Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s—expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade. They're not made for fist-pumping, and they don't follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord.
Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu, a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson's snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking.
"18 Arms" goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus' tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat's pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all.
But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson's music is all about feel. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you're moved all the same. ("'Deep' to me is like the human condition that you don't talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person" Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music's emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious "Organ to Dust" is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. "Nabta Playa", named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it's reminiscent of Drexciya's Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons' fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform "Amarna", whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It's the album's most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson's album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.
