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Call me a normative culturalist, or cultural normalist, but I’ll stand by it: In the world of electronic music, record labels release records that sound like the places they came from. Where the labels are from, I mean. It doesn’t matter which artist is up, or where they’re from. There’s always a high level of (warning: florid text) ubiquitous homogeneity. Warp Records, sovereign home of electro-elites like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, releases music that sounds like mad professors traveling in glass domes, beating the post-industrial gas lines that criss-cross Warp’s home: Sheffield, England. Ninjatune, based in London, has an obsession with being a better version of America, throwing out album covers with pointedly fucked up modernist architecture (meaning, “whatever bitch, we’ve got buildings from the 14th century”) and standing by the creed that they don’t need hip hop, let alone The Streets (meaning, “jungle is the true British urban experience.”). For the duo Soulo, it’s the same sort of game, because they’re on L.A.’s finest/StarSearch-finalist label, Plug Research. Unlike British electronic music, which is all about being as heartfelt as a T-1000, artists affliated with Plug Research (such as Daedelus, Dntel, and Low Res) make electronic music that is warm and silly like your first boyfriend. Soulo is no exception, but while silliness can get the better of some other PR artists, Soulo sounds ready to hit up Sheffield and run with the Big Dogs. Yeah, like that t-shirt you wore in 6th grade. First thing, lace up those five-wheel neon rollerblades, because we ain’t goin’ to Venice Beach. On Man, The Manipulator, Soulo uses a gimmick that—for electronic music—is a long-discovered motherlode just waiting to be mined. Those who’ve heard The Books’ album, Thought For Food, may know what I’m getting at: real instruments. The logic here is borrowed from that of a defeated teenager, who, after attending weekly raves and abstracting himself beyond recognition, has nowhere left to go but back to his parents’ house. Soulo seems to think that this is the destiny of electronic music, and in fact, they take their beats back to Americana itself. Don’t wet your pants, it’s not nearly as dramatic of a departure as The Books, but somewhere in Soulo’s sequencers, there are not just guitars, but banjos, slide guitars, standup piano, and fiddles. On “Emotions, Can You Trust Them?,” it seems Soulo has a whole damn string band locked in behind their Rolands, and resurrected a lost indie pop choral group from the southern Appalachia to sing for them. Or…maybe those singers are just backdoor extras from a B-rated Hollywood musical, who also work at In-N-Out Burger. But it doesn’t matter. If you can dream it, you can do it. Some might call this stuff “indietronics.” Soulo, however, seems to be fully aware of this, and they fuck with you over it. After all, this is L.A. Don’t for a minute think that pink stucco is for real. “The Peter Plan,” for example, establishes a dream pop groove so convincing that I started chasing butterflies. Then a pitch shift leads into “The Peter Principle,” where abrasive and messy clacking made me feel embarrassed to have ever liked the fluffy stuff. Even the songs that stay with the indie vibe a little longer don’t stagnate there, because hey, this is electronic music. These dudes are like those friendly guys wearing spandex and treading water in your neighborhood pool. You know you want to dive in, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. You know you want to hang out with them on the warm asphalt and it seems they have candy. And I would say…go ahead, talk to strangers. Your momma ain’t lookin’ because she sniffed too much magic marker making that beer sign. —Jess Tierney |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 03 05 03
