- Concerns of gender, race and sexuality occupy the mind and music of Terre Thaemlitz. It's hard to think of an artist in the electronic domain who has so succinctly allegorised his work. Ignorance to the wider implications won't necessarily hamper your enjoyment of his efforts in deep house, ambient or jazz, though engagement will only enhance it. On recordings such as the present "Crosstown," however, the message is so thinly veiled it's impossible to avoid.
It's taken from the little-known album, Routes Not Roots, recorded by Thaemlitz in 2006 under his Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion (K-S.H.E) moniker, which received a highly limited run on his own label Comatose. Thankfully, Skylax Records have decided to bring it to the wider public gradually through a series reissues, and, despite the proclamation that "we are all bitches" or the crude references to dicks and rectums, "Crosstown" is Thaemlitz at his most irresistibly seductive. It's a record that threatens, but never follows through, its potential to break; a record that keeps you hanging to the very end on the plight of its lonely hi-hat; chords shimmy and toms bob with all the hushed tunefulness of a fiesta parade congaing slowly into the distance. There's a serene soulfulness in this music that shrewdly counterbalances any coarseness in the socio-charged speech sample.
"Infected" is more upfront in its role as a dance record. There is what sounds like a sampled snippet of Michael Jackson repeating "and no, and no" over and over again while walking bass and filtered percussion carry the track in classic disco fashion. It has a latent groove that suffers from Thaemlitz' deliberate muting of the kick drum, but, as ever with him, the tease is half the allure.
Tracklist A Crosstown
B Infected