This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Position Normal's excellent debut album of found sound sample-tapestries, Stop Your Nonsense. You may not have celebrated, but I'm betting Damian Lazarus did. Lazarus has seen fit to shoehorn Position Normal tracks into his compilations on two occasions-- once in 2000, and again in 2006-- and the little-known act's influence is all over his own debut album, Smoke the Monster Out.
When not stanning for Position Normal, the UK DJ and producer has spent the past 10 years setting himself up as a kind of bellwether for middlebrow trends in house and techno: He co-ran early electroclash label City Rockers, before jumping off at the exact right moment to form his own platform Crosstown Rebels. Like many dance labels in the middle of the decade, the latter imprint smoothly charted the successive rises and falls of electro-house and then minimal as the clued-in European clubber's soundtrack of choice, and Lazarus' Rebel Futurism Session Two mix from 2005 is one of the absolute best snapshots from the center of these stylistic drifts.
How to reconcile a penchant for idiosyncratic, functionless sample collages with a career based on giving the crowd what it wants? At some point Lazarus must have realized that, if you drew a line between these two impulses, in the middle you'd find those "soundtracks to imaginary films" that dance producers and rockers both intermittently turn to when they feel like alienating their audiences. So what's remarkable about Smoke the Monster Out is how it pursues this strategy while also sounding inviting and gregarious at every turn. In this, and in the album's clean lines and uncluttered rhythms, Lazarus follows the example of Booka Shade, who have comprehensively staked out this minimal-as-soundtrack territory, for better (their first two full-lengths, their DJ-Kicks mix) or worse (their tepid last album).
But the inviting median position Lazarus occupies hinders as much as helps his cause, as this music seems never quite to satisfy completely any of the goals it sets itself. Only on the 45-second "King of Fools" does Lazarus let his sampladelic tendencies run free, with a garbled TV jingle for monster children that's straight Position Normal. Perhaps more surprisingly, there's not a single moment here that feels like it would really blow up a dancefloor, the producer's understanding of groove left underutilized. If this music were darker and more difficult, it might attract a cult following, but I suspect the very audience Lazarus most desperately wants to cultivate will find his halfway-house constructions too obvious in their reliance on melodious emotionalism. This is a shame, but I hope it also acts as a goad: Lazarus owes it to himself and to us find even better ways to make his divergent impulses run together somehow.
