Ever hear Dick Hyman's cover of James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose"? It came out in 1969, a year after Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos' Switched-On Bach sold half a million copies and turned the Moog into a must-have instrument for musicians everywhere. Listening to Hyman's reinterpretation of one of Brown's heaviest funk tracks is a weird experience: The first time or two, it almost-- almost-- sounds like an accidental precursor to the late-1990s Timbaland/Neptunes approach to digital hip-hop production, at least in the same way a '32 Ford could be considered a precursor to the Lamborghini Countach. Then the novelty wears off to the point where the rinky-dink bassline and the exasperated robot mosquito substituting for James Brown's vocals sound astonishingly cheap and frivolous. Once the 70s came, with their "Flash Light" and their "I Feel Love" and their "Trans-Europe Express", dance music had finally found out how to play to the synthesizer's strengths, and those old cover albums from the Moog's growing-pain years sounded like relics.
But apparently the shift away from the tinny flimsiness of early synthesizers wasn't a point of no return: someone up and made himself a Switched-On Dilla. That someone is Mark Pritchard, who split off his gig in retro-minded exotica-breaks peddlers Harmonic 33, dropped a "1" in the middle of that number in a nod to Detroit's area code, and put together a body of work that passes the modern Motor City hip-hop sound through an orange plastic filter that smells kind of like burning diodes. There's a slight cheapness hidden beneath all the bass he likes to smother his beats under: The rhythms usually feel like they click all right, sometimes an intriguing half-melodic drone will seep up through the murk, and you can almost grasp the weighty, body-moving funk that rolls along the basslines-- but the further the track goes on, the more you can feel it start to decay under the strain of a limited sonic palette.
That limitation comes from the self-consciously vintage-sounding Moog bleeps and blurps Pritchard toys with over the course of Harmonic 313's Dirtbox EP and the follow-up full-length, When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence. That style has a certain whimsical charm to it, but imagine if you had to put together a handful of instrumental hip-hop tracks relying mostly on the same equipment that Hot Butter used for "Popcorn". "Dirtbox", which kicks off both the EP and the album, is a subwoofer-eviscerating monster of a track, and the second track on the EP, "Arc Light", succeeds with its glowing bass and hypnotically locomotive drum breaks where lesser Jay Dee-alikes have failed. But the other two tracks on the EP sound either half-finished (stripped-down, trudging bleep breaks on "The Returners") or shaky-footed ("Wobbz", which sounds like a comedy dubstep military march through a swamp made of Nerf).
When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence maintains that approach, for better or for otherwise, and crashes into a bridge abutment when it tries to go beyond it. There's still a surplus of tracks that pit towering, seismic basslines against needling, crumbling old turn-of-the-70s synths-- waxing vaguely sinister and modestly head-nod-worthy in the stagger-step "Cyclotron", galumphing along to the accompaniment of a mid-seizure Speak & Spell on "Word Problems", and stomping brusquely towards interstellar dub oblivion on "Call to Arms". And even if some of that movement feels like jogging in place, better those than the woozy, somewhat nauseated-sounding Aphex Twin/Boards of Canada manqué moments like "Galag-A" and "Köln"-- not to mention the acid casualty "Flaash", which feels like getting stabbed and/or bludgeoned to death with a rusty 303.
But no amount of boulder-sized low-end can disguise the fact that, even when these tracks work, they usually feel like they're missing something major. And that something is a vocalist. The beat to "Battlestar"-- which consists of some sturdy neo-boom-bap drums and not a whole lot else-- might not be the most audacious on the album, but with top-notch Detroiters Phat Kat and Elzhi dropping lyrical gems over it, it's one of the most alive-sounding. "Falling Away", the other vocal showcase, features an ethereally raspy and robotic-sounding turn from Steve Spacek... and damn, this is a good production style, ain't it? The fact that Pritchard tried to let his Harmonic 313 beats stand alone is a shame, since their greatest drawbacks-- their repetitive entropy and their unsubtle bombast-- could be easily offset by a good, strong cast of MCs and singers. We're gonna run out of Dilla beats eventually, so the first mixtape guru to drop some unheard Pharoahe Monch or Erykah Badu a cappellas over "Cyclotron" instead of "Geek Down" for the hundredth time will really have something.
