Perhaps more surprisingly, there's not a single moment here that feels like it would really blow up a dancefloor, the producer's understanding of groove left underutilized. Only on the 45-second "King of Fools" does Lazarus let his sampladelic tendencies run free, with a garbled TV jingle for monster children that's straight Position Normal. Closing track "After Rave Delight", all haunting chimes and honeyed vocoder choruses, veers between moving and repellant.īut the inviting median position Lazarus occupies hinders as much as helps his cause, as this music seems never quite to satisfy completely any of the goals it sets itself. "Neverending" is cheerful, fidgety anthemic vocal house whose marvelously fuzzed-out clomp almost makes up for its laconic, semi-Auto-Tuned indie vocals. If the ideas-per-track count is slightly lower elsewhere, this is only relative: "Come & Play" curiously combines a gorgeous, nervous but torpid house groove with more ethereal vocals and self-conscious samples from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Red Right Hand" ("with your red hand, come and play," the singer acknowledges in some cryptic allusion to copyright). He knows how to make the transitions subtle, but still, that's a lot of ground to cover. Still, Lazarus' impatient, rifling pose feels kind of unique, most ostentatiously on "Moment", which flits from forlorn-sounding British nursery rhyming to a smooth Björkalike chanteuse to clipped spoken word to warped baritone mewling, while the music slips from winsome tinkles through steady house pulses, on to clattering percussion, and then eerie strings and horn sections. In this, and in the album's clean lines and uncluttered rhythms, Lazarus follows the example of Booka Shade, who have comprehensively staked out this minimal-as-soundtrack territory, for better (their first two full-lengths, their DJ-Kicks mix) or worse (their tepid last album). So what's remarkable about Smoke the Monster Out is how it pursues this strategy while also sounding inviting and gregarious at every turn. How to reconcile a penchant for idiosyncratic, functionless sample collages with a career based on giving the crowd what it wants? At some point Lazarus must have realized that, if you drew a line between these two impulses, in the middle you'd find those "soundtracks to imaginary films" that dance producers and rockers both intermittently turn to when they feel like alienating their audiences. ![]() Like many dance labels in the middle of the decade, the latter imprint smoothly charted the successive rises and falls of electro-house and then minimal as the clued-in European clubber's soundtrack of choice, and Lazarus' Rebel Futurism Session Two mix from 2005 is one of the absolute best snapshots from the center of these stylistic drifts. ![]() After Agaric’s in-flux “Run (Ostern Jam),” Lazarus dispenses with contemporary dance music and pulls up a couple oddball ‘70s tracks in the geeky putter of Su Kramer's “Magic Dance” and two parts of Bill Holt's quasi-political electro-folk sound collage “Program Ten.” For all its fragmentation, Fabric 54 is nothing if not entertaining.When not stanning for Position Normal, the UK DJ and producer has spent the past 10 years setting himself up as a kind of bellwether for middlebrow trends in house and techno: He co-ran early electroclash label City Rockers, before jumping off at the exact right moment to form his own platform Crosstown Rebels. Several of the tracks themselves are phenomenal, yet the sequencing is not quite as ideal as it was earlier on. The first eight tracks make for a taught warm-up set, highlighted by the menacing, suspenseful Claude Von Stroke mix of Kenny Larkin's “Glob” and Swayzak’s relatively vintage and charmingly bantam “Ping Pong.” After Soul Clap's ambient deep house tune “Break 4 Life,” the mix gets expansive and relatively freewheeling. ![]() Overall, the makeup of the selections here are a little leaner than those of Lazarus' other commercially released mixes. ![]() He was at the London club of the same name’s opening night in 1999 and, six years later, he began DJ’ing there on roughly an annual basis. Damian Lazarus' contribution to the Fabric series was a long time coming.
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