Put The Lime In Da Coconut

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 third was released in June 2007 and its two tracks come the closest to approximating Cobblestone Jazz's crackerjack live set at MUTEK that same month. Both cuts fit long, glimmering strands — silvery arpeggios, unruly funk bass, Venus flytrap hi-hats — into an ungainly backstrap loom, with which they warp and woof until you don't know which way is up.

Techno doesn't come much more hypnotic than this, and when you listen carefully, you can tell that's because this stuff is being improvised; it's a real-time morphology without jumps or breaks. Digitally edited music is sometimes unfairly derided as being "dry," but one thing is true: you don't find electronic music much more fluid anywhere.