Many class clowns have a sensitive side, and DJ Seinfeld is no exception. The tongue-in-cheek name, it turns out, is just a byproduct of how the Swedish electronic musician processes heartbreak. The origin story he tells for himself, from a couple years back, goes a little like this: A particularly nasty breakup led to an extended period shut up in his bedroom, watching season after season of old “Seinfeld” reruns. It’s the opposite of mysterious, basically.
Armand Jakobsson had already begun making music under another, more serious-seeming alias, Rimbaudian—a nod to Arthur Rimbaud, the absinthe-swilling French poet and enfant terrible of the 1870s—but it was his droller persona’s productions that first found traction on SoundCloud and YouTube. The two projects sounded pretty similar, actually: Both took 1990s deep house and suffused it in tape hiss and sly sample flips. But the rise of the jokier alias coincided with a handful of emerging producers with aliases like Ross From Friends and DJ Boring, author of the YouTube hit “Winona,” who accompanied similarly shopworn sounds with similarly frivolous references. A trend was born.
Between the TV-casualty names and the meme-like titles and graphic design, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether these guys are kidding or not. (The attitude is reminiscent of a classic bit from the 1996 “Homerpalooza” episode of “The Simpsons”: One slacker asks another, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” and the second one replies, “I don’t even know anymore.”) But in DJ Seinfeld’s case, behind the resolutely non-serious façade lies a strikingly wistful take on deep house. His debut LP pushes even further in this direction.
The hallmarks of his sound have not changed since his early uploads. In fact, a number songs here have been floating around YouTube for a year or more. His drums, whether breakbeats or samples from classic machines like the 808, are pushed into the red until they ooze distortion; his kick drums practically leave bloody marks where they land. At the same time, his programming yields nimble hi-hat patterns and lots of skipping syncopation. It’s a neat contrast: heavy, swollen sounds made magically weightless.
His synths and samples have a similarly vintage, battered air. The bassline of “Too Late for U and M1” is a winking throwback to the Korg M1 organ sound made famous by scads of early-’90s pop-dance hits like Robin S.’ “Show Me Love.” The TB-303’s undulating acid squiggles worm their way across the album. The whooshing textures of “How U Make Me Feel” flash back to the silvery sound of the French touch in all its filter-disco glory, and omnipresent R&B vocals and keyboards lend a glossy, richly hued patina beneath the sandpapery distortion. All of it swims in tape noise, as though his beats and loops had come from an old C90 cassette rescued from a thrifted Walkman.
None of these traits are particularly novel; musicians have been busting out “lo-fi” club tracks since the 1980s, when the machines in question were new on the market, and in recent years there’s been a retro-minded resurgence of the sound. What makes DJ Seinfeld’s music worthwhile is its genuinely affecting emotional tenor. He’s got a knack for sumptuous chord changes that can make even suspicious listeners feel some type of way: Just check the bittersweet keys of “U,” with their air of Bruce Hornsby heard through the world’s saddest, drunkest jukebox, or the winsome interplay between bassline, synths, and ribbony vocals on “I Saw Her Kiss Him in Front of Me and I Was Like WTF?” (Much like his alias, DJ Seinfeld’s titles often feel almost like brazenly self-aware performance art.)
At times, his knack for taking four bars of misty-eyed pop and throwing a suggestive veil over it recalls the Field’s emotive sleight-of-hand. And on “U Hold Me Without Touch,” the way he takes long strips of sampled vocals and inserts them into his own productions—as the singing bobs teasingly in and out of key—recalls another nostalgia-prone musician who likes to frontload his tunes with the surface noise of well-worn wax: Burial. He recalls Burial thematically, too. Just as Burial’s music evokes a lost rave utopia the UK producer was too young to have experienced firsthand, Jakobsson admits that his perspective on the ’90s amounts to “this kind of fake type of nostalgia. It was around me, but I wasn’t a part of it.”
Sincerity, rather than authenticity, is the watchword. Jakobsson readily acknowledges that he makes all of his music on the computer; the amp distortion and tape compression are just illusory effects dialed up in his software production suite. (Once upon a time, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” was the operative question; these days, it’s “Is it Memorex, or is it Ableton?”) Perhaps it’s because he leans upon these effects so heavily, but there’s something disconcerting about a style so dependent upon these kinds of simulacra; it’s unclear how much is the talent, and how much is the tools. Across the span of the album, the ubiquitous sonic degradation can get old; one wishes there were a little more variety in the record’s sound design.
Nevertheless, on the best tracks, like “U” and “U Hold Me Without Touch,” Jakobsson’s chosen effect suits the mood. There’s something cathartic about hearing such sentimental melodies turned up so loud, to the point of distortion. It gives the sense that there’s more emotion here than the tape—or the hard drive, anyway—can contain. Anyone who’s spent a lovelorn night blasting sad songs through their home stereo can identify with the desire to wallow in an excess of sentiment. In a world that’s been reduced to digital 1s and 0s, this feeling goes to 11.
