Making Something New Out of Dance Music's Past By KELEFA SANNEH
LAST year, disco and new wave underwent a dance-floor revival, as electronic producers mimicked the pop songs they had grown up loving. Smart, beguiling albums by Daft Punk and Felix Da Housecat paid exuberant (if tongue-in-cheek) tribute to the sounds of the late 70's and early 80's. An enterprising promoter gave this new old sound a name - electroclash - and organized a three-day music festival in New York last October to celebrate the genre. The 2002 Electroclash tour started in New York earlier this month and ends on Tuesday in Los Angeles. Darshan Jesrani and Morgan Geist, the two producers who make music together as Metro Area, seem personally offended by the swift rise of electroclash, and they hope its fall will be even swifter. "It's weird seeing people take something that could be really important to you and turn it into this ironic, cool fashion," Mr. Geist said. The duo's debut album, "Metro Area," was released last week by Environ Records (the label run by Mr. Geist), and it's proof that an obsession with pop history need not lead to imitation. Metro Area is one of a number of new acts creating abstract dance music that gestures toward the rhythms of disco and new wave. The two producers, both 29, grew up outside New York City: Mr. Jesrani in upstate New York and Mr. Geist in New Jersey. When they met, in the mid-90's, they discovered that they had both found electronic music the same way: by listening to rock 'n' roll. "I heard `Tom Sawyer,' by Rush, with an electronic intro," Mr. Jesrani recalled. "And that led me into Devo, Thomas Dolby." Similarly, Mr. Geist noticed that lots of progressive-rock records used electronic sounds as sound effects. "So I just focused on the sound effects," he said. Soon they were discovering hip-hop, R & B and club music, but they concentrated on the little things: the amount of reverb on a kick drum, the timbre of a particular synthesizer. Working together in New York City in the mid-90's, they developed a simple, meticulous style. When they sample an old record, Mr. Geist said, they don't swipe a chorus or even a bar - they swipe a single drum beat, using that snippet to create a new rhythm. The tracks they create are sleek and skeletal, like old-fashioned dance music with the vocals - and nearly everything else - taken out. Mr. Geist explains the group's approach by referring to the Jamaican-born technique of dubbing, in which a producer remixes a song by removing virtually everything except the beat and the bass line. "We consider ourselves to be making dubs of old tracks that never really existed," he said. This process may sound clinical, but the music itself doesn't. Starting in 1999, Metro Area released a series of four 12-inch singles; six tracks from the series appear on the album. Like most electronic producers, the members of Metro Area are D.J.'s, too, and that gives them a chance to observe firsthand which tracks dancers love. They are hosts of a get-together called "Party Out of Bounds," which takes place on the second Thursday of each month at the nightclub APT in the meatpacking district. The Metro Area album is highly danceable, and highly listenable, too. The tracks bear out Mr. Geist's assessment: they sound like extended remixes of pop records you've never heard. "Piña," one of the group's earliest tracks, uses four electric piano chords to tie together all the sounds that wander in and out of the mix: snapping fingers, conga drums, echoing sound effects. Part of the trick is to make the music sound less busy than it actually is. A number of musicians contributed to the album, including a flutist and a string quartet, but the producers use them judiciously: an instrument might add a few small phrases and then disappear for a few minutes. Using a system of gradual substitution and evolution, the producers ensure that no two bars sound the same. In dance music, every act must belong to a subgenre, and every subgenre must have a name. So what do you call whatever it is that Metro Area is doing? The German record label Force Inc. has an idea: a Metro Area track appears on the label's new compilation, "Digital Disco." Not surprisingly, Mr. Geist doesn't love the name. "Unfortunate title," he said. Still, "Digital Disco" brings together a number of electronic producers who are making adventurous disco-influenced music. One of the most interesting producers on the compilation is Marc Leclair, from Montreal, who records as Akufen. The first Akufen album, "My Way" (Force Inc.), was released earlier this year, and it shows off an impressive technique Mr. Leclair calls microsampling: he stitches together kicky, playful tracks from tiny, unrecognizable fragments of sound. The British producer Brooks finds a different way to pay tribute to his influences. On his excellent debut album, "You, Me and Us" (Mantis), he reimagines disco as an eerie, seductive genre, full of propulsive rhythms and unexpected noises. One of his best compositions is an odd vocal-driven track called "Colour Me Bad"; it almost sounds like one of the nonexistent pop songs that Metro Area remixed. None of these CD's will be nearly as popular as the music that inspired them. There's plenty of innovative dance music on the radio these days, but it doesn't sound anything like Metro Area. Then again, maybe that's the idea. Mr. Jesrani and Mr. Geist, and other like-minded producers, obsess over the parts of pop songs that many listeners never notice, and they build their tracks around these musical artifacts; that's why their music sounds odd and familiar at the same time. At its best, though, this music isn't just danceable and listenable; it's instructive too. Mr. Jesrani and Mr. Geist know that by keeping the tracks stripped down, they invite you to share their obsessions. After an hour with the album, you might find yourself marveling at the way a particular synthesizer note jumps out of the mix or the way a drum pattern shifts. It's an effective way to sidestep the pitfalls of nostalgia: Metro Area gives listeners old sounds and a new way to hear them.
