Friday, December 20, 9 p.m.
Rozz-Tox, 2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
Rozz-Tox’s Northern Parallels series of techno/house/electro/club music events celebrates its three-year anniversary with a party headlined by Detroit-born, Chicago-based DJ-slash-producer Jason Patrick, with Northern Parallels residents Higgy and Mike Derer rounding out the bill.
Planted at the nexus of the Detroit-to-Chicago Midwestern techno circuit, Jason Patrick has been DJing for more than 15 years, and producing tracks under his own name for the majority of that time period. As a DJ, his selections orbit the Detroit techno sound, though they often streak into overtly lush, hypnotic zones that slightly contrast the city’s more industrial or mechanical impulses. To be honest, it’s impossible to pigeonhole Detroit-based electronic music. As the epicenter of virtually every form of techno and electro music, in all their varying sub-genres and contrasting styles, the city’s sound resists easy summarizing.
To say, as I just did a few sentences ago, that the city has “mechanical impulses” is true, but that’s just one aspect of a constantly shifting menu of sounds that contains the opposite of whatever style you might choose to highlight in any given moment. Patrick’s approach as a DJ mirrors the all-encompassing nature of Detroit music. He’s just as likely to whip out a moody slow-burner frosted with plaintive keyboard melodies as he is to descend into the territory of glitched out, stuttering rhythms that challenge what you can move to on the dance floor. His own productions follow a similarly diverse streak. Listening through snippets of his Timeflex EP on SoundCloud yields moments of kinetic electro animated by bouncing synth patches and acid-adjacent bass lines. One track here sounds like a malfunctioning box fan jittering through the mix in rhythmic loops while a somber topline melody winds across the keys. (Be assured that this is meant as a compliment.) Clearly, Patrick isn’t afraid to dip closer to ambient music with the tracks he creates. Though there always tends to be some semblance of a beat, and drum programming is almost constantly present, the atmospheres can smear and drift into more abstract realms.
A collaborative EP with Francesco de Luca titled Oscillate hit the market about a month ago, and this one feels a bit closer to straightforward dance-floor material, with steady kick drums and driving bass lines. The EP’s title track streaks off over a steady house groove, but generates tension with some of the more atonal synth elements that never quite constitute a legible melody as much as a network of electronic tones somewhere in the neighborhood of a ringing alarm or a malfunctioning machine (once again, in a good way). “Oblivion” comes bursting out with a bone-thick kick drum and never lets the energy dip as a chaotic arpeggiated synth-voice continually flits around the mix, planted against intensifying snare claps and swung hi-hats. EP highlight “Trumbull and Fort” toys with ideas of repetition and variation. Its central mid-range synth line continues to loop incessantly throughout the five-minute run time, but the elements around that repeating line are in constant flux, as drum patterns shift and complicate against dubby swells of bass and interesting, almost-mallet like tuned percussion voices.
Jason Patrick plays the Rock Island venue's Northern Parallels 039 alongside Mike Derer and Higgy starting at 9 p.m. on December 20, admission is $10, and more information is available by calling (309)200-0978 or visiting RozzTox.com.
