In just a few years, Amsterdam’s Dekmantel label has grown from throwing dance parties for 200 of their closest friends into a powerhouse label and a stellar annual festival. They recently leapt continents to throw their first festival in São Paulo and last year, they spun off another mini-festival, Dekmantel Selectors, staged on a coastal resort in Croatia. As the name suggests, the latter festival emphasizes DJs with an ear bent towards the obscure and unheard. For those who didn’t snap up tickets, as accompaniment, the label released compilations of such curious tunes from their favorite DJs. The first release in the series featured Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Danilo Plessow balancing transporter-beam house, loft disco rarities, and raucous gospel-funk.
For the second entry in the series, Amsterdam’s Young Marco takes a decidedly different path. Marco’s mix hunts for tracks from outcasts and outliers, suggesting a bizarro world of not-dance dance music. Across 10 tracks, he finds Buchla experiments and a track made entirely from the old Nintendo game Mario Paint, cringeworthy Eighties Dutch rap, and a dewy jazz-funk delicacy from the lone legendary name on the comp, Larry Heard.
Along the way, Marco pays plenty of cheeky tributes to his Dutch roots. In the wake of Sugarhill Gang’s chart success in the Netherlands, Jolyon Grevelt earned the humble title of being the first Dutch rapper, making a record as Danny Boy at the age of 13 in 1980. So leave it to Marco to find an even weirder B-side from the lad with which to open Selectors 002. Its rubber band-lite funk gets intercut every few minutes by cat meows, wikki-wikki scratches, vocoder chants, and what Jared Leto’s Joker sneezing might sound like run through an Echoplex. Yet somehow, it all adds up into something that just escapes being an unlistenable oddity.
While EBM became a worldwide force thanks to the likes of Front 242 and Ministry, Sterk finds late ’80’s Dutch examples that are peculiar mutations of that relentless electronic sound. Gerrit Hoekema’s “Televisiewereld” sounds as whimsical as Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib,” with its circuitry curling up at the edges of the track. The Force Dimension’s 1989 track “200 FA” trades the genre’s distorted drum programming for what could be ethnographic tribal chants.
To Marco’s ear, there’s a connection to be made between the extremely rare and expensive Buchla Music Easel and a video game console. He digs up a 1981 track from Philly group Ghostwriters (an early duo featuring analog synth legend Charles Cohen) that deploys the Buchla on the joyous bubbling of “Swizzle” and then, a few tracks later, slots in Ray Tracing’s “Mariopaint,” an anthemic bit of digital tiddlywinks from the mid-‘90s. That entry comes from Irdial Disc’s peculiar ’95 comp that had as its only piece of gear the Nintendo Super Famicom, running the Mario Paint music sequencer as its only bit of software. Neither selection would scream “peak hour,” but in Marco’s hands, his gifts as a “selector” become clear. Like a packet of Sea-Monkeys, Marco knows just when to sprinkle in seemingly un-danceable tracks so as to make them wiggle to life in just the right setting.
