Dirtybird 3rd Anniversary Party at Mighty in San Francisco

Dirtybird 3rd Anniversary Party at Mighty in San Francisco

11 March, 2008 | 9.03PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Beatport Blog
• Written by: PhilG

This past Saturday San Francisco’s Dirtybird label celebrated their 3rd anniversary at Mighty with DJ sets from Justin Martin, Worthy, Christian Martin, and Claude vonStroke that showed how much musical range the label’s core producers have, but the beginning of Christian Martin’s set reminded me of what I don’t like about aspects of the Dirtybird sound. 

Justin Martin played the opening set, starting out with lush deep house and gradually adding in more techy elements, constantly twiddling knobs and playing with effects, and, for a pleasant change from the stern DJ faces I’ve seen recently, obviously enjoying himself and his interaction with the groovers on the dancefloor. I had the feeling that he was giving us a glimpse into his own musical foundations in traditional house while building up the structure that would form the basis for the Dirtybird sound. Of the three sets I heard that evening I enjoyed his the most because of the mature control he brought to it – though one of my companions complained that there were too many breakdowns, Justin Martin was very tight in the way he deployed them to manipulate the dancefloor energy.

The second set went to Worthy, who led off with an excursion into tribal house that was less exciting for me, but by the end of his set he had edged into hard trance territory, and the crowd responded by packing the dancefloor and throwing their hands in the air.

One of the very first tracks that Christian Martin dropped was Khia’s “My Neck,” This is the one track that will drive me from the dancefloor every time; I’ve left when gay DJs played it, when Joakim played it, and this time was no exception. For me, this track is a crude weapon in the DJ arsenal, and no matter how smart, interesting, sexy, and fun the music has been before it, once it drops the entire club turns into a strip joint and everyone loses ten IQ points. My main problem is how blatently literal it is, so that when the DJ drops its, he’s announcing where he plans on taking you, and if you’re into going there, great, but if you’re not, the only place for you to go is home, which is what we did shortly thereafter. Having seen the acapella version turn up in mixes from both Christian Martin and Claude vonStroke, I assume that this was the same version mixed in over top of something else, which, in a way, makes it even worse, since it means what he really cared about in this track were the lyrics, not the groove.

Dirtybird has founded itself, and become quite successful, by coming up with a sound that marries the basic booty shake of hip-hop to the structure and sounds of techno, resulting in something just this side of ghetto tech that you can hear in releases like “Chimps” (Claude vonStroke), “Bubble” (Riva Starr) and “Stoopit” (The Martin Brothers). There’s no denying that people seriously get down to these tracks, as evidenced by the stage filled with writhing, gyrating women at this party, or the packed dancefloor, but, for me, they lack the subtlety and sophistication that you can hear in tracks like “Whose Afraid of Detroit” or the pure good-natured swing of Justin Martin’s “Cicada.” When Christian Martin dropped “My Neck,” it felt like he was making a definite statement about where the evening was headed, one that was based in a fairly crude idiom, and, honestly, if it was going to be all about the booty and the bitches from that point on, I wasn’t particularly interested in going there, nor did it really represent to me what I enjoy about the label (plus, I had already heard a great set from Claude vonStroke at Kontrol the previous week).

If the evening demonstrated anything about the Dirtybird label to me, it was that all four founding members are enormously talented producers and DJs who have a deep understanding of an array of dance music genres. I would just like to see them bring some of the great work they’ve done off-label (like Justin Martin’s releases on Utensil or his fantastic remix of “Vesuvius,” Worthy’s releases on Katabaric, or even the products of Claude’s new deep techno label, Mothership) back home and to their parties to create a more sophisticated sound.

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