“The reality of dance music is that it encompasses more than just dance music,” the 25-year-old DJ and producer Jay Daniel recently told an interviewer asking about the Detroit music scene. He also seemed to be displaying his career ambitions in a single sentence. After several notable years as a prodigious house and techno talent, Daniel is cautiously expanding his purview. “I’m called a techno artist when really I’m a drummer,” he said. “I want to be referred to as a musician more so than a DJ.”
Since 2013 the Detroit artist has shared a handful of scatterbrained 12”-single and EP releases, improving in strides along the way. The progression has been leading up to an official debut called Broken Knowz, his first long player and also the first time he’s fully centering live percussion in his production, shifting purposefully from programming drums in favor of channelling his own considerable chops.
Daniel grew up in Detroit with his mother, the elusive soulful house singer Naomi Daniel, and then in Maryland with his father, where he picked up a pair of drumsticks and played throughout high-school. “I feel go-go had an effect on the way I see and hear music,” he once said of his time away from Detroit. “The cadence and syncopation is different from any other music. I could have played in a band, but it’s easier to make music by yourself.”
Accordingly, this debut feels like a solitary affair, full of the type of obsessive layering that can only be accomplished by a single pair of hands. The nine songs on Broken Knowz brim with meticulous, meditative production, and Daniel’s drumming is a revelation throughout. Instead of chopping up his drum sounds and triggering them individually, the artist uses multiple tracks to layer and loop percussion takes he recorded in his mother’s Detroit basement. As a result, the rhythms on Broken Knowz sound alive and slinky, and somehow despite all the singular attention nothing on it sounds fussy.
Daniel diverts sounds like a sleight-of-hand artist. A busily tapped hi-hat clouds the driving kick-drum of “1001 Nights” before a clipping sound builds into a galloping rhythmic element. Like any artist making dance music, Daniel revels in repetition, and he digs up little revelations inside his evolving loops. It’s an easy, popular trick to build a track up by its components, and while Daniel frequently relies on song-length crescendos of complexity, he arranges his layers with nuance and restraint, introducing certain sounds as flashy highlights and others as inconspicuous building blocks.
“Paradise Valley” is an obvious standout, and it’s also a bit of a red herring in its lush feel, a brilliant dose of shifty electronic funk that betrays some of the deeper and more austere grooves that follow. Unlike many of the songs on Broken Knowz, Daniel leads from the start with a shimmering synth that soars over a clanking percussive element. The producer taps a cowbell like a funky metronome in the right channel before a warbling synth lead rises and squirms above everything else. It’s busy and quirky, naturally just-so.
In interviews and as a DJ, Jay Daniel comes off studious and workmanlike, hyper and humbly self-aware of the Detroit music scene he inhabits. With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity. The live drum sounds are an obvious advancement in the producer’s craft and personality, but he’s also doubling down in his Detroit diligence, digging deeper into his already deep house and techno roots with sharpened tools. He’s finding old ways to do new things.
