DeepChord :: Vantage Isle Sessions (Echospace [detroit])

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(07.27.08) Effects, instruments, source sounds; Which are the most vital elements to a musical project? One answer might be that these are merely constructs applied in a previous era of music, setting up artificial boundaries by now irretrievably blurred. But if we accept the divison as a convenient way of referring to aspects of sound design, one would be tempted to answer, in the case with the Deepchord/Echospace project – and, arguably, with dub-techno in general – that it’s effects that hold sway. It’s true that DC has always cultivated a strong hardware sound, distinguishing it from the digital plug-in ethos of mainstream mnml production. But, though much is made of vintage analogue keyboards, it’s the godlike Roland Space Echo (SE) and attending angel, Korg Tape Delay (TD), that are central to DeepChord’s archaeology. More than mere tools, without their excavations all this would be but a prosaic thumpy pedestrain precinct thinly inhabited by a few mealy-mouthed synth phrases, the odd dry-hack studio wheeze and fuzzy outdoors fragment. Fortunately, with the agency of mighty SE and trusty sidekick TD, a teeming viscous soundfield is drawn out from scant sources, conjuring up vast expanses of ice-floe dancefloor, gushing geysers of hiss’n’quake, and reverberant tracts of oceanism.

DeepChord, for the neophyte, is Rod Modell (assisted by Mike von Schommer), synthesizing an amalgam of Detroit (Modell’s techno base) and Berlin, back-channelling (basically) Detroit and, from beyond, Kingston, Jamaica. Echospace is… well, largely more of the same, only with Soultek’s Steve Hitchell as Modell’s co-pilot. There’s been something of a revival lately, with a new generation of dub-techie types (of which Quantec would perhaps be the highest profile, though not necessarily the most interesting, for which look out for Atheus) creeping into the shadows at the edges of the spotlight, if not yet fully illuminated. DC’s individual contribution to the whole Detroit-Berlin dub-techno shuttle might be identified as a churning elemental substratum – like a “nature” counterpart to Chain Reaction’s “industry” undertones, the fuzzy and gruzzy efflatus of SE-TD lending special resonance to its sparse recursive key-stabs (invariably chillout-zone chords from deep house territory) and low-slung locomotion.

Vantage Isle Sessions is in fact thirteen different takes of the one track, various aliases (Deepchord, Echospace, Spacecho, cv313) being adopted to tweak it into differently vibrant forms. The opener, “DC Mix I,” is in mellowest mode, centred around insistent mid-tempo 4/4 kicks and the merest hint of chord-depth, soft-imploding snareshots, the ghost in Maurizio’s M-achine sprinkling it with echo-shards. The blasted and beatless (like “Spacecho Dub”) paves the way for soft-techno workouts (try “Echospace Reshape”), stopping off to dip into warm vapor-baths (visit “Echospace Spatial Dub”). The album centrepiece sees a windswept ambient-dub-techno peak reached in “Spacecho Dub II – Extended Mix,” maintained and even furthered in sonorous intensity by special guest, Convextion. His “Convextion Remix” is a twisted and compressed version stretched out into a throbbing jerking burbling beast, over which a massive sky-gaze gauze of post-Detroit chords is stratospherically trailed. It’s arguably the most radical transformation of the ‘original,’ against which the likes of DC mixes II and III seem almost plodding, somehow short of alterations of state, all ho-hum drums and just-so soft-pedalled chord drops – the minimal modern dance. Better is “Echospace Spatial Dub,” all veils and streamers over a spectral sub-metronome. Different again is the “CV313 mix I,” possessed of a more explicitly stated tech-house jack-dynamic, and the final “CV313 Reduction II,” three minutes of air rolled back and forth like waves on a still day over a fragment of ambient keyboard chord, the whole presided over by the ever-present SE-TD team.

Ultimately, though, Vantage Isle Sessions might be summed up as a restatement of the proposal already put forward on Echospace’s The Coldest Season – that of DeepChord/Echospace as carriers of the dub-techno torch for those that missed the original Detroit-Berlin bus. And, looking at their output in 2007/8, a sense of same-furrow ploughing is setting in, and one wonders how much more mileage there is in remakes and remodels, however well-crafted, of a design classic. Time for new prototypes?

Vantage Isle Sessions is out now on Echospace [detroit]. [Purchase]

Echospace [detroit]

DeepChord