Featured Chart: Anthony “Shake” Shakir

Featured Chart: Anthony “Shake” Shakir

20 February, 2010 | 5.32AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: anthony shakir, dj charts

I tend to wrinkle my nose a little at DJs who chart more than one of their own tracks at a time (cough, Radio Slave!). But I’m willing to cut Anthony Shakir some slack, and not only because he’s one of the kindest, humblest techno musicians I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet.

He’s also a bona fide legend, although you could be forgiven for not knowing that. Despite working with Juan Atkins in the early years of Metroplex and contributing a solo track to the epochal 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, and co-founding the Puzzlebox label with Aux 88’s Keith Tucker, Shakir has kept a comparatively low profile throughout the past decade, due in part to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000.

It’s only now, with Rush Hour’s 35-track retrospective, ‘Frictionalisms: 1994-2009’ that the man called “Shake” is beginning to get his due. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you really owe it to yourself: the collection runs from deep techno to electro to broken house, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it could change the way you think about Detroit’s electronic music history.

Of the selections he charted in his recent DJ chart (below), ‘Simpatico’ is an unsettling techno-jazz number featuring walking bass, cool Rhodes chords and some seriously oddly cut drums; ‘The Other One’ is a rough and rolling keyboard-led jam that’ll satisfy fans of Moodymann and Theo Parrish; and the moody, downbeat ‘Detroit State of Mind’ recalls Urban Tribe’s 1998 classic ‘The Collapse of Modern Culture’, to which Shake contributed (along with Moodymann, Carl Craig and Urban Tribe founder Sherard Ingram).

As for the rest? Shakir clearly doesn’t hold a grudge against European producers who have taken the Detroit techno template and run with it: both Hermanez’ ‘Necotine’ and Shlomi Aber’s ‘Create Balance’ display a heavy debt to Shakir’s own work at its most full-on and percussive, and of course Redshape (charted here for his grinding mix of Martyn’s ‘Seventy Four’) owes the Motor City everything for his own brand of steely linearity.

And then there are the surprises: the inclusion of Floating Points’ 2-steppy ‘K&G Beat’, Pangaea’s yearning ‘Why’, and Mosca’s driving, broken ‘Square One’ all suggest that Shakir is listening closely to the fringes of dubstep, UK funky and future garage. Which is pretty cool, when you consider that he has been making music since the heyday of the Paradise Garage.

Here’s Shake’s February 2010 chart for Beatport. In the player below that, you’ll find ‘Frictionalisms’ in its entirety.

• (0) Comments
• (1705) Views
• Get Anthony Shakir's DJ chart on Beatport