For the past couple of years, Will Long has kept up a steady stream of deep-house releases for labels like DJ Sprinkles’ Comatonse Recordings and Smalltown Supersound, and his debut album, 2016’s Long Trax, was mirrored by Sprinkles' own album-length remix. But Long also releases music as Celer and boasts a formidable discography (both solo and with his late wife, Danielle Baquet-Long) totaling over 120 albums worth of ambient abstraction.
It’s that project’s sensibility of restraint and narrowed parameters that drifts over to Long Trax 2, where Long uses the seemingly unchanging meter of deep house to explore themes of inertia and stasis as they pertain to politics, dance music, and society at large. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for some canned claps, a steady kick, sustained chords, and judiciously sprinkled vocal samples to carry, but Long prefers casting a spell with a minimal amount of materials. Across six tracks that clock in at over an hour in total, Long Trax 2 tends to melt in and out of the background, making it an ambient album that almost makes you want to wiggle a little, or a house album content to exist as wallpaper.
In moving away from micro-edition ambient releases and toward programmed dance beats, Long still has a ways to go to get to the level of someone like Theo Parrish or Kenny Dixon Jr., producers who can make something revelatory out of the sparest of kit sounds. “You Know?” is nearly 10 minutes of a stiff, metronomic beat and soft-focus keys that lilt upward and back in the mix. It’s a track that seems unwilling to budge toward dance music’s sense of release; instead it offers something as gauzy and indistinct as a throw pillow’s stuffing. A muffled vocal sample from Jean-Michel Basquiat rustles just beneath the surface, all but inaudible except for the line, “I don’t remember.” It’s a fitting encapsulation of the music itself: a Lethean track that fades away having left little distinct impression.
Long strikes the best balance on the centerpiece “The Struggles, the Difficulties.” The elements—melancholy chords and a beat as low-key and incessant as a ringed finger on a wooden desk—sound like what Boards of Canada might utilize if they were making deep house. As the chords billow upwards, they sound less like a pleasant, drifting cloud and more like an overcast pall. “The struggles, the difficulties, that’s supposed to be in the past,” pleads Angela Davis, her inflection expressing dismay at the ways that racism, injustice, poverty, and suffering continue to shadow us at every turn.
There’s a nonchalant air to the way that Long triggers these samples. When Richard Pryor says, “Sorry, Jack” in the midst of “That’s the Way It Goes,” you can almost hear the shrug emoji in the spaces in between. Yet there’s also a hefty sense of ambition in making a house track featuring the 44th president of the United States saying, “Nothing’s changed.” That 11-minute track summarizes Long’s political outlook in two succinct words, even as he drops in other snippets of Barack Obama’s voice (“Should we pretend that we’ve got a colorblind society?”; “I’m a very angry man”). The detached tone feels telling, and Long’s backdrop—a basic grid of kick and claps—makes these statements feel all the more perplexed and uncertain. Which is to say, if you wake up daily in 2018 and feel borderline despair and a cosmic sense of futility, hearing the former most powerful man in the free world say again and again, “Nothing’s changed,” won’t do much to move the needle.
As mellow as Long Trax 2 presents itself, there is ultimately something that feels disingenuous. Drawing on African-American voices—be they famous artists or members of the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and sprinkling them atop lethargic and rote deep house (a music originating from the inner cities of Chicago and Detroit), Long ends up draining both the music and the words of their sense of urgency. It seems a damning luxury to drift off to it.
