Saturday, January 18, 8 p.m.
Rozz-Tox, 2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
Continuing a three-night program of events under the umbrella of the Midwest Electronic Creator’s Conference, Rozz-Tox hosts a bill of deep-space techno/house and left-field beat exploration with a stellar January 18 lineup that features Golden Donna, Shen, Idpyramid, and K1NG SUPR3M3.
While Chicago and Detroit get the spotlight most frequently as the birthplaces and biggest American exporters of techno, house, and their various offshoots, other spots in the Midwest contain their own freak dance scenes and spearhead artists who have earned a wider audience on the weight of their original production. The Midwest Electronic Creator’s Conference at Rozz-Tox gives some love to producers from spots that might not rank at the forefront of dance music on the U.S. hierarchy, such as Missouri, Wisconsin, and good ol' Iowa. The evening of live performances they’ve curated for the series highlights artists that use techno, house, and hip-hop traditions as a jumping point for bodies of work infused with the spirit of hardware improvisation, ambient- or noise-adjacent sonics, and complex webs of percussion that extend over intricate narrative arcs far beyond the template of one kick drum sounding out forever through the PA speakers.
Madison-bred, Portland-born producer Joel Shanahan records under the alias Golden Donna, in addition to his work under the names Ausculation and Purpura. Though predominantly a dance-floor-focused artist, Shanahan cut his teeth in the noise underground with releases on such experimental labels as Not Not Fun and 100% Silk – labels that have rosters full of party starters, but that always steer closer to the weird end of the spectrum than any conventional approach. Shanahan’s catalog is wonderfully hard to pin down, as any given release will typically flit between funky hardware grooves, kinetic webs of percussion in “IDM”-adjacent styles, and more languid ambient techno draped in layers of synth drone. Regardless of the style he’s working in, precise drum programming sits at the center of his practice. Constantly mutating percussion patterns animate his tracks, rising from kick vs. snare frameworks into fast-shifting lattices of interlaced toms and hi-hats, which occasionally approach the overload of drum & bass or jungle. The harmonic elements he chooses to highlight often develop as four- to 16-bar phrases that recur along long loops, allowing him to temper the tones and individual parameters of each synth in real time as his drum patterns grow more dense and complicated. Check out his excellent tape Date Night from 2018 for a good crash course in the Golden Donna sound. It contains everything from squelching acid synths planted over steady beats, dreamy pads and major key harmonies, or, on the highlight “Swan Song,” extended passages of lush orchestral string arrangement that serve as a beautiful backdrop to some high quality cyborg electro-funk.
St. Louis-based producer and DJ Shen, who also produces under the moniker Shenlong, makes music that sits somewhere in the space between acid house, minimal techno, and electronic experimentation. His strong EP Cognitive Dissonance (as Shenlong) landed on longstanding St. Louis techno label Anode Records in mid-2018, and showcased his honed sense of narrative-track sculpting and hypnogogic synth work. The track “Mecha John Henry” never sits still in terms of what elements share space in the mix. Rising from a punchy bedrock of kick drum and almost martial snare hits, the track highlights a two-note atonal synth motif that sounds like a pitched-down mallet or pipe tone. That one tone smears and stretches against the mix until another brighter mallet tone joins it to create a kind of call-and-response rhythm, all while Shenlong phases drum patterns in and out of the mix. “Star Art” streaks off into space on the weight of its distorted kick drum and other percussion elements slathered in delay and reverb, which echo along behind a cracking snare tone that sounds more like a blown circuit than a drum. “The Seed” rounds off the EP with the most aggressive sonics, as it wails with heavily compressed kicks and one granular synth voice that sounds like a car revving its engine or a digital lion roaring. Maintaining the intensity for over seven minutes is no small feat, but Shen keeps the narrative moving with a battery of synth details and intensifying percussion lines.
Idpyramid is the project of the Quad Cities’ own Dennis Hockaday. His tape Dawn Rider II, released in 2016, takes a more drifty, lo-fi approach to dance music in its two 10-plus-minute tracks that skirt close to minimal kraut rock or Kraftwerkian proto-electro. The tape’s firs track airs out washes of phased synth drone as a kick/snare configuration that sounds like it was played on a drum kit rattles off its half-danceable, half-zoned out beat. The rest of the tape plays out as a series of three-ish-minute technoid synth sketches at varying levels of straightforward dance-floor accessibility and deep space exploration. When Idpyramid slows down a bit and lets the electronic-drum patterns steer his tracks, the result is a kind of woozy, lounge-y ambient techno, something that wouldn’t sound out of place in a skyscraper rooftop club overlooking the clouds. The strongest moments on the tape come when Hockaday lets the synth arpeggios themselves serve as the percussion, shedding the beats in favor of endless helixes of bright melody that stretch from the low end to the upper registers of the spectrum, not unlike Tangerine Dream or his descendants like Oneohtrix Point Never.
Though Davenport-based producer K1NG SUPR3M3 falls far closer to hip-hop and trap beatmaking than his comrades on this bill, his spacey, ornate beats fit right into the spirit of the night. Uniformly high production value defines his work, as drums punch through his mixes along with throbbing 808 bass bursts and flourishes of harmony from pianos, warbling synth voices, and synthetic horns and brass lines. His SoundCloud offers a wide menu of killer production to sink into, from the soul sample-flipping trap workout “A Love Supr3m3/Ultraviolet” (no relation to Coltrane’s album, from what I can tell), to the tightly chopped orchestral loops of “All My Love./Symmetry,” which build a beat on the hard attack of stitched together string phrases. When he strays a little further from the soul idiom, and gets into dreamier beats dusted with electric pianos and ambient synth drifts, K1NG SUPR3M3 does justice to his genre tag “astrohop.” His best moments hit in the form of heavily effected drones that he allows to swirl at their own pace behind the percussion, resulting in a spread that blurs the line between sampled elements and software synthesis.
Golden Donna, DJ Shen, Idpyramid, and K1NG SUPR3M3 take the stage at the Midwest Electronic Creator’s Conference on January 18, doors for the concert event open at 8 p.m., and admission is $5. For more information, call (309)200-0978 or visit RozzTox.com.
