For years, dance music was gripped by a compulsion to sort its constituent material into ever more finely grained categories, so that a style like drum n' bass could spawn dozens upon dozens of sub-subgenres, each with its own precise aesthetic definition. Thankfully the easy digital exchange of music and the influx of new participants in the culture who aren’t bound by received orthodoxies has helped to break this taxonomical fever, and the dance music artists most worth paying attention to right now are the ones paying the least attention to the lines drawn between styles.; ones like Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava Balasanov, for instance.
Balasanov (who records using just his first name) has in the past been associated with the seapunk and witch house movements, but that’s more a side-effect of putting out music on labels like Coral Records and Tri Angle than because of any particular stylistic affinity. He identifies simply as a house musician, which is much closer to the truth, although still inexact. On his debut full-length, Raw Solutions, Balasanov gives the impression of someone taking all of house's splintered, baffling stylistic descendants, and attempting to fuse them back into one unified whole.
While Raw Solutions takes a holistic view towards house, with an apparent goal of touching on every possible variation of the form, Balasanov obviously has some favorites. He gets the most mileage out of a Chicago-specific stylistic continuum that starts in first-wave house and moves on through ghetto house, juke, and footwork, folding an entire evolutionary branch back in on itself in an atemporal collage of stuttering high-speed beats, raunchy vocal loops, and retro-ravey synths.
As interesting as Balasanov’s attempt to create an ur-house may be-- as well as his excursions further afield into R&B, moombahton, and beyond-- his emulations of those sounds wouldn’t be proper tributes unless they bumped. Which they do, it turns out. Raw Solutions can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting it, but stepping away from the analytical perspective reveals it to be a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music.
Balasanov has a deeply intuitive understanding of house’s build-and-release dynamic, as well as its give and take with its audience, which he applies in interesting ways. The return from the breakdown on the opening track, “Werk”, which nods at salsa and 90s club music, is a piece of subtle, nuanced craftsmanship that’s the polar opposite of the walloping EDM drop. The triptych of “Girls on Dick”, “Wait”, and “On It” comprise a two-part exploration of ghetto house’s hypnotic salaciousness, split up by a brief, juxtapositional trip into chillwave-inflected ambience.
Raw Solutions is more ambitious than the average dance album, both in terms of the span of sonic territory that it covers and its attempts to synthesize all of it into one cohesive work. And it’s more successful than most. Track-by-track, the music’s potent, but like Balasanov’s approach to making it, it’s much more than simply the sum of its parts.
