"What do you think about at night?" the anonymous narrator of John Tejada's electro-house anthem "Sweat (on the Walls)" asked dancefloors eight or so years ago. She already seemed to know the answer: House, with its sensuous rhythmic patterns and lustrous textures, is commonly described as a music of feel, of thoughtless submission, but even in the moment of seduction the dancer can watch him or herself getting lost in the music, observe, and perhaps feels a bit uneasy at their easy sacrifice of a bit of their humanity in the name of communal hedonism. Perhaps this sense of double-awareness is what the music itself thinks about at night: you can hear it in A Tale of Us' remix of Fuckpony's "Bongo Porn", the swirling delirium and compulsive jerking of the original ushered through unexpected minor-key passages of sadness, regret, even existential crisis, as if the groove is forever pivoting on that point where pornography might turn, almost imperceptibly, into a scene from Steve McQueen's Shame.
The "Bongo Porn" remix lays bare most brutally the vibe which Canadian house duo Art Department stalk on this DJ mix, their first for their record label No. 19 Music's flagship series, and an unashamed extension of the sounds and emotions they explored on their 2011 album The Drawing Board. If, for the most part, Social Experiment 003 scales slightly lesser heights than the peaks reached on their debut (the epic "Vampire Nightclub", the by turns creepy and bittersweet "ICU"), it also avoids that record's tendency towards heavy-handed overstatement, preferring a "show, don't tell" aesthetic of minor key melodies and densely layered rhythmic patterns (rather than dolorous Ian Curtis vocals) to get across the duo's persistent themes of desire, obsession, self-disgust, and fear of abandonment.
The resulting sound feels neither modern nor particularly retro, although it's certainly arguable that the music's buffed up, high-gloss late night classicism resembles just a bit too strongly the kind of music that, say, Poker Flat label boss Steve Bug was playing nine years ago. Criticisms along these lines are true enough as far as they go, and Art Department will never win any awards for bravely conquering uncharted territory, but it would be unjust to ignore the dedication with which the duo strive to form a solid aesthetic around house's ambivalent hidden narrative of the dissolution of the self, going right back to Robert Owens' harrowing Chicago house classic "Bring Down the Walls". Fittingly (if somewhat obviously so) Owens offers guest vocals on two of the highlights here, starting with Art Department's own remix of Luca C. and Brigante's "Tomorrow Can Wait", all slithery Depeche Mode synth arpeggios and ceaseless house percussion over which Owens' anti-temporal hedonism emerges more as a quiet moan of dread. Jackin' Rabbit's "Full of Dreams" is even more existentially pregnant, using a bruised-sounding bassline and Owens' hypnotic murmurs to frame house music's escapism as a kind of prison of the mind.
Appropriately, Art Department's sequencing is patient, frequently letting individual choices spin well past the five minute mark so as to underscore the sensation that these grooves are webs to trap dancers in. This approach works less well on the weaker cuts, where the music seems to simply spin its wheels with a clean-edged and mildly trippy but emotionless panache (see Ali Love's remix of Brigante's "The Jungle", or Art Department, BLUD, and Shaun Reeves' "Robot Heart"), but pays off in spades on the warm but steely tech-house of the two final tracks, Gregorythme's "Artificial Tears" and Art Department's own "Insomniac", each running for close to eight minutes and offering up their own driving repetition as the only stable reference left in a world lost to doubt and uncertainty. Keep dancing? You've got no other choices left.
