What’s In a Name?

In 1997, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani complained that many electronic musicians "don't even crave renown as artists — they pride themselves on their anonymity." She seemed baffled and threatened by acts bearing names like Altern 8 and Model 500, as though thrown off by the hexadecimal coding. (This, of course, was right as Blink-182 was making the format safe for mainstream rock fans.) Kakutani's charges against electronic music — of "obliterating all feeling and thought" and a darkly "antihumanist agenda" — were laughable at best, reactionary at worst; the piece amounted to a conservative, cursory reading of techno's cultural forms. But Kakutani did get one basic point right: electronic music's circuitry is buzzing with aliases, pseudonyms, and aka's.

Almost a decade after Kakutani's jeremiad, we now know that electronic music's top-tier talent has little truck with anonymity per se. Witness the rebirth of Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman and F.U.S.E.) from bald nobody to trademarked haircut — who bobbed his blonde bangs over the turntables at the opening of the 2006 Winter Olympics, no less. While the biggest-name DJs' market shares have sunk slightly in the wane of "superclubs," they're still hitting two continents in the course of a weekend's work and socking away five-digit fees that are easily two digits higher than what your average, relatively anonymous DJ — in terms of press coverage, if not willful obscurantism — pulls in for a gig. Richard Melville Hall, aka Moby (whose moniker isn't that far-fetched, given that his middle name is the surname of his great-great uncle, the author of Moby Dick), may have trafficked under 10 different personae in his long and winding career, but your average iced-tea maker doesn't earn as much press as his Teany brand has without a world-famous backer with an instantly recognizable face. (Perhaps Hawtin ditched the bald pate and black specs in order to put an end to being mistaken for Moby.)

Sure, back in the early-to-mid '90s what came to be both championed and derided as "faceless techno bollocks" had a lot to do with a varied array of anti-establishment ideas, ranging from sublimating the individual artist within a collective identity to adopting a nom du plume for purposes of copyright infringement (you can sample without paying for clearance if nobody knows who's behind the theft), or simple tax evasion. Acts like Detroit Afro-futurists Drexciya once hid behind aliases as a way of highlighting a politicized, post-racial aesthetics, just as Detroit's Underground Resistance adopted masked personas, á la Subcomandate Marcos, in a quasi-revolutionary gesture. (No matter that it was only quasi-revolutionary; UR's anonymity, over the years, has become one of the strongest elements of its brand identity — as has the Subcomandante's, for that matter.)

Today, if an artist publicly refuses to reveal his or her identity, it's more likely in the effort to jump-start a stalled career. Take a look at that canine selector, Rex the Dog. Shudder to think what Kakutani would make of Rex, an English musician who keeps his real identity a fiercely guarded secret and whose only identifying detail, should you cross his path on the dancefloor, is an LED-lit pin that reads "Dog is a DJ." Today he records for Cologne, Germany's hip, independent label Kompakt; back in the early '90s, he was known for a slew of chart-topping dance hits produced under the name JX (his real name is Jake Williams), before the market winds shifted and he disappeared from the limelight. The secrecy of the Rex the Dog project not only worked as a marketing tactic, at least until bloggers and finally the website Discogs revealed Rex's true identity; it also allowed Williams to reinvent himself for a new public that would likely have been suspicious of his mainstream rave roots.

There's still no shortage of multiply-aliased artists in electronic music, but these days it has more to do with the genre's established forms than any hard ideological position. Just as rock bands have their definitive articles and jam bands infuse their monikers with a culinary twist (the String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon and of course Phish), the rave generation's offspring juggle multiple personas as a way with playing with the genre's conventions — as well as gaming the system. Most of the productions under the Wighnomy Brothers alias are actually the work of only one "brother," Robag Wruhme, but foregrounding the Wighnomy tag has undoubtedly helped the duo's DJ career as a tag-teaming package deal. (In dance music, outside licensing and the occasional fluke hits, DJing and live performance are the only opportunities to make an actual living off one's craft.)

The commonest reason for electronic music's shape-shifting identities is to allow a measure of stylistic freedom and risk by adopting a new name for every change of sound. I can't say definitively whether electronic music's production methods make it easier for button-pushers to shift between styles than for trained instrumentalists or songwriters to stretch beyond their comfort zones, but I suspect there's something to it. Bands and singer/songwriters often search for their compositional sweet spot, the place where chops, intuition and group interplay converge; electronic musicians can shift styles as simply as loading a new bank of samples and pushing the BPM into a zone where the new tempo dictates a change of genre. Adopting a new alias not only helps an artist demarcate his or her output into distinct stylistic categories; it also protects against fickle fans who may be dismayed by a new direction. When drum 'n' bass kingpin Photek left breakbeats behind in favor of deep house, he might have avoided angering his die-hard junglist fan base if he had simply adopted a new alias.

Many artists involved with Ann Arbor's Ghostly International and Spectral Sound labels use this approach. Matthew Dear records left-field, pop-infused electronica under his own name; he reserves the Audion tag for heavier, more club-oriented fare. (Dear also records straightforward minimal techno as False for the Minus label, and once contributed a slightly jiggier workout for Perlon as Jabberjaw.) Tadd Mullinix, meanwhile, began producing experimental IDM under his real name, then gained much more acclaim as Dabrye, an experimental hip-hop project. Chicago-oriented acid house wouldn't have fit well with Dabrye's aesthetic, and so he adopted James T. Cotton for that, while relying on SK-1 for back-to-basics ragga-jungle. (Even labels play the game: Spectral is merely the more dancefloor-oriented imprint of Ghostly, which increasingly focuses on experimental electronics and leftfield pop.)

Of course, sometimes such promiscuity becomes a shell game that the artist can't win. Sasu Ripatti first became known for his Vladislav Delay project, which picked up where Berlin's dub minimalists in the Basic Channel/ Chain Reaction school had left off; he became so closely identified with the moniker that even his girlfriend routinely referred to him simply as "Delay." When Ripatti re-debuted as Luomo, the move made sense: Ripatti's deep, vocal house tracks shared little with a Vladislav Delay production, aside from formidable banks of, um, delay. Uusitalo provided yet another (marginal) sonic departure, when Ripatti wanted to explore a more streamlined, meandering sound with 2000's Vapaa Muurari Live. But when Uusitalo returned this year with Tulenkantaja, a curious thing happened: all of Ripatti's many identities seemed to have swirled back into one, combining the formerly distinctive elements of Uusitalo, Delay and Luomo into a rich, varied album that — ironically? appropriately? — is the best thing Ripatti has released in years, by any name. There's nothing anonymous about it.