Another Electronic Musician Five CATMD163

For most of n5MD's existence the "IDM" ( Intelligent Dance Music) genre descriptor has been used sparingly and only for those artists that utilize a more strict electronic pallet. We shy away from such a specific genre tag because, for the most part, the music created by our artists lacks the "D" of IDM...yes, dance. That trend changes with Another Electronic Musician's latest album "Five", Jase Rex's fifth release under the n5MD group of labels. Five puts the dance back into Intelligent Dance Music through the fusion of Techno, House, Electro, and Jazz with Rex's now signature sculpted sound. He has created something unique while leaving the genre's subtler signposts intact to lead the way. "Five" pushes and pulls you to where IDM used to before it went astray with its over the top cuts and glitch and puts the focus back in the mind and hips. [Learn more about Another Electronic Musician...]

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First of all: he isn’t. The fact that California pad-prodder Jase Rex has been signed to n5MD gives him a head start over his chums to begin with; the label has been quite the hub of alchemy in its nine year reign, after all. Set up at the turn of the millennium by a bassist in love with flash memory, No Fives! Mini Disc has forever befuddled the venture capitalists with its steadfast stance on an ethic—namely, to gather only the utmost poetic technicians for “emotional experiments in music.” That this thinking has been dismissed as blinkered is a grim sign of the times, or more specifically, the current politics of the electronic genre, where the one-stop solution is presently thus: now that mixing packages are all but available as freeware, you only need to skim-read the guidelines, Open File from URL and hey, presto: plausible experiment. And anyway, mourning the demise of Sony’s portable RH1 recorder by factoring it into your label name will appeal only to the collectors of HD-DVD receipts, won’t it? Yes, we rather think it would. Thank you for your pitch. We’ll see you on Myspace.

Well, while it’s no secret that the interest hikes of n5MD’s limited editions has long helped keep the programmers in LaserMice, the label’s emphasis has always been on pure mood rather than indulging the libidos of boffins. Their back catalogue reads less like a circus of fad sequencing and more as a library of artificial textures, somewhere where like-minded artists can bone up in silence whenever they’ve hit the wall. Another Electronic Musician’s Five, by extension, deserves an aisle all to itself, perhaps one day destined to become the dog-eared dazzler that’s on loan more often than the Where’s Wally annual. On its first drop you’ll flinch and no doubt dismiss it as noise, but slide the bastard under an electron microscope and you’ll see the sheer flair Jase Rex has encrypted into his twisting rails of energy. Obviously aglow from the applause he received for his 2005 Use debut, he’s again refused to slip into that blank noodling that furs the filters of the electronic thinktank and instead perfected a project free of plagiarism. If I’m gushing here then it’s most likely because I’m a little in love—not one of the ten cuts on Five failed to hook me, and that’s a rarity for a genre that usually demands the patience of saints to resonate.

In short, this is precisely the sort of record Boards Of Canada should be making if they were ready to embrace the future instead of suckling on that reddening teat of nostalgia. For once it makes you feel glad to be travelling forwards in time, hungry for the era of fast-descending satellites that Rex predicts with vigor. The future ain’t so dark after all: “Amidst” is the outer dermis of a club smash, clever as Cut Copy solving trigonometry, and “Congee” takes some of Orbital’s finest pads and coaxes them into escalating symphony. These are flammable ideas, coursing down the gullet like cozy cold fusion while showcasing the power of machinery. In many places it could almost be dubstep with filaments: huge, sleek plasmaballs that cruise past you as ominously as an iceberg, their gleam and efficiency sinking in only once you’ve safely charted your exit. The rush dips and rises, such as the wintry summit of opus “Seed,” where white noise crests like the Draupner wave over a lone digital chip. In others it’s more evenly weighted: “Conjecture Correction”‘s Ultraworld-era Orb, or the torrential minimalism of the title track that burns like arctic crosswinds. The cult of hunched pioneers who sell out basement bars with their wars between projectors and Laserpods might finally have found a figurehead, and Christ does he know how to work the crowd. He’s even timed the release to coincide with the switching of political eras, the crafty fuck.

The way Rex can morph almost languidly between such crisp digital landscapes is graceful to the point where it could potentially defile my atheism, making me feel as if all the bad electronica I’d endured till now had been part of a higher agenda. But really, all you need to know about Five is that it’s a defining essay on late-night city gloom; ideal for bringing warmth to all those badly-heated studio flats. Rex commands the pumping of his supercooled ventricles with a cycle of patience and Halon, and like Warp Films’ Rubber Johnny reshot for Pixar syndication, you come out of Five feeling as you’ve just seen fireworks burst in slow motion. The world’s now a series of letters: an I, a D, and an M, and the middle one for Dance is still glowing. xlr8r

Ignore Jase Rex’s self-belittling name, as the Southern California IDM artist’s fifth album is filled with grooves and atmospherics that easily surpass the efforts of the average bedroom electronic musician. He molds a typewriter’s clacks into a drifting soul groove on "Conjecture Correction," while the excellent "Low Company" interweaves birdsong into a drizzling space-jazz ballad. Elsewhere, the interlocked synth melodies and darting, UFO-like noises on the ambient "Congee" hark back to the dank, VapoRub-smeared chill-out rooms of raves past. With any luck, this music will play in the hospital waiting rooms and drunk tanks of the future. textura

There's a conspicuously more pronounced spring in Jase Rex's step on this fifth Another Electronic Musician go-round, and it's at least partially attributable to a pronounced concentration on the D in IDM. It's always refreshing to hear electronic music presented sans pretension—Rexe's self-deprecating moniker and the accompanying promo sheet photo of him relaxedly quaffing a brew flies in the face of the stereotypical “serious artist” image—though absence of pretension shouldn't be construed to mean lack of sophistication, because if there's one thing Rexe's music is it's polished. Five's ten tracks are eminently precision-tooled in construction yet remain accessible in their musicality, due in large part to their generally joyous and melodious spirit.

Certainly the opener “Amidst” conveys a refreshingly upbeat spirit in its seamless mix of sophisticated layering and light-footed propulsion, and the tune's jubilant vibe escalates even higher when soaring synth textures enters the picture four minutes in. The material's sleek and glossy character carries over into “Simple,” a driving exercise in infectious dub-house. Here too Rexe manages to achieve a remarkable balance between compositional complexity and musicality. “DmFm” is so sunlit and breezy, one could imagine it filling the sweltering poolside air at a Hawaiian resort (admittedly an exceptionally progressive resort). Par for the electronic course, Rexe's music sparkles and chimes with the best of them (check out the glorious swells of multi-layered gleam in “Seed”), and there's no shortage of whirr and click (e.g., “Drive”) either for those keeping score. The material's seeming emphasis on the dance side of the equation doesn't mean the album teems with frenetic club ravers, however, as Rexe largely opts for mid-tempo languor in his five-minute set-pieces. Consequently, he remains true to the established AEM style while also giving it a welcome new twist. de:bug

Jase Rex hatte schon immer einen Hang zum Dancefloor und auf seinem fünften Album bringt er den endlich in den Vordergrund. Dabei sind längst nicht alle Tracks auf dem Album straight, man hat aber immer das Gefühl, dass es zumindest straight sein könnte, träumt die trappsenden Füße auf der Tanzfläche einfach immer mit. Grandios. Ansonsten ist alles in feinste Elektronika-Kostüme verpackt, die weicher und mehr auf den Punkt nicht sein könnten. Ich warte unterdessen darauf, dass AEM und Lusine endlich zusammen ein Album machen. Weich wie Wolle.

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