duggup

Artist: Terre Thaemlitz
Website: www.comatonse.com/thaemlitz/
Track Name: Hush Now (DJ Sprinkles’ Broken Record Mix). By Terre Thaemlitz
Playback: mp3
Download?: Yes

Today we are going to have a look at Terre Thaemlitz. the multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. His work combines themes of identity politics – including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race – and it’s a safe bet that he isn’t to happy with the socio-economics of commercial media production.

Now all that sounds horribly heavy for a Sunday Chill, but the music is great.

Hush Now, the track I chose for today unfolds at a pace that, well, calling it leisurely is a probably a bit vigorous. It’s a compelling piece that irritates and intrigues at the same time, the beat is way up front and all of the interest and detail is happening out at the borders of the piece. This is a lot of fun.

He was interviewed back in 2001 by Wired magazine, a great article called Terre Thaemlitz’s polymorphous electronica exercises its right to be perverse. Here is the opening bit…

Despite an apparent gap between hardcore ideology and rad.faerie technopaganism, it’s no surprise that Coil, Ultra-red and Terre Thaemlitz should be making out the most challenging electronica of the moment; it may turn out that, just as Queer club culture was way ahead in the 1970s/80s and bequeathed so many of the things now taking (profitably) for granted in straight culture, a similar thing is now happening down the circuit boards of interior space… I am moved to say that after the dual prongs last year of Coil and Ultra-red I have found a lot of electronica hard (which is to say: way too easy) to take: just boys playing with their knobs and nothing there beyond an exhausted – sexless and unspelled – formalism.

There’s no charge, or daemon – call it how you will. Terre Thaemlitz’s work is simultaneously iconoclastic and seductive: he is ‘dragging’ set ikons all over the (Photo)shop… using, as here, the ‘icons’ of jazz or discobeat, and dragging them into unknown territories, unsettling the oeuvere definitions, undoing the underpinnings: opening the set course to a flood of polymorphous indecision and fright and tongued articulation.

A real groove; and a groove on the Real.

Which brings us to Public Record, the internet-based archive established for the distribution of work of the Ultra-red organization. The Public Record serves as an archive that allows artists and social movements to co-operate; and to hopefully radicalise the conventions of electronic music and sound art.

Needless to say Terre Thaemlitz fits in perfectly. Check out some of the music here You should probably file all this stuff on the outside of the “comfort zone” or as they say in the movies “strap in Sunshine, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.

thatch is fascinated by guitars, music, guitars, production, silly noises, guitars and used to be a musician. Did I mention the thing about the guitars?
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