A frequent contributor to the celebrated Workshop label, Madteo can be counted, along with figures like Morphosis, amongst a small cadre of oddball producers of truly off-the-wall House. Listening to his music, one gets a sense of the jumbled, complex, and possibly unhinged Madteo backstory. The Paduan’s extended odyssey led him through Los Angeles, Dallas, back to Italy, and eventually to New York, where he arrived in time to experience the dirtier pre-Giuliani days when House reigned supreme in the city’s many clubs. It’s an era that Matteo Ruzzon remembers fondly, when old-school Hip-Hop was intertwined in the dance scene, and to this day it is these two poles that define the boundaries of his production as he attempts to walk a deranged path between them, guided by his fond memories of old New York’s dirt and grime. It’s somewhat remarkable that this approach rooted in another time has gained him some success in the often-conformist dance music universe, but with each release earning more notice, Madteo has produced his finest effort to-date with his new drop, Bugler Gold Part 1, on Joy Orbison and Will Bankhead’s nascent Hinge Finger imprint.
Madteo helps his case here by making and effort to reign in the most abrasive of his idiosyncracies; there’s no demented raps by oddball-extradornaire MC Sensational further morphed beyond intelligibility with effects, and the bizarre, extreme treatments of sounds are somewhat reeled in, making this easily his most superficially palatable release. Fear not, the nearly-extraterrestrial photo of the artist on the cover indicates he hasn’t lost his outward trajectory all together, but three of the pieces here actually fall into conventional House tempos even as the oddness surges out from around the edges. The title track is first and approximates a dusky, stoned version of House that is too hazy and grayscale to make much impact on a dancefloor. It’s a tune full of wonky sounds that recall someone manually speeding up and slowing down held tones on a record, and a few scattered, nonsensical vocals. Inside effort Biz R Us (Whore Power Resolution) is actually quite a bit pacier, although the metallic, harsh sounding reverbed hiss that dominates the midrange would certainly distract listeners looking for more ordinary sounds. Much like the previous track, the rhythm is cut to ribbons continuously, but because of the more energetic structure it sounds fidgety rather than stumbling. The odd one of the bunch is the 90-BPM-ish Scream Seq, which looks back to Madteo’s Hip-Hop leanings by overlaying an insistent and insistently tweaked arpeggiated synthesizer line and more tripping, nearly comatose broken beats that fall over themselves for the duration. The finale is Xtra Loose Change (2010 Refix), a nearly Techno number whose scum-shrouded, ultra-low fidelity kick drum is overlaid with a wide variety of intentionally drifting hats, vocal exclamations, scrapes, moans, and other detritus and loose change. It all eventually gets whipped into a froth over the long duration of the track with an overabundance of extra-strength weirdness, and it’s proof positive that Madteo is simply honing his edge rather than tempering the strangeness for mass consumption. While definitely still only for the deepest of heads, the danceable tempos and slightly subdued experimentalism should bring this EP to a wider audience than ever before while keeping Madteo’s outsider House unquestionably alive and kicking.
Madteo’s Bugler Gold Part 1 EP is available on vinyl at halcyon the shop.
0 comments:
Post a Comment