BLOG 05/02/2019
The Jan Diaries — Ten Records He Will Not Leave Home Without
The February 2019 entry of The Jan Diaries is an inventory of a record bag. Jan Kinčl opens with a routine that takes about ten minutes: shortly before leaving the house he goes through the bag, throws out whatever he is not in the mood for and adds whatever has been running through his head, new record or old. Ten of them he only ever removes reluctantly, and this column is that list.
What the piece covers
The first half leans on broken beat, house and jazz. Dego of 4hero, working as Dego & The 2000Black Family with Kaidi Tatham, opens with the title track of Find A Way (Neroli, 2013), the point at which a long-running duo finally sounds like nobody else. Derrick L. Carter is represented by Warrior from the double Poverty De Luxe (Icon Recordings, 2003), a track sitting halfway between Chicago house and early Detroit synths and strings. An unofficial Derrick May white label remix of De-Lite’s Wild Times, from around 1989, was bought unheard on May’s name alone: chaotic in arrangement, but with a 909 programmed by somebody who knew what he was doing. Tenderlonious’s Only Love, picked up on his last London trip, is deep house at a crawl with the keys almost hidden, and Kamasi Washington’s Re-Run Home comes off The Epic (Brainfeeder, 2015).
The second half turns toward techno. Heiko Laux’s Ornaments (Re-Inhaled) (Kanzleramt, 2002) folds saxophone, flute and double bass into a version with no kick drum at all; Kinčl first heard it when Ivan Komlinović played it on the main floor of OTV Dom. His own How Quentin Lost His Jazz, made with Regis Kattie for In Plain Sight (PDV, 2018), is there partly out of stubbornness: Regis dislikes how it came out, visiting DJs ignored it, one friend advised cutting it. Juan Atkins is there with Session Five from The Berlin Sessions (Tresor, 2005), recorded with Pacou and, in Kinčl’s view, badly under-discussed. DJ Bone’s Body Bags (Subject Detroit 009, 2005) arrived in a package from Detroit after the two met more than fifteen years ago, when Bone’s luggage went missing in transit and he played a set out of Kinčl’s records. The tenth is Digital Justice’s Theme From: It’s All Gone Pear Shaped — three musicians from Manchester, out on Robs Records in 1994 and reissued by Derrick May on Fragile Records two years later.
The part that stayed
What holds the list together is not genre but durability. Writing about the Atkins record, Kinčl makes the argument the whole column rests on: “Zaista dobra glazba je bezvremenska” — genuinely good music is timeless, and that album is a fine example of techno that has aged so well it keeps sounding better. It is a working list rather than a canon: the DJ Bone track wants five in the morning, a dark room and a proper sound system, while the Digital Justice reissue is emotional ambient techno whose strings are, as he puts it, so Detroit that May could not have stayed away.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Nine minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Deset ploča bez kojih ne izlazim iz kuće → redbull.com