There's a weird draw for me when a producer arranges samples to sound like a live band. I listen for seams, trying to determine where and how the pieces were stitched together, which simultaneously keeps me hovering over the surface of the music while taking occasional dips inside. You can get to know something intimately when you're trying to figure out how it's done.
Anyone who's looked through a club calendar in San Francisco in the last ten years has seen Romanowski's name. He's a Johnny-on-the-spot DJ and producer who's spun everywhere in town (I saw him perform at the 45 Session where DJ Shadow first collaborated with Cut Chemist) and he moves easily between styles and formats. On Steady Rocking, Romanowski indulges his love of rocksteady, the late-60s Jamaican form in which the 1/3 ska beat is slowed by half, thus creating a bridge to reggae proper.
Romanowski credits himself with writing and producing, but it's hard to say what exactly is happening on this unusual record. On the one hand, it sounds really old, with tinny production choices and a certain air around the instruments that modern studios seem incapable of replicating. You can hear an echo from ancient wood-paneled walls soaked in thick clouds of skunk. If this is mere sonic emulation, Romanowski is a total genius, but I think it something else is happening. Several tracks feature guest musicians on guitar, saxophone and flute, yet much of the record sounds sampled, like scratch guitar and drum fills were chopped apart and reassembled bit by bit. It's possible that he's lifted chunks of songs from obscure rocksteady records, but I doubt it. The various pieces fit too tightly together to have been stitched from long sections. Wherever these sounds originated, they've been arranged into something new.
And then, oddly, the record sounds new. Many of the drums obviously come from programmed machines, with beats that stiffen to the digital clock and reflect a hint of Romanowski's hip-hop roots. And then the dub touches, when they appear (J Boogie, Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto, and Gadget all offer dub remixes, though the techniques crop up elsewhere), have a sophistication that stretches beyond Tubby's four-track. "Flat Picker" is nothing more than a base of hip-hop beats with Jan Whitefield's impossibly supple guitar drawing curlicues in the vast open space, and it sounds like a more successful version of what Stefan Betke was trying to get at on the instrumental tracks of the last Pole record.
"Why?" adds newly recorded sax and flute lines that sound ancient and perfect, an early 70s version of breezy island party music, and adds assorted vocal samples that sound recent. J Boogie's dub of "Romjack Steady" shows how dense and orchestral this music can get, as it ups the tempo and adds enough reverb to the horns to make the track sound huge. The rhythms throughout are simultaneously relaxed and forceful. Steady Rocking is contemporary production and collage methods meeting rocksteady somewhere in the exact middle, making for a seriously fresh-sounding record.
