First Floor #164 – The Shifting Tides of Dance Music
a.k.a. An interview with L.I.E.S. founder Ron Morelli, plus a round-up of the week's electronic music news and a fresh slate of new track recommendations.
Dance music is a fickle thing.
A little more than a decade ago, the L.I.E.S. label was held up by the press (and a whole lot of fans) as the absolute epitome of cool, prompting a veritable flood of blown-out hardware jams and noise-techno imitators. In 2023, however, that aesthetic is essentially the complete opposite of the candy-colored, pop-sampling bangers that are currently the toast of the dance music world.
I talked about that disparity between the past and present with L.I.E.S. founder Ron Morelli in an interview published earlier this week (more on than below). Otherwise, today’s First Floor newsletter features a guest appearance by Penelope Trappes, a bunch of freshly released tracks I’m digging, a summary of the week’s electronic music news and more.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Every Tuesday, First Floor publishes a long-form piece that’s exclusively made available to paid newsletter subscribers only. The latest one is an interview with L.I.E.S. label founder Ron Morelli. He’ll soon be releasing his first solo album dedicated to dance music (more specifically, it’s heavily influenced by the ’80s sounds of Chicago, Detroit and New York), and though he’s generally hesitant to talk to the press, he opened up not only about the new LP, but also the shifting perceptions of L.I.E.S. and how the label has (and hasn’t) evolved during the past 13 years. Along the way, he also shared a few thoughts about why he’s not particularly keen on a lot of what’s currently fashionable in the wider dance music world.
REAL QUICK
A round-up of the last week’s most interesting electronic music news, plus links to interviews, mixes, articles and other things I think are worth sharing.
Although it has absolutely zero to do with electronic music, the farewell column that New York Times film critic A.O. Scott published last week—after more than 20 years of doing the job—is a great read, and includes this incredible passage, which certainly applies as much to music as it does film:
I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.
In an illuminating recent article for the LA Times, the always excellent Jeff Weiss took an extensive look at the current state of nightlife in Los Angeles, focusing in particular to how the city has struggled to come to grips with the disappearance of several venues and a culture that increasingly unfolds online. Although the piece’s contents are specific to Southern California, Weiss’ observations will likely resonate with musicians (and music fans) in major cities all around the world.
Resident Advisor’s Michael Lawson penned a story detailing the recent “controversy” (i.e. people yelling at each other on Twitter) surrounding DJ Jayhood’s unlicensed Jersey club remix of T2 and Jodie Aysha’s 2007 bassline anthem “Heartbroken.” One of the people quoted in the article is Tom Lea (whose Local Action label has previously worked with DJ Jayhood, but also UK artists like bassline giant DJ Q), and once the piece went live, he elected to publish the full commentary that he gave to RA; an insightful must-read, it’s an intelligent, well-reasoned and well-informed assessment of the situation (and sample culture in general).
For better or worse, it seems that every single dance music publication feels obligated to commission a long-form piece about the current wave of young producers coming out of Miami. Last week it was DJ Mag’s turn, and they enlisted writer James Gui to briefly profile eight of South Florida’s most hotly tipped artists, including Jonny from Space, Coffintexts, SEL.6, Sister System and Bitter Babe, who also put together an exclusive mix to accompany the article.
With the distinctly UK sounds of speed garage and bassline once again enjoying a moment in the sun, Mixmag tapped writer Felicity Martin to assemble a feature that not only details the music’s origins in the late ’90s and early 2000s, but also traces how the genres have been both beloved and disrespected over the years—sometimes by the exact same crowds.
Along similar musical lines, the latest edition of DJ Mag’s The Sound of feature series puts a spotlight on new-school UK garage label ec2a, interviewing founder Dr Dubplate (who also provides an exclusive mix).
Aslice, the platform launched last year by DVS1 that enables DJs to easily share a portion of their fees with the artists whose music they play in their sets, has announced a new partnership with FATdrop, one of the dance music world’s most widely used promo delivery platforms. Artists and labels using FATdrop can now automatically share the metadata from their releases with Aslice, which will use that information to more rapidly and accurately identify tracks from those releases in DJ sets—and more easily pay the artists who made them.
JUST ANNOUNCED
A round-up of noteworthy new and upcoming releases announced during the past week.
Daft Punk, who will be issuing an expanded 10th anniversary edition of their Random Access Memories album on May 12, have shared a previously unreleased track that will appear on the release: “The Writing of the Fragments of Time,” a documentary-style tune featuring Todd Edwards that also provides a behind-the-scenes look at the writing and recording of original LP cut “Fragments of Time.”
Released last weekend on the Pressure label, Machine 1 kicks off a new EP series from The Bug, which the longtime bass champion says will be devoted to “purpose-built PRESSURE weapons for droppin at the PRESSURE parties and other live BUG events.”
Anunaku will soon be returning to the AD 93 label with the 063 EP, an effort the UK-based Italian says is inspired by “distant memories, fairytales and transcendental experiences.” It’s slated to arrive on April 14, but the first two tracks from the record have already been shared here.
Ten years after his Legacy album helped to cement RP Boo’s status as one of footwork’s foundational figures, the Chicago artist has prepared a sequel for Planet Mu. Pulling from his archives, Legacy Volume 2 contains tracks created between 2002 and 2007, and will be released on May 12. Ahead of that, LP cut “B.O.T.O.” has already been made available.
It’s hard to believe that more than a decade has passed since Jam City turned club music on its head with his Classical Curves LP, but the UK producer will soon be releasing a new full-length, Jam City Presents EFM. Before it arrives on June 1 via his own Earthly imprint and Mad Decent, he’s shared a new single, “Times Square.”
PENELOPE TRAPPES HAS BETTER TASTE THAN I DO
First Floor is effectively a one-person operation, but every edition of the newsletter cedes a small portion of the spotlight to an artist, writer or other figure from the music world, inviting them to recommend a piece of music. This week’s installment comes from Penelope Trappes, a UK-based Australian musician who in the past few years has released multiple albums of beautifully haunting avant-pop, exploring ideas of birth and rebirth, grief, motherhood, the female body and more. (She also makes musically brighter fare as one half of The Golden Filter.) Soon Trappes will be releasing what’s quite possibly her most stripped-down effort to date: Heavenly Spheres, which was created during a two-week artist residency, consists only of “her voice, an upright piano and an old German reel-to-reel tape deck.” Before it arrives next month via her own Nite Hive imprint, Trappes has popped in here to share a unique musical gem.
Valentina Goncharova “Sirens (Yin)” (Hidden Harmony)
A couple of years ago on one of my deep dives into music for my radio show, I stumbled across the work of Ukrainian musician Valentina Goncharova. It completely took my mind to new worlds, new possibilities of composition, greater depths of listening and gave me a sense of “anything is possible” within music. The freedom within her work and the depth of exploration of sound that she accesses through complete improvisation is absolutely astounding and utterly unique.
I also love that she is classically trained but chose to deliberately explore new ways to create music. She recorded in the 1980s at home on 6.3 mm analog tapes, with no microphones—just a special wire connecting her violin directly to a magnetic pickup and then into the tape recorder using a delay loop of three seconds from her Soviet-made Lel RC Digital Reverb. The minimalist production adds another dimension to her hypnotic and explorative compositions; it’s like some kind of magic dust. The more I listen to her work, I hear the deliberate defiance of traditional composition, a complete stream of consciousness and pure intuition taking the listener deeper and deeper. I also love that her work is openly spiritual; she is searching for vibrations and sounds from beyond, connecting with the cosmic and mystical. The track “Sirens (Yin),” taken from Ocean - Symphony for Electric Violin and other instruments in 10+ parts, is infinitely transportive to me with its meditative drone and her wailing vocals that mirror her violin as she plays.
NEW THIS WEEK
The following is a selection of my favorite tunes from releases that came out during the past week or so. ‘The Big Three’ are the songs I especially want to highlight (and therefore have longer write-ups), but the tracks in the ‘Best of the Rest’ section are also very much worth your time. Click the track titles to hear each song individually, or you can also just head over to this convenient Buy Music Club list if you prefer to listen to them all in one place.
THE BIG THREE
Doc Sleep “Tomorrow Is Beautiful (feat. Glenn Astro)” (Tartelet)
Doc Sleep “C&L at Sea” (Tartelet)
Delightful is a word that isn’t—and probably shouldn’t—be used too often in the electronic music realm, but it perfectly encapsulates the vibe of Birds (in my mind anyway), the debut album from Doc Sleep. An electronic music lifer who logged time in North Dakota, Minnesota and the San Francisco Bay Area before landing in Berlin, the Jacktone label co-founder has long been a friendly figure who largely operated behind the scenes, only occasionally dropping records of her own, but this LP—a heady, ambient-leaning excursion on which she frequently steps away from the dancefloor—makes clear that she deserves a place in the spotlight.
A collaboration with Glenn Astro, “Tomorrow Is Beautiful” is one of the album’s many highlights, a glistening bit of IDM-meets-new age that elegantly floats above the cloudline, its gleaming melodies and pitter-pat percussion exuding an undeniable warmth. “C&L Sea” hovers closer to the surface—the jazzy tumble of its drums, which wouldn’t be out of place on an old Mo’ Wax record, has a lot to do with that—yet the track still has a kind of celestial glow, with billowing synths and smeared textures that stretch across the horizon, evoking images of quietly lapping waves and an epic coastal sunrise.
Andrea “Silent Now” (Ilian Tape)
Andrea “Lush in End” (Ilian Tape)
The steady expansion of the Ilian Tape sound palette has been hard to miss in recent years, and Due in Colour, the sophomore album from Andrea, unfolds along similar lines. Steeped in the Italian producer’s exploration of “hazy and experimental jazz” and described by the label as an effort more suited to “blooming fields” than “dark loud clubs,” it does include forays into woozy ambient and blazed beat constructions, at times sounding like something DJ Krush might have cooked up in the ’90s. However, the LP doesn’t abandon the dancefloor altogether; the skippy, reverb-drenched “Silent Now” isn’t far off from the broken techno aesthetic that first put Andrea—and Ilian Tape on the whole—on the map, though its smoky grooves do reflect a more notably organic bent. The restless “Lush in End” is less of a functional club tune, but there’s something hypnotic about the push and pull between the song’s meditative topline melodies (which are perhaps better described as drawn-out tones) and its underlying percussive churn.
El Choop “Faith” (Echocord)
El Choop “Closing Motif” (Echocord)
Remixes from Deadbeat and Luke Hess bring a bit of star power to El Choop’s new Closing Motif EP, but it’s the London producer’s two originals that shine brightest. That said, considering that “Faith” and “Closing Motif” are dub techno tunes, the actual brightness of the music is relatively subdued. The former saunters along with a particularly heavy glaze of reverb, but even as its underlying thump resides completely underwater, “Faith” remains a positively ravey cut, its stabbing synths doing their best to cut through the song’s persistent haze. “Closing Motif,” on the other hand, essentially flips the script, unfurling moody, post-punk-style bass and guitar lines—early material from the likes of New Order and The Cure comes to mind—atop a bouncier, more energetic gait. Making dub techno sound fresh is no easy task, but El Choop admirably moves the genre beyond endless echo and drawn-out grooves.
BEST OF THE REST
nueen “IV” (3XL)
With previous releases on Quiet Time Tapes, Good Morning Tapes and Balmat, nueen had already built the foundation of an impressive weirdo ambient pedigree, but with the new Link EP, the Barcelona-based producer seems to have been officially welcomed into the extended West Mineral Ltd. universe. Easily his most hip-hop-indebted effort to date, the record leans heavily on extended samples of rappers, reaching a high point on “IV,” a sort of neo-screwed number on which a zoned-out flow glides atop gooey (albeit lush) textures and barely-there drum patterns.
Simone Giudice “Aria” (Affin)
It’s not easy to embrace largesse without descending into schmaltz, but Simone Giudice impressively does just that on “Aria,” a rousing standout from his frequently stunning new Alone LP. The track itself is relatively simple, but over the course of five and a half minutes, its Italian creator gradually turns up the intensity, transforming his quiet undulations into cinematic blasts of melody, ultimately delivering something that would work as well in a symphony hall as it would in a big-budget film.
Mikkel Rev “Regrets” (A Strangely Isolated Place)
Mikkel Rev “Sub Sea (Peace Mix)” (A Strangely Isolated Place)
Dabbling in both euphoric trance and spacey ambient, the new The Art of Levitation album simultaneously resides on seemingly opposite ends of the electronic spectrum, but Norwegian artist Mikkel Rev makes the combination not just work, but shine. With its swirling sonics and bubbling bassline, the Sasha & Digweed vibes are strong on LP standout “Regrets,” but it’s “Sub Sea (Peace Mix)” that really gets the Y2K-era endorphins flowing, its sturdy kick propelling the track’s (tastefully) soaring trance riffs.
8circuit “Liquid Link” (secondnature)
It’s honestly baffling that secondnature hasn’t become a world-renowned techno label, because the Pacific Northwest outpost has spent the past seven years quietly offering up one brilliant release after another. The latest is Liquid Link, a new EP from 8circuit (a.k.a. the Seattle-based producer formerly known as Archivist), and its stellar title track is a washy number with a busted (albeit potent) drum pattern, new age-indebted melodies and a light dusting of soft static.
Hardt Antoine “All We See” (Kompakt)
A melody-driven slice of tech house, “All We See” is the kind of tune that doesn’t show up very often here in the newsletter, but there’s something uniquely enticing about its crystalline chimes and serpentine wiggle. A highlight of London-based artist Hardt Antoine’s new Nobody’s Watching EP, the song is primed for big rooms but never ostentatious, its low-key acid throb and sparkling synths coalescing into something with a slight sense of psychedelia and just enough pop sensibility to keep the normies engaged.
Klint “Arsenic” (Rekids Special Projects)
The title track of Klint’s latest EP, “Arsenic” is a highly functional piece of spring-loaded techno, one whose brawny underbelly chugs along like a steam locomotive as the song’s darting synths and ominous chords work their magic. Though its creator hails from France, there’s an obvious Detroit influence at work here—Klint has definitely heard a Robert Hood record or two—as the hip-shaking “Arsenic” hits hard without obliterating all of the song’s funkiness in the process.
Law “All Styles” (Rupture LDN)
Tapping into the golden era of ’90s jungle without sounding like a mere rehash, “All Styles” leads off Patterns, the new EP from UK producer Law. Although the song’s dreamily glittering melodies provide the initial hook, it’s the track’s smacking percussion and thrumming, jazz-indebted bassline that give it a proper sense of forward momentum, nodding toward the legacy of artists like Adam F and Roni Size as they satisfyingly put the nearest bassbin through the wringer.
Lårry “Angela’s Knife” (BRUK)
Anyone who’s lived through tech-step drum & bass, dubstep and EDM likely knows that the stigma around wobble bass exists for good reason. Nevertheless, “Angela’s Knife”—a standout from Lårry’s new How Was That for You EP—makes a compelling case that under the right circumstances, a well-deployed wobble can still be devastatingly effective. Pairing its subby assault with a steppy breakbeat rhythm, the track is more than capable of rumbling listeners’ guts, but it won’t melt their brains in the process.
Pugilist & Tamen “Lithium (Dwarde & Tim Reaper Remix)” (DEXT)
The title track of Melbourne duo Pugilist & Tamen’s new EP, the original “Lithium” is a potent jungle cut, but this remix by Dwarde & Tim Reaper puts things into hyperdrive, unleashing what the label describes as “full-on breakbeat jungle armageddon.” Is that a tad hyperbolic? Perhaps, but the UK pair do significantly up the energy level, their gleefully pitched-up samples and high-intensity percussive assault sure to pummel soundystems like a champion boxer working the speed bag.
ASC “Centrifuge” (Horo)
Though he will probably forever be known primarily as a drum & bass guy, veteran producer ASC has spent the past two decades steadily expanding his skillset, and now stands as someone whose cinematic sound design is often just as impressive as his thundering Amen breaks. The slow-brewing “Centrifuge,” an impeccable highlight of his new Hiding in Plain Sight LP, isn’t really jungle at all, but its looming bass tones, drifting textures and fortified trip-hop rhythm provoke a sense of awe all the same.
That brings us to the end of this edition of First Floor. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter, and as always, I do hope that you enjoyed the tunes. (Don’t forget, you can find them all on this handy Buy Music Club list, and if you like them, please buy them.)
Have a good rest of the week,
Shawn
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter, or you can just drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.