Dj Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues Raritan
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- Dj Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues
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Terre Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. Her 2009 album is getting a no-frills reissue because of its scarcity, and it's a treatise on house music that attempts to debunk the myth that house music was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia.
There's a contradiction at the core of Terre Thaemlitz's album as DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues, that is difficult to resolve. The album, a treatise on house music, goes lengths to debunk the myth that house music is/was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia—that house music is for everyone. She does this, however, while offering up a deep house sound so sumptuous and inviting that it's easy to lose Thaemlitz's socio-political motives: a Trojan horse whose trap-door gets stuck. Midtown 120 Blues is being reissued, in deluxe packaging but with no additional or altered music, after just five years, though the record's scarcity and limited reach justify that decision.
DJ Sprinkles is please to announce the re-issue of Midtown 120 Blues, self-released on Comatonse Recordings with custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself.
Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. (With 2012's Soulnessless, she claimed to have released the longest-ever album, anchored by a 29-hour piano meditation.) In the early '90s, before she was releasing experimental works, Thaemlitz worked as a DJ in the type of midtown clubs that defined Times Square before it was corporatized later in the decade. These formative spaces gave a home to the different strains of house music emanating from New Jersey and New York, a sound more contemplative than that which was coming out of Chicago: slower, jazzier, more reflective. It was music made and then defined by disadvantaged communities: by latinos and blacks and the LGBT community.
Thaemlitz has produced house music under a number of different aliases, but the deconstructivist instincts that dominate her experimental works aren't as dominant here. Midtown 120 Blues travels familiar territory, working through lived-in hi-hat patterns and familiar, calming electric piano chords. It helps the medicine go down easier, sure, but there's not that much medicine. You get the sense that this style is so dear to Thaemlitz that she's less willing to fuck with it, at least on a sonic level. Midtown 120 Blues, at nearly 80 minutes, is almost womb-like in its immersion, though Thaemlitz rejects the idea of the club as a healing, safe space. You don't 'lose yourself' in Midtown 120 Blues; it's a reflection on feeling lost.
- To casual listeners, Midtown 120 Blues may even come across as a celebration of all of the distinguishing hallmarks of the genre -- a notion that seems reasonable enough given the exquisitely crafted music on the disc.
- Music Reviews: Midtown 120 Blues by DJ Sprinkles released in 2008 via Mule Musiq. Genre: Deep House. Music Reviews: Midtown 120 Blues by DJ Sprinkles released in 2008 via Mule Musiq. Genre: Deep House. New Releases. User Reviews. Critic Lists.
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- Released under the moniker DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues reflects Thaemlitz’s experiences in almost every aspect of its construction. The album presents an unabashed view of the commercialization of the New York house scene, and the mix of ambience, deep house and melancholy throughout the album embodies this disenchantment.
Thaemlitz began documenting this scene in 1998, shortly after those clubs were elbowed out of downtown, with the Sloppy 42nds 12', her first work under the DJ Sprinkles alias. Midtown 120 Blues again took this baton a decade later, chronicling the turbulence and violation that existed in Thaemlitz's communities; it's an album that seethes, however prettily, as Thaemlitz laces her patient, supple grooves with short speeches.
Dj Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues
One poignant segment of 'Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)' finds her railing against Madonna, whose 'decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection' of the vogue scene not only misrepresented the scene's origins but left the queen 'who actually taught [Madonna] how to vogue' broke. Thaemlitz is a compelling speaker, and the hurt and anger in her voice is obvious; she's also deft enough to let the preachers, whom she often samples, do the preaching. Midtown 120 Blues feels far more personal than political.
Midtown 120 Blues is a remembrance, but it's also a travelogue, loosely documenting Thaemlitz's move from her childhood home in Missouri and her immersion in midtown's scene. 'Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)' functions largely like the KLF's Chill Out, organizing samples into an ambient collage that holds your attention even as it drifts for eight minutes. Moments like these feel like a salve for Jesse Jackson, who burns through his (sampled) vocal chords on 'Sisters, I Don't Know What This World is Coming To' and the nervous, pendulous piano of 'House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own'.
Like punk music, house music was an underground phenomenon that offered an outlet to people who really needed an outlet. And like punk music, its history is romanticized to the point that the ills and misdeeds that still permeated the community are largely ignored. In the mid-'90s Thaemlitz was fired from a prominent DJ gig because she refused to play Gloria Estefan, a frequent request from the johns who would frequent the club; the johns, after all, kept the club open.
Dj Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues Raritan Ny
Thaemlitz quit, exhibiting the kind of principled stubbornness that has guided her career. This persists: Midtown 120 Blues will not be issued on vinyl, a medium unable to provide an accurate stereo bass response. Still, there's a fondness to Midtown 120 Blues, not least in its closing shuffle, 'The Occaional Feel-Good'. There is love here, however guarded. At its best, Midtown 120 Blues simultaneously acts as a corrective to house's ahistorical narrative and reminds us just how potent and beautiful New York deep house can be.