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Electro II
Douglas Wolk’s second opinion
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

With the reliable 20-year lag of nostalgia, dance fashion has hit the synth-pop era, and the result is something called "tech" or "electroclash." There’s not a definite name for it, and there are no particularly big stars yet (though Fischerspooner are trying very hard, with their big-budget costumes and videos), but there’s a definite sound to it: the tweaky burble of new-wave synths and the pitty-pat of vintage drum machines. And there’s a little clutch of compilations groping at its borders: Defining Tech (Orbisonic), This Is Tech-Pop: 21st-Century Electro and New Wave (Ministry of Sound), and Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau (Ghostly International).

You can make clubgoers dance to pretty much anything, but if you want to get people who aren’t DJs to buy your records, you have to give them something that sounds good at home, too. And when you get these comps onto your stereo, you’ll find there’s more trend-mongering puffery to the scene than the electronic renaissance it promises. Said scene is small enough that the comps’ contributors overlap: Fischerspooner, Felix Da Housecat, Miss Kittin, Adult., Perspects, and Memory Boy are all on two apiece. It’s also large enough that three different labels are trying to capitalize on it before it gets any bigger, and all three releases suffer from padding. Occasionally, that means they reach out for something outside their loose boundaries, like Peaches’ giddy come-on "AAXXX," but mostly it means they sound like warmed-over MTV rejects.

Defining Tech and This Is Tech-Pop are similar in style and intent, but the former is more a club record — in other words, it’s less tuneful, and more dependent on its own clichŽs. Bis’s "The End Starts Today" is a sweet homage to the Latin freestyle sound of mid-’80s New York, but the rest too often sounds like new wave stripped of its melodies, with the deadpan frigidity of Kraftwerk plugged in to substitute for ambition and conviction. Tech-Pop concentrates more on songs with actual tunes and choruses, though it’s not a good sign that one of the best contributions is a cover of Corey Hart’s "Sunglasses at Night."

Disco Nouveau is a bit different. It bills itself as a tribute to Giorgio Moroder’s "robot disco" — heavily synthesized, very European, dependent on rapid-fire bass sequencers. Susumu Yokota’s "Re: Disco" is the album’s most direct homage, a variation on Moroder’s production for Donna Summer’s "I Feel Love." The disc has a seductive surface but often doesn’t follow through — DMX Krew’s "Make Me" pulses and tingles like the real thing, but it’s fatally damaged by singer Tracy’s nondescript, off-key voice. Whatever name you want to give the sound these compilations limn, though, it’s distinctly a product of nostalgia for a lost era: the new electronic pop groups aren’t feeding an eternal fire, they’re relighting an extinguished flame. And they’ve forgotten something significant in the process.

There used to be something called electro — which is very different from electroclash. The best survey of the scene is the four-disc series The Perfect Beats that came out on Tommy Boy a few years ago, but Mantronix: That’s My Beat (Soul Jazz), a new compilation of late-’70s and early-’80s tracks curated by Kurtis Mantronik, is a fine sidelong glance at the electro moment and its overlap with early hip-hop and late disco. The beats of electro were heavier and funkier — you could lock and pop to them — and they were also more daring, because they weren’t homages to beats 20 years their senior. Art of Noise’s instrumental "Beatbox (Diversion One)," included here, is playful and witty, morphing industrial-equipment noises into lounge-lizard piano just because it can.

The central tenet of Mantronix-style electro, though, is its good-natured hedonism and humanism, the idea that people and machines can and should dance together, that bodies’ salient feature is their ability to feel pleasure. That’s easy enough to parody, and a lot of the new new wave does. But the hinge on which That’s My Beat swings is Machine’s "There But for the Grace of God," a disco anthem about a girl denied the joys of club culture who finds them the hard way. It’s ecstatically compassionate — a lovely combination — and it also risks absolute sincerity. The tech scene hasn’t yet come up with anything to match it.

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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