Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s DJ Technics’ The Main Event EP. Listen to “DJ’s List” from the record below and read about it after the jump.
I remember sitting in the back of a big green station wagon listening to someone on 92Q play Baltimore club. We were on the way to a party from a show, neither as good as sitting in the car listening to the radio on a residential block. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m all journey/no destination. Baltimore club music is so forcefully forceful that it’s difficult to think of it as anything but the arrival. In the backseat of a Ford with your seatbelt on, it’s allowed a little transience.
Do you ever have times when you look in the mirror for too long? You’re not really looking at yourself, but not not yourself, you’re just looking. You can see the roots of your hair, the pores on your nose, the little lines on your lips. And you think, That’s it, that’s me. There’s nothing else to make up a person aside from those basic tiny tics. I do that sometimes and forget about other things around me, the larger context in which I live, and it’s spooky. Because I’m wearing clothes, I have a job, I have family and interests and these things move swiftly day by day, often without my cognizance. That silent soldierism is Baltimore club when it got to the too many Muppets and cartoons samples phase, a swept up spiral of horrid blasé corny. Maybe Technics had a baby or a near death moment or saw the sunshine or got a really nice new car and sucked in the warm smell of clean leather and when he was making this song he decided one minute 16 seconds into it to plop in a little balaphon five note tippy tap and let it play dainty through the end. Of course it has yelling and the “Sing Sing” egg shaker break, but it has its own quiet elegance. Maybe I’m being fey, but an old-fashioned kindness—musical or otherwise—is what snaps my ear, not a Dora the Explorer sample. While I know that kiddy playfulness is a crux of Baltimore club and ultimately not a particularly far stretch for a genre that began with a song called “Whores in the House” but perhaps where it started or where it ended up is not what are most notable, but this little rub-up in the middle, quirked with a cock-eye but still made like a master.
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- posted on Apr 15, 2008 in MP3 / STREAMS
- tags DJ Technics
