Matthew Dear - DJ-Kicks

Pitchfork 74

Multiple identities are common in dance music, but Matthew Dear has taken his ego-altering further than most. In the early years, his aliases—False, Jabberjaw, and Audion, along with his real name—served as proving grounds for subtle tweaks on a single, overarching vision of techno in which texture, groove, and hook all held equal weight. But the gulf between the different aspects of his personality has steadily widened, particularly as he has settled on two main projects situated at opposite poles. As Audion, he makes cavernous, big-room techno that trades in weaponized euphoria and supersized sensation. Under his own name, he has become a singer/songwriter of knotty, nuanced electronic pop—the possessor of a sultry, Bowie-indebted baritone and a bandleader with the swaggering stance to match.

His DJ-Kicks mix is credited simply to Matthew Dear, but it actually represents a third aspect of his musical persona: the DJ. It is not his first commercial mix CD. As Audion, he recorded Fabric 27 in 2006, and as Dear, he delivered the seventh installment in Get Physical’s Body Language series in 2008. Like those mixes, DJ-Kicks focuses heavily on the present moment: Nothing is more than two years old, with the exception of a 1980 synth-pop rarity that turns up in a newly edited form. Given the ways that dance music has changed in the past decade, there’s a temptation to read the new mix as survey of its moment, much in the same way that Fabric 27 represented the minimal scene at its mid-’00s peak and Body Language Volume 7 captured a snapshot of the EasyJet-set—the tech-house axis of London, Berlin, and Ibiza—at the end of the decade. But Dear’s DJ-Kicks feels less like a cross-section of a scene or a snapshot of a moment in time than a core sample of his own idiosyncratic sensibility. There’s more character in this mix than in the previous two; it’s weirder and more engaging. The others could sometimes get tripped up by their own linearity, but this one is more charged, more unhinged, and riskier; it’s also more intricately and intuitively mixed. It’s a vision of house and techno that’s sleazy, druggy, and disorienting—also sneaky, whip-smart, and fun.

Dear’s specialty is the controlled urgency of the peak time, and that’s precisely where the bulk of the set dwells: deep in the chugging, roiling murk, with blunt machine grooves stirring up melodies the color of bruise blood. He opens on a more contemplative note, though, with an elegiac solo-piano piece from Nils Frahm that launches us into a new, previously unreleased song of his own: “Wrong With Us,” a bittersweet, Koze-like vocal number that neatly captures the weariness of a relationship going off the rails. It’s the only time we’re treated to Dear’s singing voice in the mix, but voices actually constitute a crucial through-line. Across the set he has scattered snippets of dialogue with his friends and family—off-the-cuff fragments, slowed to a narcotic (and largely incomprehensible) crawl, that serve as sinewy connective tissue from track to track. They lend the impression of moving through a crowded dancefloor where scraps of truncated conversations whip around your head as you move—a kind of Nightclub of Babel.

While few songs here foreground sung melodies, nearly every track uses vocals as a textural or rhythmic element: the cut-up, head-turning double entendres of Markus Enochson’s “Hot Juice Box”; the choppy, panned, and filtered gurgles of Kreon’s “Silo Sol”; the booming, crowd-stoking commandments of Italojohnson’s “ITJ10B1.” As a singer, Dear has always been as interested in the heft of the voice as he is in lyrical meaning, so it makes sense that he’d gravitate toward club cuts that work in the same way. And for listeners, his varied selections—juggling high voices and low, rough and smooth, garbled and clean—carve out an unusual space in between vocal and instrumental dance music. These aren’t voices we sing along with, necessarily; they aren’t the garish “toplines” garnishing commercial EDM. But they add nuance and mystery, drawing you in past the stern, occasionally forbidding contours of the rhythms Dear favors—snapping, mechanical vortexes full of sharp edges and jutting angles.

Dear’s mixing is a treat. Unless you know the tracks inside and out, it’s virtually impossible to tell where they begin and end; he favors long, careful blends, and rarely leaves a given track to play out by itself for long. His selections benefit from the hands-on style. Pay attention to the way energy pulses between two cuts running in parallel, and you imagine the motion of a pinball as it ricochets off bouncers and flippers: wildly kinetic and keenly controlled.

The smartly paced set switchbacks between minimalist drum tracks and deeper, more atmospheric house, and it climaxes with two previously unreleased Audion cuts and an interlude. Following the “Flat Eric”-like bassline of Soulphiction’s “Sky So High,” “Live Breakdown” wipes the slate clean with an extended stretch of granular vocal processing drawn out into a gravelly fit of pique. “Starfucker” rebuilds momentum with a rolling groove and a sharply syncopated hook, and it all comes to a head with the unhinged “Brines,” an improvised modular-synth workout playing rapid-fire snare rolls off dial-tone squeal. The set’s real highpoint, though, comes a few tracks earlier, when Dear mixes Simian Mobile Disco’s “Staring at All This Handle” into Pearson Sound’s “XLB,” one of 2016’s biggest techno tracks. As Resident Advisor’s No. 2 track of the year, it’s by far the highest-profile selection in the mix, but its notoriety isn’t the operating factor here; it’s the way Dear plays the two tracks’ hooks off each other.

Each one is considerably powerful on its own. Simian Mobile Disco’s sounds like a Foley artist’s thunder sheet being suddenly liquefied, as if by some arcane chemical process; Pearson Sound’s is a barrage of neon tracers cutting through darkness. Together, they evoke an image like something out of a John Woo film—a hail of bullets in an actual hailstorm. It’s such an intuitive pairing that you wonder why all DJs don’t always play these two tunes together. But it goes deeper than that. With the two descending sequences snapped into a kind of double helix formation, we’re presented with a schema of what Dear listens for when he’s putting together a mix: an X-ray of the structural underpinnings of his DJ sets. DJing is often characterized as an active, even athletic undertaking, whether that means rapid cross-cutting or vulgar fist-pumping. But in Dear’s hands, it can also be a more contemplative one: a case of setting up two tracks and letting them play out in a way that allows us to hear them anew. Locked into his listening, we let his ears guide ours.