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
