Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ "Uptown Funk" just spent fourteen consecutive weeks atop the US Billboard charts. Two years ago, Daft Punk’s "Get Lucky" topped the charts in 30 countries and became one of the best-selling digital singles of all time, its parent album Random Access Memories taking home the Grammy for Record of the Year. Which is to say, there’s a mint to be had in mining the sound of early '80s R&B, boogie, and electro-funk right now, whether you take your cues from the Gap Band or Chic, Morris Day and the Time’s "Jungle Love" or Thriller. By such a metric, Baltimore-born, Sheffield-based producer and house-music veteran Maurice Fulton should be a multi-platinum artist and in-demand producer for big artists.
But in reality, Fulton remains a hard-to-pin figure in the deep house underground, avoiding big festival stages, dropping album-length releases without notice and eschewing publicity, media and interview requests. Two-plus decades into his music-making career, he does whatever he damned well pleases. The past three years have seen Fulton release an album under the guise of a Finnish jazz trio Syclops, a set of tough house productions to back a powerful Swahili singer Mim Suleiman, a sensuous remix of Rhye, a twisted EP with Japanese icon DJ Nori, and a third album from Fulton with his wife Mu (under her full name Mutsumi). Almost all of them were quick blips on the dance music landscape, some of them released only digitally via his BubbleTease Communications label.
Two months ago, one of Fulton’s many guises, Boof (a project which seems preoccupied with flowers of all varieties), appeared seemingly overnight with the release of The Hydrangeas Whisper. This one gets a physical release this week courtesy of Running Back, giving fans a slightly more tenable grasp on one of dance music’s most elusive figures. Like a bumblebee in a botanical garden, Boof finds Fulton alighting on many different sounds, never quite settling into any one.
In the past, Boof reveled in Fulton’s jazz side, and this album is no different. "Intro to It's Sunny S Outside" sounds like it borrowed the drum machine from George McRae’s "Rock Your Baby" and added a George Benson guitar figure, resulting in a swirling Balearic number. Then Fulton does his one-man "Get Lucky" robot band on "Birgit Boogie", a grid of go-go bells, hand drums and closed hi-hats. Nagging clean guitar upstrokes and champagne-bubble synths give the track an airiness that counterbalances the fat, wobbling bassline underneath. "Just on the Swings" imagines Nile Rodgers’ guitar lines atop a SAM Records’ groove before stomping on the overdrive and flange pedal.
But from there, Fulton becomes a bit restless. The title track recreates the sort of inert, hissing ambience of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, and the suspended synth chords of "Cat Soulcat Strut", sounds like an imagined sweet spot between the Gap Band’s 1984 hit "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" and Arthur Russell’s "Go Bang #5". The album veers into clanging metallic minimal techno accompanied by furious Cuban hand drums, to arcade blips dumped into a '90s house track, to a swing number on "Emi's M" not unlike a robot jazz ensemble tackling "Take Five". These jumps might derail another album, but as is always the case with Fulton’s productions, he has a singular talent for making the most idiosyncratic and random of sounds seem natural.
