- Gritty dance music to turn a basement show into a sweaty rave.
- Nick Klein's body of work is a riposte against boring dance music. The New York-via-Florida artist has released hours of scuzzy dance floor tracks and experimental electronics on cassette and vinyl on labels like L.I.E.S., Alter, Ascetic House and the long-running Los Angeles noise outlet Monorail Trespassing. As you might guess from those associations—as well as the label he cofounded, Primitive Languages—his palette skews grim. Klein's kick drums typically land with a sickening thud under scraping textures and whining high-end frequencies. But Klein can do more than just make an unholy racket. His new EP for BANK, Bathroom Wall, is contagiously funky.
Klein has cooked up punk dance music out of various setups. He didn't even own a computer early in his career, making tracks with whatever hardware he could cobble together. That eventually changed. "I ended up selling all my gear," he recently told the Miami New Times. "I would tour with just a laptop and a little synth." For Bathroom Wall, he's back to the machines, recording modular synthesizer straight-to-tape.
The new workflow yields compelling results. On "The Worst Band in The World" and "American Gut," he finds a nasty groove and lets it ride, but the limitless tweaking at-hand via the modular brings out subtleties absent in previous material. Elsewhere he touches on power electronics ("Rather Be Your Enemy") and in-the-red dance floor fare ("Pushing Your Luck".) But on the remarkable closer, "Poor Me Another," he marshals a handful of modular lines into a twisted, 106-BPM funk. It's dance music that could transform a basement show into a sweaty rave.
TracklistA1 The Worst Band In The World
A2 American Gut
A3 Rather Be Your Enemy
B1 Pushing Your Luck
B2 Poor Me Another