Traxx on the decks at Communion, the Cabooze, Minneapolis, Sunday, July 13
Very sorry for the delay: a lot of freelance clustering, not a bad problem but not easy to manage time with. Especially when you’re writing about the goddamn Grateful Dead, which I went into with a killer roundtable of experts and deep enthusiasts at Rolling Stone over the weekend. VIP: Angie Martoccio, who won with her evocation of Bob Weir’s shorts phase in her blurb on the number-one show on the list of thirty. There’s also fifteen important post-Jerry moments and Rob Sheffield’s to-the-wall list of his twenty favorite “Dark Star”s. And those weren’t all the things I wrote about recently, but they make my case about time management.
Nonetheless, let me note that this will be the first of five consecutive posts, one of which is a preview of an upcoming event in NYC. And let me also note that the next four will all be retrospectives of one sort or another, involving old sets. I didn’t intend this to happen, but those were/are the groupings that have come a-calling, and they demanded to be reckoned with—a.k.a. I couldn’t resist them. You’ll see what I mean.
You can hear four of the five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Traxx, The Definitive Articles of House Music Chapter 5 (April 29)
Traxx, Communion (The Cabooze, Minneapolis, July 13)
A few weeks ago, Traxx, the Chicago DJ, played at Communion, my favorite weekly party in Minneapolis, taking place in the summer at the Cabooze. Traxx took the last four of five hours, and he took us places, starting with our own city. He opened with one of the first-ever Twin Cities rap 12-inches—a roll-call of the Prince and Jam-Lewis rosters, mainly—and followed it up with, and I quote, “the 25-minute-long unreleased remix of ‘Shockadelica’ that Prince gave to me personally,” as I overheard Traxx told someone after the show. (I also spoke with him myself and confirmed it.)
The Prince didn’t end there, or even begin—that would be the shirt in the photo at this post’s top. Then again, at 9 p.m. sharp (he played from 6 to 10; it’s an outdoor party, gorgeous weather, great sound always), Traxx dropped “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton.” I was exulting to my friends: I knew he was going to play something from The Black Album. Soon after that, I said to a friend, “This sounds like INXS.” A moment later came the chorus: “Suicide Blonde.”
I’m leading with all of this, of course, because I’m a Prince head myself and I know others reading this are too. He played lots and lots of house music, of course—a lot of sub-rosa stuff from a lot of eras and places but always firmly planted in the Chicago of the eighties and nineties, where INXS and Prince certainly got played (they got played everywhere, they were huge). He did a lot of heavy EQ’ing throughout, too, his longtime specialty. “Never change, Traxx,” I said to a friend at one point.
But I also lead with the Prince because, my god, what audacity! Nothing new there, either. Yes, he lost people (including people I know for a fact hate Prince—OK, bye), but he also kept people all the way to the end. A good number of those who stuck around for his post-set on-mic envoi were among the party’s youngest dancers. Far from being turned off by its lack of train-track inevitability, Traxx’s weird, willful set’s highly personal turns clearly spoke to them. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many were Black, either.)
“Sub-rosa house music firmly planted in the Chicago of the eighties and nineties” is the basic remit of Traxx’s ongoing Definitive Articles of House Music series, now up to six chapters, per the DJ’s styling. (They’re all here; scroll down.) I wrote about Chapter 3 a couple years back (cf. BC041), and I went back to Chapter 5 in the wake of the Communion performance. (During the way too much time I spent writing this, Traxx released Chapter 6 as well; stay tuned.) Chapter 5, then, is a lesson in old-school Chicago minimalism—not liny a la Berlin decades later but less-is-more, tracks that sometimes veer into the near-tool-like. Sampler time was shorter then. He throws in some curveballs, EQ’s like a dervish, goes to town, all of it rooted in vintage Chicago (cf. BC065). It all jacks like a motherfucker, but you knew that.
Greg Beato, Injection Box 003 (June 27)
“The elusive Miami-based producer and DJ . . . resurfaces with his first official set since his mix for @dkmntl in 2016,” goes the info blurb—that’s nine years, during which a lot has happened in techno. But in another sense, techno never really changes—its blessing and its curse, with this mix a shining example of the former. It’s bendy and tweaky and proudly, robustly robotic throughout, and the tunes sound like they were born to be together, but there is also a hell of a lot of variation in each selection’s musical approach. One moment you’re hearing the grain of the machines breathing together, another is like Ms. Pac-Man translated onto the techno grid, the next you’re hearing signs-whpping-by dial-twist stuff of the Akufen’s My Way stripe. The sound is so clean and the tones are so marker-thick throughout that it all harmonizes beautifully.
Andi and Berlin Bunny b2b Eyes Dice, Synthicide (The Lot Radio, July 6)
First hour goes to the hostess—someone I once asked onto a Pop Conference panel, whereupon she gave the best presentation, easy, about men in lipstick as a Goth trope. The Hunger (1983) figured heavily into her talk. At one point, onscreen, she showed us a triangle with the film’s, and thus her subculture’s, three primary components: Bowie, Bauhaus, and vampires. At least 70 percent of the audience—and the room was very full—whipped out their phones (almost all the women, for sure) to take a photo of this triangle.
I treasure that story, and I also treasure the unfettered good time this show has been providing me—and it has little to do with Bowie, Bauhaus, or vampires, per se, apart from, perhaps, deep ancestry. Andi’s first hour is positively bubblicious—shaded with moodiness, particularly at the beginning, but also consistently giddy and sometimes gorgeous, in moments neo-trance and neo-rave at once, but more modestly appointed than either term indicates. The vocals are often sampled and re-played till they turn liquid. The bass lines still thunk, though—maybe that’s the glue. When the b2b follows, things get more Teutonic in a hurry, and also way more eighties—late eighties, right on up to and including “Theme from S’Express,” pitched cunningly up.
dBridge presents Exit Records: The Aptitude Show (Rinse FM, July 9)
Last month, I came home from a very different Minneapolis club night, Mechanix, a drum & bass monthly that takes place at Eagles 34, which Keith Harris recently profiled in Racket (gift link), and put this on—I didn’t plan it that way, it was next in the playlist queue, but it worked like a charm. Either dancing at Eagles (this was the lineup; Dave Shichman was sharp and welcoming) had opened me way up to the Rinse set, or the Rinse set took what I had just danced to up another notch or three, never mind any other enhancements. But re-accessing dBridge’s hour was a thoroughgoing pleasure even on the mend. Antic breakbeats are something I generally go for, but the riffs, FX, subs all work overtime for the full hour.