thomas brinkmann

Description

From the album secondary inspection (2004) - ''The microscopic beats at the center of the minimalist dance music that's become prominent in the last decade has, not surprisingly, tended to focus on the rhythms prominent in Western club culture. Microhouse is the only genre name to gain any real traction in this area because house music is the primary template in which these artists choose to work. Which means there's still plenty of room for experimentation. Metro Area's full-length from last year, for example, was interesting in part because it took Latin disco rhythms that were used as accents in trad 4/4 house and pushed them to the foreground. It was exciting to hear stripped dance music with that much space that didn't have a steady kickdrum making time. Tijuana's Fernando Corona is known more these days for the music he's making under his experimental and high-art leaning Murcof alias, but as Terrestre, Corona puts the beats first and foremost. His stated goal for Terrestre is to take the sounds he hears on the street in Tijuana and reflect them with the kind of cracked and convex mirror only the computer can provide. His unfairly overlooked split album with Plankton Man, reissued last year, was filled with cut-up samples of wailing voices, horns, nylon-stringed guitars, and other signifiers of traditional mariachi bands. These easily identifiable fragments were affectionately inserted into catchy and fluid dance tracks, a combo that was inspired and original to say the least. For Secondary Inspection, Corona ditches the overt Mexican folk references and loses himself in rhythm. "Botas de Oro" immediately establishes that Secondary Inspection isn't going to be another exercise in dry minimalism. Its syncopation seems designed more for marching than dancing (in gold boots, presumably). It's not hard to imagine a drum corps doing a faithful cover of "Botas de Oro" and the exacting and well-rendered cymbal and snare patterns sound live, but then unexpected production touches-- like drum hits that echo, dub-style, into the distance-- remind us that's we're listening to computerized dance music. "Secondary Inspection Theme" is, as its title would indicate, an even more expansive encapsulation of Terrestre's sound. The album's best track, it's a terribly exciting musical melting pot as cowbells, tin cans, congas, a snare, wood blocks, and an eerie, screeching background drone arrange themselves around a rhythm that blends Mexican, Caribbean and African elements into a European dance context. Terrestre's "Theme" is the sort of music where you wonder if the 3/4 upbeat coming through the syncopation references dub reggae or polka that found its way over from a border-town Tejano band. But then, that's a question for musicologists; most important, "Secondary Inspection Theme" is eminently danceable and cuts across traditional boundaries. It's a floor-filler for drum circle hippies and urban clubbers alike. When Corona dials down the syncopation, he delves into darker atmospheres. "Ejido del Terror" is a weird blend built around a tech-house pulse, with added conga hits and a scraped fish giving an extra boost to the upstroke hi-hat, while the percussion in the fast, polyrhythmic "Alushe's Night Out" is heavily processed, with individual creaks and glitches sharing time with the hand-drum fills. Both of those tracks have eerie, otherworldly synth squelches that impart a feel of both Western desert melodrama and a post-apocalyptic cityscape. When Corona says in interviews that he sees Secondary Inspection as informed by a post-9/11 sense of paranoia, these are the tracks to which he's referring. Melody is not a primary consideration here; at the heart of Secondary Inspection is Corona's uncanny beat sense. There is elasticity to Corona's programming that recalls Thomas Brinkmann's work as Soul Center-- an unusual timing when sequenced elements trail a hair behind, paradoxically fostering a sense of relentless forward motion I c...