Todd Terje is an oddity, he has been around for what seems like ages and has carved out a niche for himself as the king of midtempo dance music. His productions are few and far between, there was the massive 'Snooze for Love', 'Ragysh' and 'Eurodans' which was so good it caught the attention of Take That's Robbie Williams, who borrowed it and changed it just enough not to get sued on his single 'Candy'
Terje benefitted from being friends with the Norwegian producer Erot, who produced Annies first album before tragically passing away. Norway became a bit vogue in the early Noughties thanks to acts like Royksopp and Annie, and Terje has always quietly been in the background, growing more and more obsessed with disco but not releasing many of his own tunes...
To have roughly 33% of your productions plagerised by Robbie Williams is a bit of a bizarre achievement for anyone to write gushy blogs about... so what is it about Todd Terje that makes him such hot property at the moment? It's his remixes and re-edits of course. while his own material is thin on the ground, he is one of the most proliffic re-editors in the game, most DJ's will re-edit tracks to make them more dance floor friendly, it is a trend that has declined among DJ's in the past few years mainly because if there is a track that needs a re-edit, the chances are it has already been done by Todd Terje.
Paul Simon has been done...
Stevie Wonders Superstition...
The Bangles, Walk like an Egyptian... is there no place he wont go?
...I think that by the time you've remixed Demis Roussos, its safe to say that is the case.
The track that led me to write this was a track I'd heard on Ivan Smagghe's Walk in the Woods, for Tsugi, I rarely check tracklistings unless I have to and with this one song nesting towards the end of the mix, I simply had to. It was driving, synthy, freah and timeless. It turned out it was a Terje remix of the late 70s New Wave band The Units. Apparently 'High Pressure Days' was a reasonably big track in its time getting lost of airplay on the radio both in Britain and in the States upon its release in 1979, but I was but a twinkle in my papas nutsack at that point so I have had to backtrack to hear it... I'm so glad I did
One of the things that has died out with the end of vinyl as the main form of listening to music is playing records at 33rpm instead of 45 or vice versa. We all cackled as we turned our parents copies of Past Masters by the Beatles into Alvin and the chipmunks before deciding we wanted to have a crack at scratching for the first time like the rap DJ's do. Also, late at night when the radio got to play the weirder stuff and before the homeogenistion of radio, there were times when the DJ's had no idea what speed the faceless 7 inches theyd been sent in were supposed to be played at.
At its inception, vinyl was at odds with the machinery it was played on, this resulted in a record being played at a speed at odds with the one that it was recorded at. Certain recordings of Beethoven are known to us as being much faster than they were actually concieved by the German composer. People like Leadbelly and Robert Johnson tend to be pitched up 25% making the vocals seem nasally and whiney. This accidentally changed the sound of the early blues musicians that country singers like Hank Williams would go on to immitate later on. This mistake in the process of converting the sounds that came from an artist into a noise that would come out of a speaker had a profound effect on music which is still heard today when whiney Nashville men sing about their wives running off and taking their dogs.
Williams was influenced by the blues musicians that hounded the airwaves in his day. and it was always played about a quarter speed too fast.
And played at the correct speed...
...And this is Dolly Parton's Jolene slowed down, it works both ways.
Playing records at the wrong speed was not just something that would happen by accident; DJ's in nightclubs, before the advent of the CDJ could, completely change the energy of a dancefloor just by ramping up or slowing down a well known track. They could use more nondescript 'DJ tools' to veer from house to drum and bass and back. A recent DFA mix CD opened with a slowed down version of Robert Hood's techno chinstroker classic, 'Minus'
And the second is the track played at original 45rpm.
Now either way, it isn't all that clear what the correct tempo should be and if you were to ask Robert Hood, he'd probably shrug his shoulders and tell you to play it however you feel you enjoy playing it most. it adds a level of freedom that gives you a say in the production of the track, in a way.
I have mentioned before Marc Groul's ignorance of playing a record at the correct speed, leading to the entire creation of Belgian New Beat, a dark offshoot of Acid House and Industrial.
The difference is staggering, both are very playable both belong to two very different scenes or at the very least, rooms in a club. New Beat ended up being slower and more sinister, the offshoot of Disco from the early 80s Hi-Energy was also created by cranking up the speed instead of down,
It would be wrong of me to talk about the perks of playing records at incorrect pitches without mentioning John Peel, who's lackluster approach to music broadcasting led us to hear happy hardcore played at house speed, wonky african music pacing along at snails pace and chipmunk vocals regularly on the most popular music station in the UK at the time. Peel was the champion not only of weird and wacky music but also playing records at the wrong speed.
"I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that sounded better when I played it the other night, at the wrong speed." John Peel, after playing Josh Wink's 'Higher State of Consciousness' for the second time.
The entire rave scene from 1989 onwards mainly involved a sample of a sped up soul record, with an 808 to beef up the drum part, part of a break and a cut of a vocal. An entire scene which men in their 40s reminisce over, for the most part not realizing that they were more often than not just dancing to a sped up version of the casualty theme tune. The early Prodigy singles are littered with pitched up vocals and tinny breakbeats, partly because that was the only technology available to them at the time, but that is what makes it so good, it is evidence of thrift, of making the best of what you have. It was grass roots and it was revolutionary and it was so, so simple.
The key part of this was the option to play the our music at various speeds, something so common through the age of vinyl, that it was completely taken for granted and it was something that was destroyed without a second thought when CD's came to prominance. The consumer need for conveniance took away some of the listeners ability to be creative with the track. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite. As much as I loved vinyl, I was in awe of the superior quality of CD's, I marvelled at the invention of the I-pod and I love these computer programmes like Ableton and Traktor, which have revolutionised DJing in recent years. I never mourned the loss of the Betamax or the Minidisc. But not everyone is a DJ, we don't all have the means or ability to manipulate a track, whether for comedy value, like turning Kylie Minogue into Rick Astley with a flip from 45 to 33rpm, or turning a Hip-Hop break like Prodigy's 'Poison' into a weird psychedelic breakbeat garage track. Which is a massive shame. It is one instance where we've really lost something.
