Tag / DJ

by hereandsphere

GIRL TALK : DAVE AUDE’ at CLUB CAFE 06.07.13

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GIRL TALK DANCE : DAVE AUDE’ @ CLUB CAFE 06.07.13

Master re-mixer Dave Aude’ made a rare Boston DJ appearance last night at Club Cafe. The more than two-hour set by Aude’ was a highlight of Boston’s Pride Week. On the same night that Roger Sanchez, equally masterful as Aude’ and for just as many years, was dropping a two-hour set at a club not three blocks away, Aude’ rocked a dance floor full and excited.

There’s no mistaking what Aude’ does. He remixes pop bop dance tracks almost always featuring girly girl singers. In the studio, no one does it better, not many as well. His sound is creamy smooth most of the time but occasionally slap-nasty. Beats race along, synthesizers chirp and whoop, and the girl singer puckers her message of love-me, of go-away, of have fun and dance with me.

And so it was at Club Cafe. Aude’ played spiffy girl dances and nasty ones, hits new and old (Cazzette and Afrojack, but also early 1990s stuff such as Inner City’s “Good Life” and parts of tracks that echoed Snap, Ya Kid K, and Haddaway), and a long chain of racy giddy girls’ nights out — all of it segued with a smooth hand. He sound nudges the entire body. There’s roll and rumble, step and tiptoe for the legs and feet; shimmy shake sound effects for the hips and chest; and voices cute, chirpy, teasing, grungy — these and more; Aude’ has remixed an almost who’s who of star and wanna-be star girl pop voices — for the head and neck. In Aude’s sound each gets center stage only to give way — effortlessly in a dissolve mix, teetering on a quick cut — to its sonic companions.

Using the scantiest of equipment, two CD players and Club cafe’s stripped-down mix-board, Aude’ still managed to juggle his three-part sound without one flat moment, missed cue, or off-base segue. There were jet streak effects, twisty riffs, moody breaks, melodic serenades; sometimes he shaped his sound as a sharp slash, a kind of sword dance. But mostly he delivered his signature : girl going giddy, soprano soaring, heart a flutter. It was a night of girl talk and girlie action delivered mostly to boys for whom girl things are a necessary freedom to love and be loved in.

There is nothing simple about girl feelings. That’s why dancers — boy or girl — who embrace girl moves adore them. Aude’ focuses his sound and subject matter as narrowly as any DJ this writer has seen; yet at Club Cafe he made it serve an almost horizon-less expanse of tones, moves, talk, and beats. The many young DJs who play girl-voiced pop bop to party people often settle for sameness and surface. Not Aude’. His mixes at Club Cafe went inside a melody and turned it around and out, this way and that, changing on the fly and doubling back. Challenging, Aude’s rhythm action sure is, to a girl playing vixen, vamp, or Betty Boop. At Club Cafe Aude made sure that all of his chosen singers commanded her chosen role — and his chosen music.

— Deedee Freedberg / Feelin’ the Music

by hereandsphere

FROM PURIST HOUSE MUSIC TO EUROPOP CONCERT : ERIC PRYDZ @ OCEAN CLUB MARINA BAY 06.02.13

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For the first hour of his 90-minute set at Ocean Club Marina Bay on Sunday night, Eric Prydz unfurled a house music sound as basic as it gets. there was a bottom beat — free of gimmickry and arena-rock scrim, a fiercely focused saunter and stroll similar to the minimalist claw and creep that Popof, an underground DJ, spun at RISE Club two weeks ago. Coming from a DJ/producer famed for the polished pop of “Every Day,”  Prydz’s bling-free beat and rhythm presentation surprised. At Ocean Club one is used to hearing acrobatic burp — hair band music on a mixboard, or slats of grunge, or the child’s play crayoning of “electro.” Prydz did none of these.. What he did do was funk and blues — Prydz loves 1980s funk — and, at times, a sigh of soul. It worked. The Ocean Club crowd packed itself shoulder to hip and head to back and, as if one body, it  pulsed, it stomped, raised hands; it swayed and cheered.

Prydz — full name Eric Sheridan Prydz, according to his bio; he comes from the suburbs of Stockholm —  has a full crate of such defiantly pure tracks — six or seven years of it. There’s “Woz not Woz,” (honoring 1980s cult band Was not Was); a re-mix of Switch’s “A Bit Patch,”; “Genesis”; and the in-your-face body bump that is re-mix made of M83’s “1983.” A similar history could be applied to many DJs who play pop-dance venues like Ocean Club; but few such DJs  play their purist music there. Not so Prydz. For an entire hour he played his early purist music and shaped it to a purist standard, too, on two channels and a mixboard.

The crowd loved it. “This is why i am here tonight !” exclaimed a well-known local DJ who rarely goes Ocean clubbing.

Though Prydz loves 1980s funk, he also likes 1980s-1990s glam-rock — has remixed tracks by Depeche Mode and Pink Floyd, among others. It shows. In the manner of these bands, his anthems not only shine, they breathe  — think “Midnight City,’; which Prydz used — exquisitely — at Ocean Club as a bridge from low funk to high polish.

As for “Every Day,” it delivers the most convincing message any pop song of this decade has spoken : “if every day is like this, how can we survive / working days on the night shift trying to stay alive.” It’s a working-class message; and Prydz’s fans at Ocean Club were every bit that: unhip haircuts, attired in tacky tops, last year’s bling, sports logos, and cheap heels. Still, being hip isn’t everything…

The final 30 minutes of Prydz’s set lifted his sound from road-noise house to an orchestrated Europop as flossy as any concert  today’s Paris to Moscow dares stage.  Prydz regaled his song in orchestral brocade; necked it in sonic jewelry; tiara-topped it with a ring of techno;  The audience could feel what was coming next: the hit.

It came. Like a working-class hero king, “Every Day” read out its charter of exhaustion’s right to survive; to be listened to.  A grand finale “Every Day” had to be; and was. Grand and final, a magnificent last word.

—- Deedee Freedberg / Feelin’ the Music

by hereandsphere

TWO-THEMED DANCE MUSIC : GUTI @ BIJOU 05.26.13

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On Sunday night, Boston dance music fans had an opportunity to see Argentina’s Guti drop a set in prime time. At Bijou, the rapidly rising DJ — whose full name is Jose Maria Gutierrez Hernandez — delivered a set unlike any other that this writer has seen, one with bottom beats and overriding detail so separated — and so individually spotlighted — that his two hours amounted to two entirely separate sets sharing the same time slot and space. There was realism in that: after all, two people dancing on the same dance floor are, in fact, two separate lives confronting in the same space and time. Guti’s Argentina has, for over 100 years, owned a dance, the tango, in which hot drama arises from the friction of two separate lives acting in the same space and time. Only fitting, was it, that Guti gave his Bijou fans a 21st century version of tango drama, a dance very different in its passions but much the same in its two wills willfully dancing.

In tango, the clash is of anger, of dislike, of sexual heat that forces itself through mutual rejection, power plays, sex as pain, humiliation, surrender. Nothing this dark happened in Guti’s Bijou set, but much the same plunge was implied — risked, even — yet gently avoided in his very dissimilar two waves. First came a big, alpha-male’s boot stomp, next an interlude of high-note bird’s calls followed by the boot stomp returning. This was the set’s pattern; the boot stomp had its minutes, only to give way to equal minutes of flutter, lullaby, whistling, twisty noises: seduction in a soprano octave.

His music amounted to two themes having an extened conversation, a give and take that, late in set, moved toward resolution as Guti mixed the two themes together in complicated angles — in each of which the two conversators worked their way around each other, as if to gain advantage. Yet no advantage was to be had; each theme in his \music maintained its tone, its movement, its initiative, and if, in his mix, the focal point between them tilted in one direction. Guti brought it back again to the other direction only to end up in the middle as stomp and flutter circled one another like side by side whirl-a-gigs of sound. Such too, was the tango.

Guti has, in the past four years especially — he has DJ’d for far longer than this — produced tracks, or re-mixed the work of other producers. His prolific body of work has attracted devotees almost everywhere that dance music is enjoyed. Many sound dream-like in their delicacy and whimsy : “Hope,” Ray Foxx’s “The Trumpeter,” “I’m feeling Interglactic,” Wols’s “Bushmans Oversized Vibe,” for example, and his remix of Livio & Roby’s “We Are.” Eqully many do a bounce, from squeaky squiggly to boot stomp: his remix of Davide Squillace’s “The Other Side of hiustler,” “option One,’ and “Bususki,” and “Non Adepto.’

This list by no means exhausted the sequence of excerpts from tracks, both his own and remixes, that he input to his Bijou workout. Using a PC program this writer hasn’t seen before, one that enabled him to pick and hunt from one track to another and punch it all into a scant two channels of mix, Guti squashed and jiggled the knobs on the PC mixboard. He cranked more two, three,m even four at once, pushing and pricking the sound into conversational cant. There was buffoonery in his mix and boasting too; zig zags and finger pointing. All of it pressured the dancers to move not just legs and hips but also hands, head, elbows, knees. Body talk took on advanced meaning — but not so advanced that a pair of classic tango dancers wouldn’t have understood every surge, sag, lean, pucker, wink, and prance in Guti’s battle of two wills willing upon each other.

It was aset not to be missed, as sublime and imaginative as any that this writer has seen in many, many years.

Opening for Guti was DJ D-Lux, whose reidency at Re:Set Wednesdays (in Cambridge) has made her a local, Boston star of deep house grooving. In front of Guti she played exactly what she is best at : two hours of rolling rhythm in murmur tones, a succulent flavor evoking the sweaty sentiments that deep house lives by. D-Lux’s set could easily have headlined almost any dance music club in the Boston area — at least at those few clubs hereabouts that are willing to embrace the deep house sound in its fullest evocation.

—- Deedee Freedberg / Feelin’ the Music