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Arp core >> Andrea Parker makes short shrift of the woman DJ thing
by CHRIS YURKIW
No one can figure out how this bubbly blonde makes such "dark" music, but they've been glad about it ever since the 27-year-old Kent native came out under her own name back in '96 with couple of singles for the Mo' Wax label (the orchestral "Rocking Chair" being the biggest splash). Since then she's remixed old faves like Depeche Mode and old heroes like Steve Reich, but the wait for her debut album's been a long one, extended by Mo' Wax's association with the A&M label, which was gobbled up in the massive Universal-PolyGram merger. The record's here now, though, attitudinally titled Kiss My Arp, an Arp being a classic analog synth.
"Analog synths were actually built to make your own sounds, and drum machines are there to program your own beats," says Parker, resisting a jab at sample-happy folks like Fatboy Slim. "So I didn't get into all the new digital keyboards with all the presets because I just find it too boring. That's the whole point to me: to make your own sound... That's what they used to do many years ago. Actually, I just like making life incredibly hard for myself!"
"Many years ago" means, for Parker, the glorious early '80s, when a beast called electro bred with early hip hop--both driven by the slap and
"doom" of the 808 drum machine. Parker's 808 certainly evokes that time, but she's too much the aspiring innovator to crank out a revivalist electric boogaloo. Yet for all the talk of Philip Glass (Parker popped into NYC for a "mad" gig with the man and his orchestra) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (she remixed him, too), Kiss My Arp can largely come off as a trip-pop album, albeit creepy, helped in large part by Parker's singing on about half the tracks--something she manages to pull off a little better than other producer-DJs, like, say, Goldie.
Parker can get her back up when the "woman DJ" thing is broached (she dislikes segregation of any kind), and faces up to the inevitable, on this night, in scrappy style:
"I think people like Anne Dudley [Art of Noise] and Liz Fraser [Cocteau Twins] and Laurie Anderson were some of the great females in music who didn't have to get their tits out to get where they were, and I really respect that... There've not been very many unattractive women who've gone to #1, yet there've been so many guys... I don't mean it disrespectful, but the Chemical Brothers look like they've just rolled out of bed when they're in photo shoots."
At Sona this Friday, November 5, 1am, $20 |
She calls herself an experimental musician but can't let go of a youthful desire to sing pop stylee. She makes brooding downbeat tracks and gives them funny titles like "Melodious Thunk." And she's currently carting her record bins all by her lonesome through the airports of North America, quite remarkable, says Andrea Parker, "for a girl who couldn't go into a pub by herself a few years ago."