Electronic dance music comes in many shapes and sizes now, many hues and shades, but sometimes a basic directive is all you need. The strobe flashes. The kick-drum booms. The music makes you wiggle.
Unlike a lot of by-numbers techno missives, Jon Carter’s ‘The Strobe’ doesn’t forget that it’s a dance track designed to make people dance. It might lurk in the dark recesses at first, illuminated by sporadic, split-second percussive flikkers; it might then kick like a mule; it might inhabit a sci-fi netherworld with machine elves and robodogs. But when it kicks back in, it undeniably has da funk. Some disco-funk. It’s techno-disco, and Sven-from-Berghain only knows that techno needs some sparkle more than ever at a time like this.
Jon Carter says: “‘The Strobe’ is completely influenced by the nights I spent in Body & Soul in New York, as well as NYC Downlow in Glastonbury, by the sweat pouring off the ceilings in basements in Derry, and those moments, when you’re completely disorientated on the dancefloor. I hope it moves your body and fucks with your mind.”
Dylan Earl Barnes, one half of UK house heroes Mutiny, remixes it in a jackin’ house stylee, complete with some nifty 808 snares and a tribal sensibility.
‘The Strobe’: blinkin’ marvellous.