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DJ Sprinkles: Midtown 120 Blues
 
- Stefano I. Bianchi


In Blow Up (Italy), #128, Gennaio 2009. Terre's note: I heard from many people that 8 of 10 is a very high ranking for this magazine. :)

 

(Click image to enlarge.)


 
English translation:

"While the world celebrates the revival of New York House Music, constructing utopian fictions about the genre as it goes along, DJ Sprinkles retreats deep into the bowels of house. This is the rhythm of empty midtown dancefloors resonating with the difficulties of transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug & alcohol addiction, racism, gender & sexual crises, unemployment, and censorship," Terre Thaemlitz writes in the liner notes.

Filled up almost until the last drop, his new CD under the alias DJ Sprinkles is a record that targets (again) house music, elevated by absolute adoration to the level of the symbolic: squint-eyed and full of meanings beyond pure music. He extracts a hypnotic and minimal sound floating with with piano loops and feminine soul voices (Midtown 120 Blues), violently sweet abstractions of dead voices (Ball'r - Madonna-Free Zone) and jazz (Brenda's $20 Dilemma, and the splendid Reverse Rotation). The one point of rest in the ballad that is this album is Grand Central Pt. II, a masterpiece clipped from a cinematic Hollywood dream, with a desolate aesthetic of glitches scattered like fallen stars. With the precision of absolute tactical intelligence, that is followed by the most vivid and lively track, The Occasional Feel-Good. Yes, just an "occasional feel-good" after which the record, and everything else, must close.

A piece of wonder. Personally, I do not know the "bowels of the house" so deeply, but I feel that we are in, and something unheard of is happening here. A primitive and very simple sound, a pure non-physical body of moving nostalgia for the future (House Music is Controllable Desire You Can Own), a sense of abandonment similar to a suicide pursued without any grudge, like a transition from an act of free will to mob insanity, no more being, no more having. Terre's blues is of the same bastard race as that of blacks from one hundred years ago, only to be followed by guys like Arthur Russell. The impossibility of being accepted, later transformed into a rejection of the idea of acceptance - at the hands of producers who are likely blacks and gays but whose works have become so white, pale and emaciated - today becomes the torment of surrender, the materialization of rejection in rubbish, disdain without contempt: Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To... the title of one of the key tracks of the album, a trip of bloody dreamlike intensity rendered unbearable by an endlessly repeated vocal loop (now this is blues!). An unconditional surrender to unwanted conditions. Empty dancefloors, opened bowels. Manifesto. (8)