Minilogue & Loco Dice

CLUBLAND MAY


The Swedish production team of Minilogue have barely put a foot wrong over the last few years. Originally starting out as Son Kite, producing progressive house and trance, they quickly branched out into more techno and house-centric material, finally abandoning their Son Kite project in 2004 in favour of their Minilogue moniker. Most of the releases have always held some element of this beginning but with ever more stylistic touches they have been refining their art, stripping back the clutter whilst enhancing the overall effect. With their debut album Animals recently released it looks like they have reached the zenith of this process. The album is in two parts; a dance oriented chapter and an ambient one, but let’s just look at the floor fare for now.

When you think of the term minimal these days your mind is assaulted with every man and his dog techno that is clogging up ear canals faster than you can hum a Cobblestone Jazz bassline. For a lesson in what true minimalism is in 2008 you could do a lot worse than take a listen to Animals. The majority of the tracks sound like they have been recorded live from a jam situation and sound all the better for it. Making use of space and sonic detritus like they never have before, Minilogue lay the anthemic wand to the side for a minute and focus on creating something with cohesion that sums up the many realms of their Spartan doctrine. You can hear elements of Basic Channel, Rob Hood, and Monobox bubbling away in the mix hear. Not all of the tracks hit home but from the point of view of a techno album this is surely one of the finest of 2008.
Loco Dice is somewhat of a character. The Tunisian born DJ/producer form Dusseldorf lived a past life as a hip hop DJ and MC in Germany playing support for the likes of Usher, R. Kelly, Snoop and Jamiorquai before converting to dance music around the early naughties. Apparently his real name is Dice Corleone and with that sort of natural legacy one can only wonder why a name change was necessary.
Anyway, the exiled from 4th and Broadway crossover artist brought plenty of hip hop machismo with him on his conversion, evidence of which can be found on any interview you can find with him on video. But then his ballsy attitude has always been justified by his production output; a good couple of handfuls of releases over the past six years and few that fall shy of commanding dance floor rapture.
He has often been criticised for hiding behind producer Martin Buttrich who is his constant production partner, but the notion of producer means different things to different people and it can be fairly noted that Loco Dice releases sound nothing like those of Buttrich on his own or with other partners like Timo Maas.
If there is any one release that can help to dispel the pesky Buttrich-lead Dice success, then it is Dice’s debut full length album 7 Dunham Place. In a move that intertwines beautifully with his previous life as El Corleone, Dice made the album in Brooklyn at the address hinted at in the title of the work. That’s somewhat of a big deal for a techno producer, to leave the city of his influence and base himself somewhere else for the duration of recording. It pays off in spades here though as the thick cultural pastiche of the five boroughs is woven into the fabric of the album.
There’s an intensity about New York that nothing can prepare you for; you breathe every breath in the present and you’re completely aware of it. Your destiny lies in wait for you around each corner, your eyes remain focussed on possibility whilst contemplating the impossible. This is the world that Loco Dice steps into for 7 Dunham Place. It is a world without preconception about what type of tracks will be made in Brooklyn, only that tracks will be made and they will be made in Brooklyn, of Brooklyn.
And so whilst you may be trawl through the nine tracks on offer and lazily reflect on what the bare sonic architecture is doing for your ears, it helps if you try to step into Loco Dice’s head and imagine the tracks through his mind. In fact it may help if you read the liner notes on the album gatefold as they reveal the inner thoughts of the producer. To be fair it helps if you can understand the type of esoteric stream of consciousness English spoken by German techno producers (ever tried to make sense of a Johannes Heil blurb?) but Mr Dice does very well in expressing his moods and thoughts behind the tracks.
7 Dunham Place so beautifully soaks up the atmosphere of New York that you could at times forget there was a German captain at the helm of this ship. Opening track ‘Breakfast At Nina’s’ is wonderfully deep, a bottomless well of arcane house music that harkens back to the classic days of the geographic genre but is every bit steeped in now. The mechanics of ‘How Do I Know’ may flirt with the current trend of German minimalism but the nagging vocals push the track more towards a Chi-town feel. The only time that true Germanics threaten to break through on the album is with ‘Consequently Eccentric and Delicate’ but the monotonous flow of the track bears more in comparison with Steve Stoll’s work than Mr. Dice’s European output.
There are moments of lush emotion (‘Black Truffles in the Snow’), Nu Yorican fever (‘La Esquina’) and straight up big pimpin’ (‘Pimp Jackson Is Talkin Now’).
This is the sound of Dussledorf being dragged back through the five boroughs and all the better for it. From deep house to spare, whittled down techno, 7 Dunham Place will be hitting many a best of list this year.