Search - Dubfire :: Global Underground: Taipei (GU31)

E-Beat Buffet

Mark Eremite | Seoul, South Korea | 08/21/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I used to go to Renaissance's Master Series for the latest, greatest and most creative in EDM, but GU has been amping up the competition for some time now, and this 31st installment is barely an exception. Taking the helm this time around is one-half of the dark groove duo known as Deep Dish: Dubfire (although his mother calls him Ali Shirazinia).



I've seen Deep Dish live twice, and both times I was struck by how emotionally removed the two were from their sets. I know it's a job that requires a certain amount of focus, but it's also an art of a kind. Art is about communicating on a level beyond the explicable. It's not enough to turn the tables with skill; you're also trying to engage the audience with a music that speaks to everyone involved. Watching the Deep and the Dish soberly flipping discs in and out made me wonder if they felt the music as much as they wanted the audience to.



Live sets, of course, are much different than recorded discs (even if the discs are recorded live), but I offer that observation up to underscore the only real issue I have with Dubfire's two-disc GU set. The trickiest part to writing about music is about pinpointing elusive (and usually subjective) emotional resonances, it's about putting into words something that is meant to be indefinable. After all, isn't that why EDM music exists? Because nerves don't know how to talk?



Dubfire's discs run the gamut, and they run them well, but they seem more intent on displaying technical proficiency than on capturing a groove. Both sides of this set sound like a primer course in the evolution of EDM, which is nice for someone who wants a sampler platter of sub-house sound. For others who seek out music on the basis of their mood, well, you'll find yourself both loving and hating this compilation.



Disc One, for instance, pours out slow and smooth with the caramel grooves of Dubois' "I Try." Dubfire adds a little Haunted to his House with Barbeque's "Myself" and a taunting mix of Jordan and Boryka's "Sun Is Rising." This mood -- a low-blood, endothermic simmer -- moseys not-so-poorly up to the ninth track -- Ballroom's "Remember Me" -- at which point Dubfire, perhaps bored, stops riding the trance rails and starts throwing on the tribal thrusters. There's a really, really nice mid-octane quartet in the 11th to 14th tracks, sort of a sloppy supersonic space race of music, but shoved where it is at the tail end of a gut-deep, lounge-lizard line-up, it seems oddly out of place. It forces you to motivate your mood, instead of following the natural rhythms of the music that preceded it.



The second disc has perhaps a better ratio of stand-alone tracks, but it is even less cohesive than the first. It's always bad, with sets like these, when the reviewer feels compelled to pluck out favorite tracks instead of mentioning how well everything meshes, and that's exactly what I'm about to do here. I kept going back to "The Sax Track" (a super crunchy psy-trance number), Robbie Rivera's endearingly cheesy "Float Away" (which Dubfire deliciously over-coats with a minimalist techno twitter that I found highly addictive), and Heinstein's head-banging, aptly titled "Tuff Tribal." The connective tissue isn't bad, either (although the inclusion of the Huntermann and Bodzin redub of Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" I found jarring and bewildering). But it all lumps together styles and genres that -- while not mutually exclusive -- need more than masterful mixing to get them to meld.



Like those live sets all over again, I found Dubfire's GU submission delightful but also disappointing. I appreciate and even admire his talent in this rather difficult of art forms, but it seems to me that he (and many of his contemporaries) would do well to remember that before they ever mix music to move their audience, they should be mixing foremost to move themselves. Sets like these are stunning in the the talent they display, but missing still is the sense that this is someone doing something other than showing off what they can do. The lamest dancers out there are the ones who are acutely aware of being watched, who aren't having fun with themselves at all. Dubfire did well with GU31, but I doubt he mixed it while dancing with his headphones on."