In the parlance of the increasingly vocal menswear blogging community, Todd Terje is "having a moment." A combination of serendipity and opportunism, a moment is a flash of triumph, unplanned and difficult to reproduce. To offer some perspective, cargo pants are also having a moment. Like Terje productions (as opposed to remixes), cargo pants disappeared for a few years mid-decade; now they're back, and they look (sound) better than anyone remembers. Hell, it was only six months ago when, upon asking a friend if he had any interest in a Terje DJ tour stop in Chicago, I received the following curt reply: "No. I don't want to listen to a bunch of space disco shit." But Terje's three-song Ragysh EP-- the one that included year-end chart barnstormer "Snooze 4 Love"-- dropped and proved surprisingly sticky.
This month he follows that with It's the Arps, a four-track EP on "space disco shit" mothership Smalltown Supersound, composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer. The first line of Vintage Synth Explorer's ARP2600 entry is, "The ARP 2600 is without a doubt one of the finest analog synthesizers ever." Terje has always been a sound-- and not a retro-- fetishist. Why else devote his precious remix work to nu-disco bench players and classic rock mammoths in equal measure? It's no surprise then that he'd be tempted by a mystical artifact such as the Arp, which, like many old synthesizers, looks like the kind of rune-encrusted rock-toy that his music's implied spaceships set out in search of. (The former astrophysics student is a rumored future space traveler.)
Terje's own productions-- like those of labelmate Lindstrøm-- favor knob-twiddling disco, like Giorgio Moroder without the pop-vocal instincts. He's confident and gifted enough to throw away an all-time piano loop on a Bryan Ferry remix. On It's the Arps, he trades the sturdy eight-minute structures of Ragysh for a baggier and more colorful sound. "Inspector Norse" would be a pro-forma space-disco jam in lesser hands-- it has that bulbous bassline, the tint of humor-- but Terje transforms it into a daytime noir, one that spreads its pinging notes wide. The star of the show is the two-track "Swing Star" suite, part one a wicked treadmill of double-time sequences over blocky bass and hiss-y drums. It's synth music as roadside fireworks: Light the fuse and back away quickly. "Swing Star Pt. 2" explores the same chord progression but with a cleaner palate, and the result is a light-breeze boogie that feels like a comedown. (The fourth track "Myggsommer" is a narrow miss, a vine-y synth doodle that suggests vintage synth flippancy can be as precocious as vintage guitar-tone exercises.)
This might've been lost in the space disco explosion a half-decade ago, but with his contemporaries wandering off into prog, kraut, and sundry other forms of out-music, the clean lines and easy momentum of It's the Arps are really refreshing. And Jesus, it's fun. The trouble with moments, of course, is extending them. Terje has the imagination. An upcoming Roxy Music remix suggests Terje will be a more consistent presence, which is fantastic: I'd really like not to be comparing him to fedoras in 2017.
