Artists who experiment with dance music usually either free the beat from the standard 4/4, warping it into rhythmically interesting shapes that are nearly impossible to dance to, or they leave the beat alone to mess with all the other stuff. Harlem-based producer/drummer Gobby, who’s created beats for the likes of Mykki Blanco and Le1f, is the latter type. From the four-to-the-floor kick drum that opens his debut full-length, Fashion Lady, to the stroboscopically pulsing funk samples that close the album, there’s not much here that a competent DJ would have much trouble blending into a set of uptempo dance music. The album's subtitle is “Techno Ass Album,” so most of the songs hew to the steady 4/4 structure that powers techno and house music.
Whether or not a DJ would be willing to throw these tracks into a mix-- well, that depends on how adventurous they are. Fashion Lady draws from a wide range of fringey electronic noise freaks, a dense, knotty palette that you'd find in Aphex Twin and Squarepusher's more cerebral material. Elsewhere, there's an absolute mayhem of smeary, lo-fi sounds that sound like they could have been recorded at an aggro DIY art loft show.
Fashion Lady succeeds where the straight techno and noisy sides find an equilibrium. “Cops” matches a steady, uncluttered beat with one synthesizer playing a short sketch of a bass riff and another holding a higher tone, evolving through changes in modulation rather than pitch. On paper that might seem boringly repetitive, but it possesses the same hypnotic power of a classic acid house track, a reminder of, exactly, how sonically strange a lot of classic dance music really was.
Fashion Lady’s center of gravity is located within those moments, which also prove to be the jumping-off point for Gobby's wilder experiments. “Lect Hom” is one of the record's more rhythmically tweaked songs, with a skittering beat that flickers between drum n' bass, Miami electro, and Chicago footwork, topped with a woozy, wobbly bass line and horror movie organ stabs. “VB News” is a murky, overdriven blend of polyrhythmic drumming and dubby synth fantasia. If Blade Runner had a scene involving a cyber-Third-World ayahuasca ceremony, it would be the perfect soundtrack.
Fashion Lady is a fairly bipolar record, and Gobby seems like a fairly bipolar artist-- at least, in creative terms. He constantly tugs back and forth between a dance producer’s desire to bring a crowd together and the noise crowd's opposing infatuation with audience alienation. But the album's most interesting facet is that it never fully succumbs to either impulse. Whether Fashion Lady is a dance record with a noise-minded heart or the other way around, Gobby's propensity to create tension through these competing motivations is compelling, its central ambiguity providing plenty of fascination.
