Tweet
Cobblestone Jazz article
This makes me wanna go see them perform live..Nice article. 
A User's Guide to Wagon Repair
by Philip Sherburne
When Cobblestone Jazz took the stage at Montreal's MUTEK festival this year, the group's set was unlike anyone else's during the five-day spread of events, both for its music and its presentation. Sure, there were two dudes on laptops, gearboxes, MIDI controllers and mixers, your standard electronic setup; and their 4/4, backbeat-heavy pulse wasn't that different from the house and techno foundation that supported the majority of the week's sets.
But there was something else bobbing and weaving through the mix: undulating Rhodes keyboard lines, alternately jaunty and menacing, sprightly and overcast. And there, indeed, was a young man actually playing all the riffs and chords in real time, on an actual keyboard — a rarity at a time when the only keyboard used in most electronic "live" performances is of the QWERTY variety. The performance became even more unpredictable about two thirds of the way through, when another figure took to the stage: the Mole, aka Colin de la Plante, who had played just prior to the techno-jazz trio. Now here he came again, diving into his unusual setup of laptop, turntable and modular synthesizer — a massive WTF of a machine dangling cables and spitting LED flashes — blending his own loops and turntablism seamlessly into the mix and ratcheting Cobblestone Jazz's hedonistic, menacing, faintly anarchic grooves one step up the Dionysian ladder. This was something else altogether.
No one who knew the group well would have been terribly surprised: de la Plante has two releases on Wagon Repair, the label co-founded by Cobblestone's Mathew Jonson, and what's more, he and Jonson, old friends from Vancouver, BC, frequently pair up at after-parties, spinning up dizzily improvisational sets using turntables, laptops and knob-boxes galore. No one who knew Wagon Repair well, for that matter, would have been caught off guard: that kind of collaborative, off-the-cuff, faintly anarchic spirit is exactly what drives and defines the Vancouver label. And that's precisely what's made the youngish imprint one of the most exciting new entries upon the electronic scene.
Wagon Repair — founded in 2004 by Jonson, Todd Shillington (aka Konrad Black) and Jesse Fisk (aka Loose Change) — didn't waste any time in establishing its idiosyncratic identity. Its first record, the Missing Link's Screw Loose EP, released in the last week of December — hardly an auspicious time to bring out a vinyl single by an unknown artist — staked the label's claim on a neglected parcel of techno terrain, emphasizing rough-hewn machine rhythms and grumpy electronic tones that were neither obviously analog nor digital, sampled nor synthesized. From the beginning, Wagon Repair was not an either/or proposition, but an and/but one. (The Missing Link has gone on to release three more releases for the label, all of them just as agreeably creaky, and all of them informed — like so much of the label's output — as much by electro cadences and breakbeat sensibilities as by house and techno's 4/4 chug.)
Next up was Jonson's "Marionette," which helped to quickly raise the label's profile. Jonson had already released a number of successful singles for labels like Perlon, Itiswhatitis and Minus; his Decompression EP for the latter, in fact, was a major hit in techno circles. "Marionette," with its mournful arpeggios and melting pads, further suggested that the label was onto something special, while the flipside's "Marionette (Live Edit)" was a none-too-subtle shot across electronic music's studio-obsessed bow — a reminder that some of the most moving techno comes not from pushing little colored blocks around a screen, but from triggering sequences and twisting knobs in real time, and allowing the momentum of the moment to sculpt the track's shape and flow. And while the next release, Konrad Black's brooding Draconia EP, demonstrated that Wagon Repair was also quite at home with dusky, minimally-inclined techno — as bassy and as sexy as anything out there — it was with Wagon Repair 04, featuring Jonson's "Return of the Zombie Bikers," that the label showed its affinity for out-and-out monster jams. Riding a staggering, syncopated beat and wooing dancers with a snake charmer's portamento riffs, "Return" was one of 2005's biggest tracks and remains one of the label's most gripping.
"TV 20" is minimal at its most noir; it's also proof that Timbaland and "snap" producers aren't the only folks who can wring blood from clicking fingers and a sharp intake of breath.
A lesser label might have been content with those early successes, repeating the same tricks until sales dropped off and some other upstart label pulled ahead of the pack and offered a new template to ape, just as others had begun to mimic Wagon Repair's own styles. But Wagon Repair didn't rest upon its laurels. Since then, the label's only real defining quality has been its eccentric nature. Stylistically, it has ranged widely, from the lo-fi tomfoolery of Hrdvision (Matthew Jonson's brother) to the colorful, whack-a-mole house of Mike Shannon to Danuel Tate's Pushcard EP; one of the label's most recent releases, the record — the work of Cobblestone Jazz's talented keyboardist — offers a sui generis fusion of swing, cool jazz and pumping, peak-hour deep house. As with all of Wagon Repair's releases, that list doesn't tell half the story: it's not about what genres get roped together or what machines synched up; Pushcard's four tracks are ultimately about colliding ideas, promiscuous sounds and explosions of form amidst chaos (and vice versa).
Even when one of the label's releases conforms to the rules of a given subgenre, it retains Wagon Repair's eccentric sensibility. Luca Bacchetti's masterful Once Again EP could easily be mistaken for the bleepy minimal techno of the day. But from the grit in his palette to the ragged, real-time interplay of his machines, Bacchetti's nervous, neurotic techno stands confidently in its own corner. (Where it seems to be wringing its hands and banging its head against the wall.) When it reaches outside its immediate family, Wagon Repair seems to bring out the exceptional in its signees. Both Minilogue, a psychedelically-oriented act with releases on numerous labels, and Lazy Fat People, kingpins of Switzerland's deep-techno scene, managed to turn in career highlights with their respective records for the label, taking their respective approaches to spine-tingling sound design and slow-mo trapdoor constructions to sprawling (and captivating) new extremes. (And surprising ones: Lazy Fat People's "TV 20" is minimal at its most noir; it's also proof that Timbaland and "snap" producers aren't the only folks who can wring blood from clicking fingers and a sharp intake of breath).
Ultimately, Wagon Repair seems to remain mostly a family affair focused on that group of Vancouver buddies, some of whom have scattered to the winds. (The Mole now lives in Montreal; Konrad Black is in Berlin.) And if you listen intently to the releases from the Mole, Jonson and Cobblestone Jazz (plus the Modern Deep Left Quartet, which is Cobblestone Jazz with the Mole), you'll hear the clearest distillation of the label's ideas, where three or four decades of dance music styles and music-making methods get squished together in a great, shuddering lump. Disco, electro-funk, acid house, Detroit techno, minimal — they're all there in varying proportions, smearing like water and Windex. In Wagon Repair's most recent run, these ideas have been most fully realized in a string of EPs from Cobblestone Jazz. "Dump Truck" and its flipside, "Peace Offering," are fidgety fusions of jazz riffage and house glide; what's distinctive about them isn't the instrumentation or the musical vocabulary so much as the way they create their own worlds with their own proprietary logic. When you're dancing to these songs, or even just listening on headphones, they feel like the world's ur-dance music, the Platonic ideal for cutting rugs to. And then you put on one of the season's big club hits, underground or otherwise, and you realize just how strange Cobblestone Jazz's concept of dance music really is.
The two versions of "India in Me," from the eponymous EP, are long, improvisatory fugues of serpentine arpeggios and drum programming that shift as imperceptibly as clouds on high; the songs' Eastern modalities might be a musical pun to remind you that this is, at heart, trance music in its most literal sense, but that doesn't make them any less hypnotic. The two tracks from June 2007's Put the Lime in Da Coconut EP, meanwhile, come the closest to approximating Cobblestone Jazz's crackerjack live set at MUTEK that same month. Both cuts fit long, glimmering strands — silvery arpeggios, unruly funk bass, Venus flytrap hi-hats — into an ungainly backstrap loom, with which they warp and woof until you don't know which way is up.
Techno doesn't come much more hypnotic than this, and when you listen carefully, you can tell that's because this stuff is being improvised; it's a real-time morphology without jumps or breaks. Digitally edited music is sometimes unfairly derided as being "dry," but one thing is true: you don't find electronic music much more fluid than this. That's how Cobblestone Jazz's live performance felt: free-flowing and intuitive, the product of a group of musicians that know each other as well as they know their machines. Judging by their recent output — as well as the upcoming Cobblestone Jazz debut LP, initially slated but now likely to be licensed to a bigger label — get ready for a deluge.
A User's Guide to Wagon Repair
by Philip Sherburne
When Cobblestone Jazz took the stage at Montreal's MUTEK festival this year, the group's set was unlike anyone else's during the five-day spread of events, both for its music and its presentation. Sure, there were two dudes on laptops, gearboxes, MIDI controllers and mixers, your standard electronic setup; and their 4/4, backbeat-heavy pulse wasn't that different from the house and techno foundation that supported the majority of the week's sets.
But there was something else bobbing and weaving through the mix: undulating Rhodes keyboard lines, alternately jaunty and menacing, sprightly and overcast. And there, indeed, was a young man actually playing all the riffs and chords in real time, on an actual keyboard — a rarity at a time when the only keyboard used in most electronic "live" performances is of the QWERTY variety. The performance became even more unpredictable about two thirds of the way through, when another figure took to the stage: the Mole, aka Colin de la Plante, who had played just prior to the techno-jazz trio. Now here he came again, diving into his unusual setup of laptop, turntable and modular synthesizer — a massive WTF of a machine dangling cables and spitting LED flashes — blending his own loops and turntablism seamlessly into the mix and ratcheting Cobblestone Jazz's hedonistic, menacing, faintly anarchic grooves one step up the Dionysian ladder. This was something else altogether.
No one who knew the group well would have been terribly surprised: de la Plante has two releases on Wagon Repair, the label co-founded by Cobblestone's Mathew Jonson, and what's more, he and Jonson, old friends from Vancouver, BC, frequently pair up at after-parties, spinning up dizzily improvisational sets using turntables, laptops and knob-boxes galore. No one who knew Wagon Repair well, for that matter, would have been caught off guard: that kind of collaborative, off-the-cuff, faintly anarchic spirit is exactly what drives and defines the Vancouver label. And that's precisely what's made the youngish imprint one of the most exciting new entries upon the electronic scene.
Wagon Repair — founded in 2004 by Jonson, Todd Shillington (aka Konrad Black) and Jesse Fisk (aka Loose Change) — didn't waste any time in establishing its idiosyncratic identity. Its first record, the Missing Link's Screw Loose EP, released in the last week of December — hardly an auspicious time to bring out a vinyl single by an unknown artist — staked the label's claim on a neglected parcel of techno terrain, emphasizing rough-hewn machine rhythms and grumpy electronic tones that were neither obviously analog nor digital, sampled nor synthesized. From the beginning, Wagon Repair was not an either/or proposition, but an and/but one. (The Missing Link has gone on to release three more releases for the label, all of them just as agreeably creaky, and all of them informed — like so much of the label's output — as much by electro cadences and breakbeat sensibilities as by house and techno's 4/4 chug.)
Next up was Jonson's "Marionette," which helped to quickly raise the label's profile. Jonson had already released a number of successful singles for labels like Perlon, Itiswhatitis and Minus; his Decompression EP for the latter, in fact, was a major hit in techno circles. "Marionette," with its mournful arpeggios and melting pads, further suggested that the label was onto something special, while the flipside's "Marionette (Live Edit)" was a none-too-subtle shot across electronic music's studio-obsessed bow — a reminder that some of the most moving techno comes not from pushing little colored blocks around a screen, but from triggering sequences and twisting knobs in real time, and allowing the momentum of the moment to sculpt the track's shape and flow. And while the next release, Konrad Black's brooding Draconia EP, demonstrated that Wagon Repair was also quite at home with dusky, minimally-inclined techno — as bassy and as sexy as anything out there — it was with Wagon Repair 04, featuring Jonson's "Return of the Zombie Bikers," that the label showed its affinity for out-and-out monster jams. Riding a staggering, syncopated beat and wooing dancers with a snake charmer's portamento riffs, "Return" was one of 2005's biggest tracks and remains one of the label's most gripping.
"TV 20" is minimal at its most noir; it's also proof that Timbaland and "snap" producers aren't the only folks who can wring blood from clicking fingers and a sharp intake of breath.
A lesser label might have been content with those early successes, repeating the same tricks until sales dropped off and some other upstart label pulled ahead of the pack and offered a new template to ape, just as others had begun to mimic Wagon Repair's own styles. But Wagon Repair didn't rest upon its laurels. Since then, the label's only real defining quality has been its eccentric nature. Stylistically, it has ranged widely, from the lo-fi tomfoolery of Hrdvision (Matthew Jonson's brother) to the colorful, whack-a-mole house of Mike Shannon to Danuel Tate's Pushcard EP; one of the label's most recent releases, the record — the work of Cobblestone Jazz's talented keyboardist — offers a sui generis fusion of swing, cool jazz and pumping, peak-hour deep house. As with all of Wagon Repair's releases, that list doesn't tell half the story: it's not about what genres get roped together or what machines synched up; Pushcard's four tracks are ultimately about colliding ideas, promiscuous sounds and explosions of form amidst chaos (and vice versa).
Even when one of the label's releases conforms to the rules of a given subgenre, it retains Wagon Repair's eccentric sensibility. Luca Bacchetti's masterful Once Again EP could easily be mistaken for the bleepy minimal techno of the day. But from the grit in his palette to the ragged, real-time interplay of his machines, Bacchetti's nervous, neurotic techno stands confidently in its own corner. (Where it seems to be wringing its hands and banging its head against the wall.) When it reaches outside its immediate family, Wagon Repair seems to bring out the exceptional in its signees. Both Minilogue, a psychedelically-oriented act with releases on numerous labels, and Lazy Fat People, kingpins of Switzerland's deep-techno scene, managed to turn in career highlights with their respective records for the label, taking their respective approaches to spine-tingling sound design and slow-mo trapdoor constructions to sprawling (and captivating) new extremes. (And surprising ones: Lazy Fat People's "TV 20" is minimal at its most noir; it's also proof that Timbaland and "snap" producers aren't the only folks who can wring blood from clicking fingers and a sharp intake of breath).
Ultimately, Wagon Repair seems to remain mostly a family affair focused on that group of Vancouver buddies, some of whom have scattered to the winds. (The Mole now lives in Montreal; Konrad Black is in Berlin.) And if you listen intently to the releases from the Mole, Jonson and Cobblestone Jazz (plus the Modern Deep Left Quartet, which is Cobblestone Jazz with the Mole), you'll hear the clearest distillation of the label's ideas, where three or four decades of dance music styles and music-making methods get squished together in a great, shuddering lump. Disco, electro-funk, acid house, Detroit techno, minimal — they're all there in varying proportions, smearing like water and Windex. In Wagon Repair's most recent run, these ideas have been most fully realized in a string of EPs from Cobblestone Jazz. "Dump Truck" and its flipside, "Peace Offering," are fidgety fusions of jazz riffage and house glide; what's distinctive about them isn't the instrumentation or the musical vocabulary so much as the way they create their own worlds with their own proprietary logic. When you're dancing to these songs, or even just listening on headphones, they feel like the world's ur-dance music, the Platonic ideal for cutting rugs to. And then you put on one of the season's big club hits, underground or otherwise, and you realize just how strange Cobblestone Jazz's concept of dance music really is.
The two versions of "India in Me," from the eponymous EP, are long, improvisatory fugues of serpentine arpeggios and drum programming that shift as imperceptibly as clouds on high; the songs' Eastern modalities might be a musical pun to remind you that this is, at heart, trance music in its most literal sense, but that doesn't make them any less hypnotic. The two tracks from June 2007's Put the Lime in Da Coconut EP, meanwhile, come the closest to approximating Cobblestone Jazz's crackerjack live set at MUTEK that same month. Both cuts fit long, glimmering strands — silvery arpeggios, unruly funk bass, Venus flytrap hi-hats — into an ungainly backstrap loom, with which they warp and woof until you don't know which way is up.
Techno doesn't come much more hypnotic than this, and when you listen carefully, you can tell that's because this stuff is being improvised; it's a real-time morphology without jumps or breaks. Digitally edited music is sometimes unfairly derided as being "dry," but one thing is true: you don't find electronic music much more fluid than this. That's how Cobblestone Jazz's live performance felt: free-flowing and intuitive, the product of a group of musicians that know each other as well as they know their machines. Judging by their recent output — as well as the upcoming Cobblestone Jazz debut LP, initially slated but now likely to be licensed to a bigger label — get ready for a deluge.
Comment