Album of the Week: Pezzner, ‘The Tracks Are Alive’

Album of the Week: Pezzner, ‘The Tracks Are Alive’

18 June, 2010 | 3.29AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: freerange, pezzner

The debut album from Seattle house producer Pezzner couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only is it tailor-made for summer’s dancefloors; it blows like a cool breeze through the stale air of a market crowded with by-the-numbers deep house.

We spoke to Dave Pezzner to find out how he hit upon his sound, what he’s sampling, and what happens when Seattle rain trickles into deep house bedrock. Read on for audio samples and the interview.

‘Three Out of Five’

Not to knock straightforward club grooves, but you rarely hear deep house done this musically. Released on Jimpster’s Freerange label, ‘The Tracks Are Alive’ goes way beyond mere functionalism, and without sacrificing any of its power. Pezzner’s sound is unusually lush, weaving together muted samples and bright synthesizers into a supple sound field that’s full of color. It’s a refreshingly dynamic album, loud and soft and tough and yielding in all the right places and all the right proportions. No brick walls here, just careful balance.

The album ranges from underwater disco (’Three Out of Five’) to buzzy, funky tech house with Minneapolis on its mind (’Balboa Park’); ‘Find Me’, featuring the vocalist Larissa Kapp, delivers moody house vibes with just an echo of ‘80s electronic pop. There are even few short but exquisite ambient sketches. Here and everywhere on the album, depth is the common denominator.

‘Find Me feat. Larissa Kapp’

‘Chiuso Per Ferie’ is one of the deepest and dopest tracks I’ve heard this year, with echoes of Mood II Swing, Moodymann or Pepe Bradock, but delivered with a crispness that’s Pezzner’s own. (It’s essential for anyone into Motor City Drum Ensemble, Prime Numbers, the Story label, etc., as are ‘Dewolfe’, ‘Blacklist’, and really, everything else here.)

‘Chiuso Per Ferie’

With a looped vocal hook that reminds me of Carl Craig’s ‘Dominas’, and a shuffling, jazz-influenced drum jack, ‘Blacklist’ is another of the record’s standouts, successfully fusing tough percussive drive with swirling atmospherics.

‘Blacklist’

For its first three and a half minutes, ‘Philip (Parts 1&2) is a tense, Detroit-inspired tech house track with flickering chords and carefully whittled percussion; then the breakdown explodes into a series of overlapping vibraphone lines, an obvious homage to Philip Glass and Steve Reich‘s ‘In C’, and one of the most unexpected things I’ve heard in a house track in some time.

‘Philip (Parts 1&2)’

The album deserves its title: these tracks are alive, bursting with ideas—and yet without ever seeming crowded. Pezzner’s answers to our questions were just as thoughtful.

On a very basic level, how do you make your tracks? Obviously samples play a key role; where do you typically get your samples from, and what kind of magic do you perform upon them? How long does a typical track take you?

I think going back, my introduction to music production in the early 90’s was very sample-based. My music partner Bob Hansen and I built our studio around an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampling workstation, and for years we didn’t even use synthesizers. Even today, I find myself using the same basic processes that we were using before we switched to computers and software, just replace the ASR-10 with Native Instruments Battery, and Kontakt.

These days I’ve got a bit more of a process towards sample selection. Now I collect more obscure, harder-to-recognize songs to sample from, and thanks to the rare disco and edit movement that has happened over the past few years, there’s a growing abundance of amazing sample material posted on blogs and podcasts all over the internet. I collect these tracks and analyze them using Mixed In Key, which basically tells you what musical key your mp3s are in. Then I save the tracks to a folder on my computer that I like to call a “music sample pool”.

When I’m working on a song, or a remix, its easy enough to get the song started and create an eight-bar loop, but at some point I almost always find myself at a loss for ideas, so I use Mixed In Key to analyze the song I’m working on, and compare this to tracks in my sample pool, and the ideas start coming to me.

This process takes out a lot of the time consuming trial-and-error that used to come with sample selection and really speeds up the writing process. Lately it’s only taken me just a couple or a few days to write a song.

‘The Tracks Are Alive’

Your productions sound more musical than a lot of current tech house, with a lot more going on than the rote chord stabs and one-note basslines. And yet your tunes are also really repetitive and tracky. What do you think accounts for your style? Do you ever want to break out and write full songs?

I’m really not sure. I’m obviously pulling my cues from classic artists like Cliff Martinez, Steve Reich, Wendy Carlos (listen to ‘Philip Part 2’ and ‘Last Call’ and you’ll know what I mean). I’d gone through phases of listening to loads of pop R&B tracks from the ‘80s, especially those from the Paisley Park camp like Morris Day, Andre Cimone, Prince, etc., and obviously I find something brilliant in the repetition of techno and house music. Lately, I find myself rehashing some of the house music themes that were made popular in the late ‘90s by guys like Global Communication, Swag, I:Cube, and Daft Punk.

I like to hear music that has something organic and easy to relate to, while telling a story, and offers something new and experimental. And if the music makes me want to dance, even better.

You’ve got a cracking live set. Do your live performances influence your productions at all?

No, not really. Back in the Jacob London days we had gone through periods where all the songs were written so that they were easy to insert into the live PA, or easy to DJ. These days, not so much. Now I’m writing songs for those people listening to my music on their iPods with their headphones on. I mean, naturally I mix my music to sound nice in a nightclub, but “club hits” are not the first thing that come to mind when I’m doing these tracks. More than anything it’s important to me that my songs evoke some sort of feeling from the listener, be it loneliness, suspense, frustration, humor, love…

‘Dewolfe’

Your music has a real sense of color, spirit and even a kind of looseness… Does that describe your personality as well?

I’d like to think it does!

Your solo material is quite different from what you were producing with Jacob London. What accounts for the change?

I hate to say it but maybe it’s due to some good old-fashioned growing up. Jacob London perfectly represents that time in our lives where Bob (Hansen) and I were two young jaded 20-somethings taking the piss on house music at a time where we felt the genre was getting stale and formulaic. We would get together, drink lots of tequila and mock house music by making house music—severely overusing glitch effects, writing beats that were almost obscenely “jackin’”, and of course tossing in animal noises and unnecessary breakdowns just for the sake of crossing the line. We even wrote a song with a built in trainwreck.

At the time it worked well; people who didn’t get the joke enjoyed Jacob London as funky jackin’ house, those who did get the joke were either annoyed with us or became devoted fans. But then I’m not sure… maybe it got old to us in the same way a joke gets old after you tell it too many times.

I quit my day job about three years ago to pursue music full-time and began writing music on my own, which is actually something I hadn’t done… ever. I always wrote music with Bob and I was surprised to find that the music I wrote on my own, when there’s no jaded message, no silly studio tricks, no animal sounds or tequila… Well it sounds like Pezzner.

‘Last Call’

What’s it like making house music in Seattle, a city not really known for its club scene?

I love Seattle. Not just for the fact that it’s my home and all my friends are here but the city is full of life. We’re surrounded by trees and lakes and there’s a huge art scene. I feel at home on days like today where I can look outside to grey clouds, which to me means a perfect excuse to stay at home and work on music. Although I gotta say, it would be really nice if more people were making house music here.

*Photos: Bob Hansen

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