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Home-cooked house
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by JACK OATMON Brennan Green, DJ, producer and owner of Chinatown Records, could be described as a purist. Even given the disparate fusions of styles—house to samba and surf rock—that his production has encompassed, he seems to be searching for something vital and classic in existing forms and techniques. He’s a musical conservative, in a sense, attempting to progress sounds without cheapening or diluting them. “I’ve been really studying samba this year, the rules for the rhythms,” says Green over the phone from Tokyo. “Doing this Chinatown Latin jazz tune was what put me onto it. The guy doing the percussion was correcting my rhythms. I was doing, say, a Brazilian clave line on top of this pure Latin jazz drum rhythm track and he was just telling me that you can’t do that sort of thing. You’re breaking a serious rule. I was fascinated by these rules and how, when every instrument is doing what it’s supposed to do, how all these things start to work together to get the particular sound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” A decade-long Canadian expat based in NYC and frequenting Japan for gigs, Green certainly isn’t ruling out experimentation, as evidenced by his discography, but rather eking out his creativity within classic styles. “I’m trying to follow those rules, still doing little fusions, but getting more serious about the styles of music, samba and Latin jazz and whatnot. I’ve learned that you have to know the rules before you can break them.” Green’s attitude extends to production and DJing as well as composition, particularly in regards to the explosion of software production. “You can feel the heat from sound,” exclaims Green. “That’s warmth to me. It’s soft. It’s inviting. The same as photography—you can see warm colours versus cold. Not necessarily temperature, but there’s warmth in so many different media—architecture, sound, colour, food. You can taste the love in someone’s cooking. You know, family values.” Green’s implied correlation between mom’s apple pie and analog production is at once silly and true. Whether by socialization, association, or perhaps even objective truth, many find digital production and laptop DJing sounds cheap much of the time. “More often than not have I got off of a plane and walked out of the arrivals gate and seen the look of relief on the promoter’s face and had them say, ‘I’m so happy to see you pulling that bag of records behind you right now.’” This common debate is the house world’s equivalent of rock’s raw vs. polished. The difference, of course, is that in both price and access, the roles are reversed. It is infinitely cheaper and easier to achieve the dreaded polish in electronic music. It only requires a cheap, second-hand laptop and a solid set of studio monitor headphones, while rawness comes from a huge studio packed with mountains of rare, outdated, largely discontinued technology and plenty of arcane technical knowledge. “We’re getting deeper into that rabbit hole and I just can’t dig it. It’s so obvious to me. I’m often telling my friends, at least, if you’re writing music inside a laptop, bring it over to my place and have it come out of the computer through a mixing board. Just something! Something electric.” WITH RUNAWAY, LOOSE JOINTS DJS, |
