Efdemin
There’s something fleeting, precise and crystalline in Philip Sollmann’s productions. There are the fading ghosts of purestruck metallic resonance throughout all the sounds he choses, which ring like triangles, gongs, chimes struck unhanded by some thing unseen in the empty rehearsal room of an old concert hall. Or maybe that’s my over-active imagination. Ryuichi Sakamoto, explaining how he deliberately put lots of intervals and gaps between the notes on his now-classic Vriion and Insen collaborations with Carsten Nicolai, put it like this: “I hit one note,” he said, “then just let it go, let it ring, then after the silence I hit the second note.” Like Sakamoto’s piano, Sollmann’s tracks ‘ring’, and they ring true. You’d have to say it was the Efdemin album that really clinched it for Sollmann this year: a beautiful work with limitless replayability (my iTunes playcount tells the story), toned in chrome metal, sombre green and deep blue. A lot of people would have to give the nod to ‘Just a Track’, with its dry drums and preachapella, or ‘Acid Bells’ with its unnerving squall of chimes, but ‘Stately, Yes’ is the track I would offer as the best example of the abundant qualities just described. In this track, Sollmann sublimates the shuttersnap dryness of his art-school training to a highly emotive understanding of deep house, and it’s a deserving winner. And all this from an artist who was only an (admittedly beautifully crafted) blip on the radar little more than a year ago, before the release of ‘Bergwein’. Perhaps that says something about just how accomplished his productions really are.
Ricardo Villalobos
I remember seeing Ricardo for the first time as the warm-up DJ for Isolée at a gig in the front room of Melbourne’s Revolver in 2001. All I knew about him was that he was ‘Perlon’s DJ’, and that he’d done some nice tracks that appeared on the first Superlongevity compilation. There was something incredibly peaceful and sure about him on stage. He looked like some Andean Jesus (with the facial hair of the saviour and the long, pretty eyelashes of an alpaca) with that extended torso, the beatific smile…. The next time I saw him play was in Tokyo, just before Alachofa made him the pinup boy of artschool/bedroom ‘auteur techno’, and he looked exactly as he had done in Melbourne. In fact, all Ricardo Villalobos has ever done is be himself, at least as far as I can see. He’s not into developing personas (although he collaborates under pseudonyms) or pawning a gadget-cluttered future led by wankers who think their accumulation of frequent flyer miles is a sign of human progress. With his alienated, bemused relation to the hype machine, his suspicion of the Internet, and the starry-eyed idealism that comes across in his interviews, he is hardly the person most likely to be the bearer of so much hype. Thing is, Villalobos is overhyped, but not over-rated. When you hear tracks like his remix of ‘Cellphone’s Dead’ or any of the work on ‘Sei es Drum’, the Fabric compilation or last December’s outstanding ‘What’s Wrong My Friends’ double EP, you know you’re in the presence of a unique talent with a skewed worldview and a gentle, twisted sense of humour. His tracks have magical effects on dancefloors, and they’re wonderful to mix. Most of all, it’s those drums, those wonderful drums. All I ask of techno is that it be rhythmically interesting, and nobody fulfils this criterion better than Villalobos – and with more sticks and skins than the rest of ‘em put together.
Radio Slave
The rising star of synth pop in Australia is called ‘Muscles’. The name works beautifully because of the wüssy, wet melodies, the sunny hooks and the fact that Muscles is a weedy little white guy. But Matthew Edwards deserves the moniker more. Radio Slave is a music of musculature, of power, directness and impact. This is techno with the ability to wiggle its pecs, and they’re big, buffed and oiled. Gosh, it’s like Berghain on a Saturday night, and this is precisely where such tracks are most at home. It’s the big room boom boom, and that’s the way we like it. More than any other artist on this list, Edwards burst prominently onto the scene (or even out of his t-shirt, Hulk-style) no more than three years ago with a deluge of high-impact, peaktime floorbombs, defty navigating the fine lines between the sampladelic idiocy of mash up, the buzz and squelch of electro house, and big, sweaty sausages-worth of peaktime minimal techno. What do you bench? Not as much as the Radio Slave remix, I’ll bet. But it’s the subtle ‘sensitive’ side of Edwards’ musical output that best shows his flexibility (this guy does yoga as well as pump iron), especially his work with Joel Martin as Quiet Village, definitely a slowburn late-night favourite. More artisan than artist, Edwards’ work pays attention to all the parts of a track that ‘matter’, that make it earn its chart position kick by snare. Behind all that, though, there are the ears of an emerging master. You get the feeling that not only will Edwards’ Radio Slave tracks be ruling the big floors for the next while, but that, having mastered doing things ‘by the rules’, he’s going to start playing between them.
Matthew Dear
Poly/rhythmic/plasticity. This was the phrase that ended up in my notebook when trying to nail Dear’s style to the wall. Dear’s is a plastic passion, one that bends and moulds itself into three evolving musical styles, each of which appeared to hit its stride in 2007, which was also the title of Dear’s psychodramatic tour through the deep, dark techno of the wee smalls. There was a lot on 2007 to remind one of the blurred horrorsmear of a Francis Bacon portrait: it’s late, and all the kids in the club are growing claws. Then one hisses, you take fright, and scurry home from the club alone. And this is when 2007’s vampires (with ‘False’ teeth, natch) ambush you. It’s not just that Dear can pull off a moodpiece as totally engrossing and immersive as 2007, it’s also that, in the same year, he can release Asa Breed, an adventurous, interesting synth-pop album that showcases his growing songwriting talents. You wonder where he finds the time to destroy floors with his innumerable Audion remixes. The day that Dear discovered the Audion raygun was fateful: it continues to stun whatever it hits, even a year after ‘Mouth to Mouth’. Tracks like the remix of Blackstrobe’s ‘I’m a Man’ or ‘Fed on Youth’ (as False, but sounding Audion-ish) have a colossal feel to them. They hit in tsunami size waves, each larger and longer than the other. More than anything else, it’s this overwhelming feeling of mass and force that gives Dear’s tracks that techno avalanche touch. And it’s one kind of crushing I enjoy withstanding every time it hits me.
It’s also no coincidence that Dear is the sole representative of the M_nus camp to chart on RA’s producer rankings this year: he’s the only one who’s producing music that appeals to anyone not smitten by the cult of plip-plop or jammed into a k-hole in the corner of Bar 25. To me, the reason for this is that he’s emphatically not inflexibly tied to one style. Like I said, he’s poly, he’s rhythmic, he’s plastic. And he can sing. Kind of.
DJ Koze
A year ago or more, I said the following about Koze: “Just when you think he’s going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he shoots one out of a cannon.” I stand by it (the statement, not the cannon. If the RSPCA calls, I had nothing to do with it). Koze’s tracks have more ideas, more invention, and more pitched-up vocal samples than anyone else since the Avalanches. And when he’s on it, he’s one of the best DJs there is. Whether it was his remix of Dear’s ‘Elementary Lover’ or Battles’ ‘Atlas’, or two of the year’s best EPs (‘All the Time’, and ‘Naked’ [with Sid LeRock), Koze’s output was relatively modest, but he totally owned everything he touched – like his band International Pony sang: “it’s like SOLID GOLD!”. Speaking of which, I know that it was technically a 2006 release, but for me, International Pony’s Mit Mir Sind Wir Vier was one of 2007’s real treats. Cosily done. Contextually too (paralleling Dear’s relationship to M_nus), Koze was one of the only people who’ve had a longstanding creative association with the Kompakt mafia who really ruled the school this year, with the notable exception of Thomas Fehlman, who put out the extraordinarily under-rated Honigpumpe. I can’t talk about this too much more without going on a rant, so I’ll leave it there…but suffice to say, when Koze makes jokey music, it’s actually funny.
