Derrick Carter: Leaps of Fade

House-music DJ Derrick Carter is renowned for extending his overlay mixes almost all the way through the songs he cues. Other DJs use the overlay to couple the end of one song smoothly to the beginning of the one that follows. But Carter, who's a Chicago native and has been an improviser in house music since the style's mid-'80s inception, plays one song on top of another as long as he can, wrapping them in each other's voice and beat, like lovers embracing.

At Avalon's turntables last Friday he mixed in his long-loving overlay style almost exclusively, blending two and sometimes three records together. Even voices and synth riffs shifted their focus a bit -- from nice and sweet to semi-sweet, let's say, or from knees grinding to thighs winding -- as the beat kept on keeping on. It was a dark and flirtatious beat, for the most part plush and melodic, and it ruled, it was all.

Carter played no easily recognizable songs, not even the club hits that populate a good part of most house-music DJs' sets. Instead, he crafted his own music from the records he chose, which was how the first disco DJs did it. His used his double and triple overlays to modify a beat's shape or dissolve part of its pressure.

Ambient DJs, who favor acid house's metallic starkness, follow a similar path. But the deep-house DJ in Carter programmed plenty of joyous tribal rhythms in among his hard strokes. Even more unlike ambient was the way he opened his set in the delicate groove of jazzy, garage dancing. And frequently during his set he cut away from deep beats to seek out the entirely disco manner of what fans call "traxx," a breezy mix of salsa and house that lightens a droopy eyelid and tastes happy on the lips.

DJ David Morales can build entire sets around the soulful loveliness of traxx. But in Carter's case the traxx moments were pure digression that emphasized all the more the overriding hardness of his big beats. At times, Carter's take on happiness seemed too hard and unyielding. But whenever the intensity of his overlays threatened to drive the music off course, he got religion and used the fade knob to leap from the bad-trip side of an overlay to the soulful other side. Leaps of fade, you might say.

-- Michael Freedberg