Dalback - John or Jesper -- recommendations/admiration

shit - spelled dahlback

Pretty great, though the sheer volume of stuff from both makes me wary of any sort of general pronouncement.

A DJ once played me this awesome track which he claimed was a collaboration between John and Francois K/Francois Krevorkian (apparently these are different people? I'd always assumed they were one and the same), but I've never been able to find mention of it since.

loving all of John's recent non-"deep" house tracks:

'my favorite stars' 12" on morris audio
his remixes of Marc Romboy on Systematic
'time traveller' 12" on systematic

these are hot hot hot

love, love, love Jesper Dahlback. The Persuader stuff on Svek is still among my favorite dance music ever. the collaboration with Alexi Delano on Seasons is great and both his mixes for Turbo Recordings are summertime favorites. we had Jesper booked to play a party in Seattle back in 2000 but he cancelled. we got Weekender (Alex Moran) from Toko/Glasgow Underground instead and he seriously rocked the place. still wishing Jesper had made the trip. his recent foray into techno/acid has been fun to play but doesn't capture my imagination like the Stockholm LP or EP's on Svek.

Anyone listened to the John Dahlback album?

i've heard Who's Your Daddy - not sure if that is from new album, but i liked it. Je Regrette, jesper's remix is really good - he somehow manages her give Billy Ray Martins vocals a lot of depth and to give the song some moodiness the original track lacked ..i think by following vocals around snake-like and then suddenly going off key by 1/2 or 1/4 note change, flat or sharp - really effectively thickens the sound and tone of things without overwhelming. the other track "pass this on" had kinda the same effect.

heywood thx for the recommendations. so far i think i've only listened to the deep house stuff

To be fair both have released lots of crap aswell as the good stuff.

Jesper's worst sins=boring acid revivialism, being "too Pokerflat", if you know what I mean.

John's worst sins=I am sure he did a track with Sebastian Ingrosso on one of those awful hyper-fast Swedish bigroom house labels like Pryda or Goia. That's a seriously big sin too, they are fucking terrible labels.

The Sebastian Ingrosso collab-o ("Lick My Deck") isn't bad so much as quite average.

I love "too Pokerflat" as a put-down (my favourite put-downs are always those which could almost be compliments). It also makes sense re Jesper as Poker Flat is very much the Svek of electro-house.

It's a phrase we've developed at work for the emerging trend of overly techy or acidretro electro house! or worse, both at once!

I sometimes wonder if I actually liked "Jack 2 Jack (Jesper Dahlback Remix" at all, or was just caught up in the hype. It is kind of annoying, in a way.

well two thirds of jack 2 jack are really good. the part where it goes all wimpy is not great

"It's a phrase we've developed at work for the emerging trend of overly techy or acidretro electro house! or worse, both at once!

I sometimes wonder if I actually liked "Jack 2 Jack (Jesper Dahlback Remix" at all, or was just caught up in the hype. It is kind of annoying, in a way."

It's a very fine distinction though, yeah? What are other tracks that fall on the wrong side of the divide for you?

I am about to commit a cardinal sin, perhaps, but sometimes "Sweat" by John Tejada just feels too simple for me. It's like sometimes with this acid stuff there's just one layer of everything, and a big whacking beat behind it. I'll try and think of some others. I guess if you look at what Josh Wink's been doing it fits the bill too, it should be insane and really crazy and it pushes buttons everywhere but there's just something sickly and lumpen about it too, something akin to breakbeat somehow? Not good to dance to perhaps???

It's odd, because stuff like Tomboy-"She Hit My Head" is extremely retro, and ace, which leads me to think it's when tech-house becomes a factor that things get boring.

I also feel bad here, because one of my best friends is a fan of almost exactly this style that I dislike!

"too simple" is a bad way to put it, actually, I'll stick to "too retro". maybe I'm being harsh on "Sweat", it is good, I just know I've had so many chances to play it since I bought it and I never do, and I actually quite like the b-sides.

Ha ha I thought you'd been oddly quiet about "Sweat". How would you differentiate between stuff like "Sweat" and stuff like "Beat The Street" though? I mean I know these tunes are quite different obv but I'm trying to see what it is that is differentiating them.

(I would say "Sweat" falls on the right side of whatever this line is BTW, but I'm happy to carry on as if it doesn't for the purpose of teasing this out)

Haven't heard any recent Josh Wink stuff I don't think.

The breakbeat comparison is a good one though, in that I could imagine the scene winding down into a techy rut with similar consequences.

recently acquired the Bastratt ep (as hugg & pepp) and it is pretty wicked. and based on the 30 seconds i've heard, i am dying to get "sweden 1, canada 0" out on turbo. dahlbacks make me happy.

haha it's funny I kind of went off "Beat The Street" a bit too at whatever point I started to feel badly towards this style! I do think "Acid Bath" is actually a much more electroey track and has more of a sense of fusion to it. I ended up liking it alot more than "Beat the Street" in the end.

The latter is good though, I think actually the climax in it has that really cold electro feel to it (like "Acid Bath"). Maybe the distinction is the sort of party feel of "Beat the Street" or "Sweat", I think I like the murkiness, or even hell PROG elements of alot of electrohouse. Sometimes you just think "where are the synth stringlines!"

I was about to say: if there's a binary emerging it's along retro vs prog lines I think. Both are good though - most of my favourite DJ sets tend to toggle back and forth (erm really do get Crosstown Rebels 2 Ronan, I know I'm being annoyingly repetitive on this point).

I'm curious as to what you tend to think of Firm as a label - I see them as potentially mediating or even moving right past this divide really well if they can keep the quality control up. I know Schaeben & Voss were disappointing for you when you saw them but the live set Tobias and I saw was seriously mindblowing, spacialised kraut-electro-house, really hypnotic.

We have CR2 in work, I must give it a proper listen at some stage.

I will try check out some Firm stuff, I've not consciously heard any.

I actually think Black Strobe really have some awesome stuff towards the more popular end of this side of things. Stuff like "Nazi Trance Fuck Off" and whatever the similarly epic (12 mins plus) really hard electrohouse tune on the Ivan Smagghe-Live@The Flame mix is are really pushing stuff along. It's like a totally individualist electrohouse sound, which similar to Vitalic seems to repossess techno and make it really alive, a populist essential genre rather than a willfully obscure pop-hating blind alley.

There's a prog/trance element with the Black Strobe stuff too, and obviously other really external elements being thrown in aswell, like the EBM thing, most pronounced perhaps in what's becoming their trademark, that really rapid whiplash snare noise that they do at the end of phrases or long climaxes.

It's funny cos after their Essential Mix, and now those 2 tracks, plus seeing them play for us back in March, I've gone from thinking of Black Strobe as fairly quirky but good reliable supporting cast types to being potentially huge.

I bring them up here cos Schaeben & Voss live do sound a bit like Black Strobe live, from your description.

And yeah, for me, I think there is a need for this new direction for the harder more peak-time electrohouse stuff to develop. micro stuff is amazing and I buy so much of it but something needs to replace the Tiefschwarz remixes and the maximalism of last year, it's hard to know what to play at peak time! When in doubt of unfamiliar crowd of student drugheads I open with "Nazi Trance Fuck Off"!

The funny thing about comparing S&V with Black Strobe is that live all of their tunes were structured like "The Abwehr Disco" or the "Kleine Lust" remix - HUGE - quietens down a bit - HUGE - quietens down a bit - HUGE etc.

I agree re the "peak time" issue, that's why I was saying in the thread about progression in linear based music that micro seems really big again this year.

The "big" (as in peak time) tracks for me these days are the Sender type tracks, things like Misc's "The Magic Number" or Jake Fairley's "Radiator" - basically stuff that occupies the middle ground between Basteroid's "Against Luftwiderstand" and Superpitcher's "Fever".

BTW Ronan, a list of my Firm Favourites (ha ha):

Schaeben & Voss - Supernervous People (this was insane live)
Geiger - Hear My Train Coming
Andre Kraml - Safari
Schaeben & Geiger - Really Real
Schad Privat - One Night At The Dizko
Schaben & Voss - Cold Heart Sweat

* the caveat here is that I haven't heard many of the recent Geiger/Kraml/Privat/Voss releases so this list is probably way out of date.

Ah I love "Hear My Train Coming".

I must check out the label. Is "Call Me Killer" by Heiko Voss on Firm, I bought that on Saturday.

too poker-flat is a criticism?!!?! not round my place!

i listened to the jeff samuel mixed pokerflat 4 cd sitting in the park the other day, and it was all i could do to stop my self just fucking dancing like a lunatic round the park. i already looked like a lunatic swaying and tpaping and grining like a fucker. that cd is a.w.es.o.m.e!!!!!!!!1

i dotn really like jack to jack too much, but "too techy electro house" sounds liek exactly what i love.

its odd ronan, because i find lots more that is like this in sometheing like nazi trance fuck off "It's like sometimes with this acid stuff there's just one layer of everything, and a big whacking beat behind it.", and lots more oddity and supercol little tweaks, and
hidden gems in somethign like bugnology or aformentioned pokerflat 4.

tell me about svek people. i wanted people to talk about it on my paper recordings thread, but i think i got confused with swag.

I think Bugnology escapes being too Pokerflat, cos it's not actually very acidy, and has the prog element.

I've not heard Pokerflat 4 but it's possible alot of the tracks aren't on Pokerflat I guess!

the majority of them are on pokerflat, the others are "exclusively produced for this compliation", like the donnacha costello and jeff samuel ones.

i guess i had never really thought of poker flat as an electro house label. im not sure i underastand your desire to minimse acidic stuff and your liking of black strobe, but i dont know much about them i guess.

steve bugs "bug in your brain" on the comp pretty much epitomises everything i want to hear, kinda sparse, but with every element broguht in and allowed to totally fucking rock. every new hi hat, every double kick drum, is just fucking awesome. i guess its pretty retro, but in an electro sense.

well for me black strobe are a new twist on the acid sound, I am not a producer but it sounds as though they just aren't using the same setup for 303s etc, there's a much deeper sound to all of their acid tracks.

Love The Dahlbacks mix of the Knife, also check out Jesper in the group ADJD, their Stocktown Bizniz 12" on Pokerflat is great.

I love Pokerflat too Ambrose (the Volume II mix was in my '02 top ten!) but there is an air of "audio couture" about them, that "we have all the best records old and new" vibe where certain approaches are so consummately perfected that there is little room for cheese. However they themselves are only sometimes "too Pokerflat".
A more precise form of the put-down might be "out-Pokerflatting Pokerflat".

i demand haute couture wheher it be music or clothes. poker flat is the obvious accompianment to my H&M lifestyle.....

haha but i dont know much about poker flat really, i just love that mix.

quite a few john/jesper tunes on this mix from me right here

nothing new here for you seasoned dj types, but anyone that was looking to hear some of this stuff might find some pleasant surprises.

and 'sweat' is on it, so steer clear, ronan. ;)

thx-will listen to this tonite

Can I butt in here to ask about Jeff Samuel? Everything I've hard I've loved (and what does Poker Flat boring mean? I love it, prefer it to Get Physical - but what does this say about my taste?). Anyway, any Jeff Samuel recommendations gratefully received.

I don't think I have any Jeff Samuel but John Dahlbäck's been churning out great stuff recently:

John Dahlbäck - Hugge's Theme (Systematic)
Hug - The Angry Ghost (K2)
Huggotron - Glasshouses (Resopal)
Hugg & Pepp - Spjut (Dahlbäck)
Huggotron - Pop it Bad (Craft Music)

All from this month!

there's a great jeff samuel remix of frankie 'benga' on frankie records.

John sure has a fetish for hugging.

I don't like any of those records from JD, except maybe one track on the K2 one!

"Take you dare, I will take you dare" Dodgy tune by John dahlback but its funny. Erotic Moments in House vol 3.Dessous.

like the Angry Ghost 12-inch, also check out John's "Zoovoices"

Hugge's theme's central riff is good, but he manages to fuck it up half way through grrrr (as we were saying this morning, ed mcf)