I am 41 years young, which may seems strange considering the name of my blog. Wakage no itari - the limits of youthful vitality, or in other words, those silly things you do when you're young. Nevertheless, today while writing this post I feel very young. Maybe because I have fallen in love! Yes in love with a record called Midtown 120 Blues and I want to tell the world about it and about the person behind this amazing piece of work.
The name is DJ Sprinkles, better know as Terre Thaemlitz.
Terre is an award winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work critically combines themes of identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production.
His audio projects have found release on a variety of record labels ranging from Mille Plateaux, to YMO founder Haruomi Hosono's Daisyworld Discs, to Bill Laswell's Subharmonic Records, to Universal Music Germany's Classical Division, to the UK dance label Disorient, and so on. Graphic design, photography, illustration, text and video also play a part in Thaemlitz' projects. His writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines.
He has released 15 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan. He currently resides in Kawasaki, Japan
In May 2008 in Japan and January 2009 in Europe, the gender-queer artist (who prefers either “he” or “she,” while not really subscribing to either) released Midtown 120 Blues, the first full-length album under the DJ Sprinkles moniker. A moniker he took on when he started DJing about 20 years ago. “DJ Sprinkles has always been a signifier of the unheard DJs, un-played records, and undocumented outcasts. The unimportant,” Thaemlitz explains. “Because, ultimately, I think house culture revolves around disenfranchised people attempting to construct a space in which we feel important.”
And what an amazing album.
Midtown 120 Blues it’s about changing perspectives and rethinking preconceived notions. It is over an hour of exquisite deep house music where things are kept instrumental, with no wailing divas but richly textured productions that are warm and enveloping, full of gently tapped pianos and flute notes floating by. For Thaemlitz, deep house is not the music of celebration, but the music of sadness. Perhaps this is sadness for the original context that has been erased, buried and gentrified. Perhaps it's the sadness of the original context itself. Possibly it's a mix of both.
Midtown 120 Blues is an incredibly deep album—not just in terms of the "deepness" of the house on offer, but emotionally and intellectually so, as Thaemlitz maps out the sound in a deeply personal way. A meditation on the "meaning" of house, a critique of the recent deep house revival, an exploration of one man's personal relationship with the sound.
Midtown 120 Blues is all of these things, not to mention being some of the best deep house you'll hear in a very long time. As soon as you here the opening bars of the serene intro, disturbed by the voiceover stating very matter-of-factly, "House music isn't so much a sound, as a situation," you'll realize you're in for a true - and tense - listening experience. Prepare for lilting teardrops of piano, defiant kicks, a Madonna smackdown, apocalyptic yet paradisal Larry Heard landscapes, Moodymann lo-fi productions, beatless movements fashioned from a classic funk break - it's a preternatural "obituary" of house.
In the opener “Midtown 120 Blues Intro” a pair of piano chords diffuses like smoke into diaphanous drones, muted arpeggios mumble, and robot fingers snap as an echo-extended snare keeps crackling time. Thaemlitz faintly lays out his case: Instead of the “greeting card” bullshit notion of house that’s most commonly trafficked – “life, love, happiness” – he insists “suffering is in here, with us.” The facile universalism of mass marketing broadens the terms of house music so vastly its inscription of gay disenfranchisement fades away. Enumerating the crises that lead to house’s emergence, multiple overlapping Thaemlitzes recite, "It's the rhythm of the empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, racism, gender and sexual crises, unemployment and censorship."
The combination of pain and ambivalent nostalgia is expressed not only by vocals which mutter of violence, of Madonna's 'theft' of Vogueing, of being "deep in the bowel of House", but in Thaemlitz's piano chords. Unlike much Deep House, which merely replaces House's disco origins with a vague and soporific jazziness, Thaemlitz's playing works like Nina Simone's, opening up between jazz and modern classical a huge harmonic space in which to articulate complex emotions. Even though these linear tracks seem superficially like conventional Deep and Ambient House pieces, the combination of gently but relentlessly provocative voices and unexpected harmonic left-turns bring what is traditionally high class background music into sharp focus and demand close and sustained attention.
The melancholy is clearest on "Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)," almost nine minutes of gently drifting ambience, as a piano softly dances over warm gentle tones, the sound of a record crackling and popping, and a woman's voice reflecting on seeing somebody "getting knocked around." The final minute is silent except for the sound of vinyl crackling. More than anywhere else on the album, this track underlines what deep house means to Thaemlitz—sadness, pain, the threat of sudden violence and the fleeting promise of escape in a club.
I transcribe the words of the end monologue of the track Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone) which narrates the theft of Vogueing by Madonna, as they are a further expression of the emotional statements made in this album.
"When Madonna came out with her hit "Vogue" you knew it was over. She had taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with her lyrics, "It makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl." Madonna was taking in tons of money, while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue sat before me in the club, strung out, depressed and broke. So if anybody requested "Vogue" or any other Madonna track, I told them, "No, this is a Madonna-free zone! And as long as I'm DJ-ing, you will not be allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor's reality!"
On his Comatonse Records website she writes "Please note that nobody has legal permission from me to sell MP3 downloads of my music - not iTunes, not e-music, not anyone. They are selling my music illegally. They and the distributors they deal with have no contracts with me, and do not pay me a single penny of your purchase cost. They continually ignore my written requests to have my works removed from their profit-engines, knowing that the money at issue is less than the cost of my hiring a lawyer to resolve this ongoing mess. Please do not pay those mainstream corporate assholes for downloads of my music! They complain about MP3 copy protection issues while deliberately and systematically stealing from independent producers like myself - and consumers like you! Make no mistake, they are the music pirates to worry about!
The album has in spades what many a contemporary dance effort lacks: amazingly deep music, a greater purpose and its ensuing range of emotions.
If you want to buy this album (and if you like house music you definitely should) please follow this link
If you want to know more about DJ Sprinkles/Terre Theamlitz (and there is a lot to know and a lot to learn) please visit his label Comatonse Recordings website
Thanks to Terre Theamlitz for this amazing piece of work
Thanks to my Scottish brother Muz for making me aware of it
The name is DJ Sprinkles, better know as Terre Thaemlitz.
Terre is an award winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work critically combines themes of identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production.
His audio projects have found release on a variety of record labels ranging from Mille Plateaux, to YMO founder Haruomi Hosono's Daisyworld Discs, to Bill Laswell's Subharmonic Records, to Universal Music Germany's Classical Division, to the UK dance label Disorient, and so on. Graphic design, photography, illustration, text and video also play a part in Thaemlitz' projects. His writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines.
He has released 15 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan. He currently resides in Kawasaki, Japan
In May 2008 in Japan and January 2009 in Europe, the gender-queer artist (who prefers either “he” or “she,” while not really subscribing to either) released Midtown 120 Blues, the first full-length album under the DJ Sprinkles moniker. A moniker he took on when he started DJing about 20 years ago. “DJ Sprinkles has always been a signifier of the unheard DJs, un-played records, and undocumented outcasts. The unimportant,” Thaemlitz explains. “Because, ultimately, I think house culture revolves around disenfranchised people attempting to construct a space in which we feel important.”
And what an amazing album.
Midtown 120 Blues it’s about changing perspectives and rethinking preconceived notions. It is over an hour of exquisite deep house music where things are kept instrumental, with no wailing divas but richly textured productions that are warm and enveloping, full of gently tapped pianos and flute notes floating by. For Thaemlitz, deep house is not the music of celebration, but the music of sadness. Perhaps this is sadness for the original context that has been erased, buried and gentrified. Perhaps it's the sadness of the original context itself. Possibly it's a mix of both.
Midtown 120 Blues is an incredibly deep album—not just in terms of the "deepness" of the house on offer, but emotionally and intellectually so, as Thaemlitz maps out the sound in a deeply personal way. A meditation on the "meaning" of house, a critique of the recent deep house revival, an exploration of one man's personal relationship with the sound.
Midtown 120 Blues is all of these things, not to mention being some of the best deep house you'll hear in a very long time. As soon as you here the opening bars of the serene intro, disturbed by the voiceover stating very matter-of-factly, "House music isn't so much a sound, as a situation," you'll realize you're in for a true - and tense - listening experience. Prepare for lilting teardrops of piano, defiant kicks, a Madonna smackdown, apocalyptic yet paradisal Larry Heard landscapes, Moodymann lo-fi productions, beatless movements fashioned from a classic funk break - it's a preternatural "obituary" of house.
In the opener “Midtown 120 Blues Intro” a pair of piano chords diffuses like smoke into diaphanous drones, muted arpeggios mumble, and robot fingers snap as an echo-extended snare keeps crackling time. Thaemlitz faintly lays out his case: Instead of the “greeting card” bullshit notion of house that’s most commonly trafficked – “life, love, happiness” – he insists “suffering is in here, with us.” The facile universalism of mass marketing broadens the terms of house music so vastly its inscription of gay disenfranchisement fades away. Enumerating the crises that lead to house’s emergence, multiple overlapping Thaemlitzes recite, "It's the rhythm of the empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, racism, gender and sexual crises, unemployment and censorship."
The combination of pain and ambivalent nostalgia is expressed not only by vocals which mutter of violence, of Madonna's 'theft' of Vogueing, of being "deep in the bowel of House", but in Thaemlitz's piano chords. Unlike much Deep House, which merely replaces House's disco origins with a vague and soporific jazziness, Thaemlitz's playing works like Nina Simone's, opening up between jazz and modern classical a huge harmonic space in which to articulate complex emotions. Even though these linear tracks seem superficially like conventional Deep and Ambient House pieces, the combination of gently but relentlessly provocative voices and unexpected harmonic left-turns bring what is traditionally high class background music into sharp focus and demand close and sustained attention.
The melancholy is clearest on "Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)," almost nine minutes of gently drifting ambience, as a piano softly dances over warm gentle tones, the sound of a record crackling and popping, and a woman's voice reflecting on seeing somebody "getting knocked around." The final minute is silent except for the sound of vinyl crackling. More than anywhere else on the album, this track underlines what deep house means to Thaemlitz—sadness, pain, the threat of sudden violence and the fleeting promise of escape in a club.
I transcribe the words of the end monologue of the track Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone) which narrates the theft of Vogueing by Madonna, as they are a further expression of the emotional statements made in this album.
"When Madonna came out with her hit "Vogue" you knew it was over. She had taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with her lyrics, "It makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl." Madonna was taking in tons of money, while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue sat before me in the club, strung out, depressed and broke. So if anybody requested "Vogue" or any other Madonna track, I told them, "No, this is a Madonna-free zone! And as long as I'm DJ-ing, you will not be allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor's reality!"
On his Comatonse Records website she writes "Please note that nobody has legal permission from me to sell MP3 downloads of my music - not iTunes, not e-music, not anyone. They are selling my music illegally. They and the distributors they deal with have no contracts with me, and do not pay me a single penny of your purchase cost. They continually ignore my written requests to have my works removed from their profit-engines, knowing that the money at issue is less than the cost of my hiring a lawyer to resolve this ongoing mess. Please do not pay those mainstream corporate assholes for downloads of my music! They complain about MP3 copy protection issues while deliberately and systematically stealing from independent producers like myself - and consumers like you! Make no mistake, they are the music pirates to worry about!
The album has in spades what many a contemporary dance effort lacks: amazingly deep music, a greater purpose and its ensuing range of emotions.
If you want to buy this album (and if you like house music you definitely should) please follow this link
If you want to know more about DJ Sprinkles/Terre Theamlitz (and there is a lot to know and a lot to learn) please visit his label Comatonse Recordings website
Thanks to Terre Theamlitz for this amazing piece of work
Thanks to my Scottish brother Muz for making me aware of it
Most words in this post are bluntly taken from the following sources:
Bernardo Rondeau on www.dustedmagazine.com
Joe Muggs on The Wire (UK) Issue 300, February 2009 www.thewire.co.uk
Joe Muggs on The Wire (UK) Issue 300, February 2009 www.thewire.co.uk
Amar Patel on Straight No Chaser (UK), January 2009 www.straightnochaser.co.uk
