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Album Review

Black Meteoric Star

Black Meteoric Star
Black Meteoric Star

[DFA; 2009]

6.8

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

All but the brashest dance music carries at least a whiff of cosmic consciousness, a belief that the right combination of repetitive beats and unknown variables can plot a course to crack the stratosphere. But that transcendental urge is rarely so explicitly articulated as on Gavin Russom's self-titled album as Black Meteoric Star. The album is, in many ways, a direct extension of the smoldering freakouts of Days of Mars, a 2005 album Russom recorded with Delia Gonzalez. There, they harnessed a battery of vintage and home-built synthesizers to create their own version of classic ambient music-- liquid, evolving, nominally "beatless," but imbued with unmistakable pulses cycling at different speeds. You could trace its sounds and ideas to electronic and compositional pioneers such as Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, Steve Reich, Pete Namlook, and Carl Craig, but the obviousness of the lineage never stood in the way of the music's immediate, visceral qualities.

On Black Meteoric Star, Russom takes the duo's obsessive pursuits and applies them to the well-worn conventions of classic house and techno. Marked by simple, contrapuntal synthesizer arpeggios and jittery drum machine patterns, the music at first recalls the humid, shorted-wire minimalism of pioneering house and acid; it's not surprising to hear Russom namecheck Chicago's TRAX label and some of its artists in an interview with London's FACT magazine.

Sounds evocative of classic machines like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and TR-707 Rhythm Composer contribute to the vintage feel. Hallmarks of original house productions-- woodblocks, tambourines, hi-hats-- are now deeply rooted tropes, but Russom doesn't get tangled up in his piety. (The current vogue for intoning phrases like "house music" or "Detroit" over generically shoomping chords and congas is blissfully absent here.) He flirts with funk, but Black Meteoric Star isn't much interested in the humor or sensuality that animated Chicago's mid-80s house musicians. Instead of Robert Armani or Phuture's needling minimalism, he tends to a maximalist, sprawling psychedelia.

Ultimately, what Russom draws from his analog dance-music forebears has more to do with process than sound. Early house music derived much of its curious charge from the constraints its producers faced. Mothered by necessity, they made do with obsolete, bargain-basement instruments, often turning them on their ear and perverting their intended uses; they arranged in step time and recorded live, with none of the cut-and-paste convenience available in contemporary audio software. Russom likewise sticks to an all-analog setup combining vintage synthesizers and drum machines with more obscure boxes of his own invention; he records live in single takes. This necessitates a strict economy of means: the music is stripped down to only as many elements as can be reasonably manipulated in real time. His tracks batter a handful of ideas over and over again, with most of the variation a result of twisting filters and tweaking envelopes. But where TRAX emphasized the negative space that yawned in between the notes, Russom uses distortion and delay to smear his sounds into something corroded and verging on the limits of control. On "World Eater", there's at least one point where the beat audibly slips, most likely the result of his machines' wonky, loose-leashed timekeeping. (Synchronizing jerry-rigged circuitry like this, without the controlling hand of MIDI pushing things forward, is a notoriously dodgy affair.)

It's not as jarring as you'd think-- only a DJ in mid-mix would likely notice the slippage. But it's a reminder that Black Meteoric Star comes at "dance music" with an outsider's perspective. This stuff is worlds away from contemporary house and techno's relentless professionalism, perfect timekeeping, and pristine compression. The tracks are abuzz with line noise; the first four tracks bleed warm, tubelike distortion, while the final two sound like they were recorded live to a room mic, one possibly draped in milk-soaked cloth. That's part of the music's appeal, and also one of its ironies: At a time when the "democratizing" effect of music software has led to a glut of functional, professionally competent but imaginatively bankrupt music, the insistence upon a lo-fi aesthetic-- or better, ethic-- becomes something like a badge of honor, an auteur's protest.

Doth Russom protest too much? Maybe. The music doesn't always measure up to its conceptual ambitions. "Death Tunnel", one of the album's shortest tracks, barely merits its 378 seconds, and makes a self-defeating opener for the album. The rhythm plods, its eighth-note hi-hats cutting awkwardly into mushy arpeggios. And as intriguing as the basement-inventor backstory is, all that hand soldering sometimes makes you wish for more. In an interview with TheFader.com, Russom explains that he built his own machines because they allow him to do things that aren't possible with commercially available gear, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the music itself. The drum patches are familiar from a thousand recordings; far more radical sounds have been conjured by synthesists with modular systems or even over-the-counter analog gear. And I'll admit to a slight resentment of the fact that the DFA imprimatur assures Russom the kind of press that any number of artists who have long worked in a similar idiom (Mark Verbos, Ra-X, Legowelt, Unit Moebius, Giorgio Gigli, Donato Dozzy, even Omar S, and many of them more skilled and engrossing than BMS) will never enjoy. But in Russom's defense, he's not trying to re-invent the wheel, just forge his own from the materials.

Something about Black Meteoric Star sucks you in, undeniably. A year ago, I was skeptical about the first four tracks I heard, longer versions of four included here; my doubts didn't abate when hearing the finished album. But after an initial near-dismissal, I found myself coming back to the record again and again, then searching for interviews with the artist to find out exactly what motivated these strange analog hailstorms, which worry away at their material with obsessive determination. All six tracks are suffused with high drama; there's something almost tectonic about them, the way rocky patterns are shoved aside by colliding plates of sound, overtones flying off like sparks in hot ash.

It's clenched, anxious music, but there's something profoundly relaxing about it. Depending upon your state of mind, it hunches in the background like a cushion of white noise, or, turned up loud, heaves the horizontal axis on high-- a vision of the dance floor as space elevator. It's no coincidence that the strongest tracks here are the longest ones (though the six-minute barrage of "Dominatron" is as forcefully evil as its title would suggest). The slack, toe-scuffingly funky "World Eater" and the grinding "Anthem" are both 10-minute samples of infinity. At 14 minutes long, "Dreamcatcher" dares to attempt more ambitious structures, juggling drum tracks and piling up counterpoints into a honeyed churn. And the andante "Dawn", sounding like the soundtrack for underwater breakdancing, turns 18 and a half minutes into a spaced-out blink of an eye.

That kind of expansive vision is nothing new in dance music, of course; if anything, it's becoming routine, in the wake of quarter-hour anthems from the likes of Ricardo Villalobos and Lindstrøm. But I get the sense that Russom's neverending sequences come from listening to the world around him: specifically, the days-long club culture of Berlin, where he lives now. These intense, sustained workouts are as spiritually inclined as the most gospel-infused "spiritual house," just in different ways; they're reaching for the void that turns the dance floor inside out. (The irony is that you'd be hard-pressed to hear any of these tracks served up on Berlin's minimal smorgasbord, which recycles house music's watered-down tropes like a sushi restaurant serves up limp tuna on its endless conveyor belt.)

It's true that there's something a little bit precious about it all-- for instance, the fact that Russom once performed the project as part of a collaboration with the multi-media artists Assume Vivid Astro Focus that featured costumes, balloons, laser, and video projections. (In video clips of the performance, the balloons are a reminder of David Mancuso's Loft, while the projections and dancers more mundanely recall, well, just about any mainstream club from the Meatpacking District to Mitte.) But why shouldn't Russom at least try to do something special with his presentation-- especially when coming from the spectacle-shy world of indie rock? "Projecting a 'fantasy environment' is important to me when I make dance music," Russom told FACT. "It's something I do half-consciously, imagining the place where the music would fit ideally or what people would be wearing, etc. Like, 'What is the world that this belongs in?' It's quite sad that the dance floor is disappearing from the cultural landscape. It's a very important place." Russom may come from a house outsider's background, but just like he and Gonzalez got ambient, I think he gets dance culture. Black Meteoric Star is a spiritual thing, a body thing; a cheeky thief and a generous giver. It's a long night out and a longer walk home, mind abuzz, ears ringing.

— Philip Sherburne, June 18, 2009


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