The Todd Terry Trilogy: Past, Present & Future
Loudhouse Records / INgroovesemusic (from the Rave Dozen)
Although it was Chicago acid house that ignited the firestorm of rave culture in the UK, British rave music would ultimately be influenced more by the sounds coming out New York during the late Eighties. The Northern “bleep” style associated with Unique 3 and Warp acts like Sweet Exorcist and LFO owed a massive amount to the New York post-electro label Cutting and its acts like Nitro Deluxe, whose “Let’s Get Brutal” pioneered a style of bass-heavy and skeletally minimalist house music. And the breakbeat-driven hardcore rave style was hugely influenced by Todd Terry’s mental merger of house and hip hop.
Remote in sound and spirit from the house styles we usually associate with New York (i.e. the soulful, lushly produced garage of labels like Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove), Terry’s music was brash and street-raw, a fast-money music of uncleared samples, phat bass, and kickin’ beats. Just as Terry’s hybrid sound was vital impurist, so his insanely prolific output (the “various artists” on this overview are all him operating under different aliases) was fueled by an impure mixture of mercenary and artistic impulses. The muddy motivations proved to be fertile soil though, because even when recycling his own most successful riffs, he invariably reworked them and made them even deranged. Terry’s production of the Jungle Brothers’ “I’ll House You” basically super-imposed the group’s hip-housy rapping over his own Royal House track “Can You Party”, which had been a monster UK hit in the acid house-crazed summer of 1988. But he’d already versioned that track once before as the incredible “Party People”, a sort of drastic dub of “Can You Feel It” that turned reverbed after-traces of piano and vocal hubbub into a juddering pulse-riff. The effect is at once slammin’ and ethereal, like the air itself is wracked and palsied with disco fever. On this track and other early Terry tunes, the production has a curious cavernous, clanking quality, making you feel like you’re in a bunker-like space full of sound-reflections and muffled noise. Whether deliberate or a by-product of lo-fi studio conditions, the effect of playing them in a club must have been to double the “in the club” feel.
With this thrifty trackmaster (“I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble”, he once said) you don’t get any of the preciousness associated with, say, the Detroit techno auteurs. Terry wants to rock the party and he wants to get paid in full; his avant-gardism is almost a byproduct of the drive to catch listeners ears with crazy-making effects. Where your average New York producer would coat Dinosaur L’s mutant disco classic and Paradise Garage anthem “Go Bang” in an aspic of veneration, Terry eviscerated its nagging vocal riff for use in his own “Bango”.
With this thrifty trackmaster (“I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble”, he once said) you don’t get any of the preciousness associated with, say, the Detroit techno auteurs. Terry wants to rock the party and he wants to get paid in full; his avant-gardism is almost a byproduct of the drive to catch listeners ears with crazy-making effects. Where your average New York producer would coat Dinosaur L’s mutant disco classic and Paradise Garage anthem “Go Bang” in an aspic of veneration, Terry eviscerated its nagging vocal riff for use in his own “Bango”.
There are too many classics on this comprehensive anthology to list, but one deserves special mention: Black Riot’s “A Day in the Life”, its nagging techno motif and “fee-eee-eel it” sample-riff essentially making it the first UK hardcore track.
TODD EDWARDS remixes of ST GERMAIN's "Alabama Blues"
(from Faves of the 1990s )
New Jersey garage's great renegade, Todd Edwards developed a technique of
cross-hatching extremely brief snatches of vocals (blissful hiccups, gasps,
moans, splinters of yearning and smears of melisma) along with little bursts of
guitar, horns, and other instruments, all from old soul, funk and blues records.
Using sometimes as many as 60 micro-samples (some of his early tracks were
released under the name The Sample Choir), he weaves these fragments into
melodic-percussive honeycombs that are so burstingly rapturous they're almost
painful to your ears. That bittersweet quality may also have something to do
with a curious microtonal quality to his tracks, where the dense web of samples
often seem slightly sharp in pitch or semitonally smeared. At any rate,
Edwards's compelling blend of organic and mechanistic, "songful" and "tracky",
was hugely inspirational to the burgeoning speed garage and 2-step scene in
Britain, where house music has always been more involved with sampling and
digital FX than its American deep house precursors. My pleasure in Todd's
records was only enhanced by finding out that he was deeply influenced by Enya's
use of sampling and digital technology to multitrack her own voice into densely
layered, feathery-sounding tapestries of harmony. Enya!.
New Jersey garage's great renegade, Todd Edwards developed a technique of
cross-hatching extremely brief snatches of vocals (blissful hiccups, gasps,
moans, splinters of yearning and smears of melisma) along with little bursts of
guitar, horns, and other instruments, all from old soul, funk and blues records.
Using sometimes as many as 60 micro-samples (some of his early tracks were
released under the name The Sample Choir), he weaves these fragments into
melodic-percussive honeycombs that are so burstingly rapturous they're almost
painful to your ears. That bittersweet quality may also have something to do
with a curious microtonal quality to his tracks, where the dense web of samples
often seem slightly sharp in pitch or semitonally smeared. At any rate,
Edwards's compelling blend of organic and mechanistic, "songful" and "tracky",
was hugely inspirational to the burgeoning speed garage and 2-step scene in
Britain, where house music has always been more involved with sampling and
digital FX than its American deep house precursors. My pleasure in Todd's
records was only enhanced by finding out that he was deeply influenced by Enya's
use of sampling and digital technology to multitrack her own voice into densely
layered, feathery-sounding tapestries of harmony. Enya!.
TODD RUNDGREN
blink-and-you'll-miss it reference in Nuggets box set review, Spin 1998
the ear-dazzling
flare of Nazz's "Open My Eyes"
Bonus Rundgren bitchery
More on Todd Terry and New York ruffhouse
More on Todd Edwards
Lovely pieces! I remember Armand Van Helden speaking about Todd Terry in a documental about house music (forgot the name, but it's a big one), saying that anything "new" that anyone is trying in house production, Todd did it before. His productions had this groovy aggressiveness feeling that you associate with hip hop (like this continuous competitive innovation between beatmakers, though I don't know if there was any other produce he would compete with at that time, Todd's sound was certainly unique), it's kinda sad that nowadays that feeling is lost, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Todd Edwards music have always felt more introspective, maybe because of the usual gospel-themed microsampling and lyrics. A sound of his own in a different way from Todd Terry. I remember reading somewhere that during the 90s, before his sound took off, he wasn't getting much attention and he tried pursuing another sound (like his Jump To My Beat remix, kinda Philly-esque inspired disco house, still with microsamples), and then his original sound caught on, so he went back to the style we know him for.
pd: I believe that Todd Terry's track is called "Can You Party?", not "Can You Feel It". The latter is the one released under the CLS alias.
Cheers, and well spotted (i've corrected the mistitling)
ReplyDeleteThe tunes are so tuff so ruff - and in "Party People" I love the subtitle of the tuffest ruffest mix, "B-Boy National Anthem", presumably cos of the the samples from "Planet Rock" and T. La Rock.