Local Albums: May 2010 – It’s not that electronic music isn’t that accessible. It’s accessible enough to show up in television ads, to be co-opted by Madonna, and to have its sound and production techniques borrowed by indie bands. The real problem is its relentless abstraction. It doesn’t have an attractive singer in front emoting into a microphone. This isn’t a problem in the world outside the United States, however, where House and Techno get housewives and insurance salesmen through the day. It’s a peculiar atavistic attachment to a po-faced strummer in the spotlight that keeps electronic music on the margins here.
Johnny On Point’s new CD Keefin It Real doesn’t do anything to bring dance music out of the shadows, but I doubt that’s his intent. He doesn’t bother to conform to any genre I know–they’re not House, Techno, Dubstep or what’s currently mis-labeled Electro. The only thing I can really call him is a stone-cold sound geek. Each of these brief tracks tries out a few musical ideas just long enough to get the point across, and then it’s done. The CD is organized as four four-part songs or suites, but I don’t really see how the parts relate musically to the whole.
Of the four, I’m most partial to the opening group, “Kluuck Pt 1-4,” as it’s the most moody, and contains the most varied textures, from seriously damaged guitar sounds to flanged tablas and vowel-filtered synths that sound like alien voices. “Jop-Remix” follows with punky Prodigy-like breakbeats before dipping briefly into a speedy techno interlude, followed by a segment with some vocals, followed by a distorto beats and bass bit. “912PM” has more guitar and another brief vocal segment.
You can tell a lot of energy and enthusiasm went into this CD, and I’d love to see what he does live. But over the course of the CD, I felt exhausted by their ADD “one damn thing after another” compositional techniques. Every track on this CD has many good ideas worth further exploration, but blink and you might miss a good one, and something you like less jumps in to replace it. But hey, you can download the whole album free from johnnyonpoint.com so it’s your own damn fault if you don’t check it out.
