Dump Truck EP

We Say...

Review by Philip Sherburne

Wagon Repair — founded in 2004 by Matthew Jonson, Todd Shillington (aka Konrad Black) and Jesse Fisk (aka Loose Change) — didn't waste any time in establishing its idiosyncratic identity. Its first record, the Missing Link's Screw Loose EP, released in the last week of December — hardly an auspicious time to bring out a vinyl single by an unknown artist — staked the label's claim to a neglected parcel of techno terrain, emphasizing rough-hewn machine rhythms and grumpy electronic tones that were neither obviously analog nor digital, sampled nor synthesized. From the beginning, Wagon Repair was not an either/or proposition, but an and/but one.

The clearest distillations of the label's aesthetic squish together three or four decades of dance music styles and music-making methods in a great, shuddering lump — disco, electro-funk, acid house, Detroit techno, minimal, they're all there in varying proportions.

By 2007, these ideas had been most fully realized in a string of EPs from Cobblestone Jazz. The first, "Dump Truck" and its flipside, "Peace Offering," is a fidgety fusion of jazz riffage and house glide; what's distinctive about them isn't the instrumentation or the musical vocabulary so much as the way they create their own worlds with their own proprietary logic. When you're dancing to these songs, or even just listening on headphones, they feel like the world's ur-dance music, the Platonic ideal for cutting rugs to. And then you put on one of the season's big club hits, underground or otherwise, and you realize just how strange Cobblestone Jazz's concept of dance music really is.