-minded listeners would probably be skeptical about the idea of a burgeoning scene existing pretty much anywhere in Tennessee.
Rudded, however, just might change their minds. Arriving on Fixed Rhythms—an Oklahoma City label that definitely knows a thing or two about building something outside of dance music’s hype centers—it’s the latest release from Charlie Conway, a guy who, aside from DJing, making music and throwing parties, is also the co-founder of Nashville’s Disctrix venue. More importantly, however, the record is a thumping exercise in bang-the-box techno. Deeply indebted to the raw sounds of Detroit and Chicago (and not far off from what fellow American producers like 1Morning and JR2k have been doing in recent years), the record opens with its title track, an invigorating number that skillfully combines blasts of corroded noise with an insistent—and undeniably funky—groove. On “Zinc,” the sense of mayhem only increases, yet even as Conway serves up gnarled synths and pushes nearly everything into the red, he keeps things firmly on the dancefloor, never allowing his rhythms to fall into a static abyss.
Closing out the EP, “Why Do You” does manage to turn down the distortion, though the track—which clocks in at more than 12 minutes—still has a somewhat crazed energy, its rubbery groove prompting questions like, “What would it sound like if Moodymann was hopped up on way too much Adderall?” Conway clearly likes his techno fast, but listening to Rudded is less like being beaten over the head and more like trying to keep up with an excited kindergartener who’s streaking across the playground. Yes, things can get a little messy, but even if you’re exhausted at the end of the day, you’re going to have a big smile on your face.