Frits Wentink
Redline
Clone Royal Oak
For a minute in the 2010s, Frits Wentink seemed like one of the coolest producers on the planet. The Dutch artist arrived as part of the “outsider house” cohort—which would evolve, with better branding, into lo-fi house by the middle of the decade—and looking back at his output from that period (both his own releases and the records by others he issued via his Bobby Donny label), they exhibit all the trappings of the era. Oddball rhythms? Check. Kitschy melodies? Check. The occasional dusty break? Check. I mean, writer Holly Dicker once described him as Napoleon Dynamite.
It’s easy to focus on the goofy stuff from those days, but Wentink has always displayed a deep knowledge of and love for house music. So yes, his track names were sometimes silly, but he also understood the musical grammar of house well enough to play around with it—and do so without losing sight of what made a track jack.
As the zeitgeist has shifted in this decade, Wentink has continued to put out house records, but his music has gotten more refined, deeper, and maybe even a bit more serious. But not too serious, as Redline, his latest release from Clone Royal Oak, still displays the cheekiness of a committed prankster. “Heat Shield,” for example, is built around a bassline wiggly enough to make Terry Francis jealous, yet as the track evolves, Wentink’s smile starts to crack through, its organ keys transforming the tune into a circus-ready piece of tech house (in a good way).
He pulls a similar trick on “Mind State.” As the otherwise bass-forward deep house track progresses, the melody sounds increasingly day-drunk and frenzied, like someone who skipped the canapes at a wedding and is on their sixth glass of champagne before dinner. The other two cuts on the record are just as good (and fun), though my preference is for the slightly dubbed-out “Burned,” where staggered percussion is made fuzzy in a wash of sighing chords. This is classic and classy house—it’s just been made with a sense of contemporary irreverence.
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