Speedy J: insanely fresh techno
When I think of “techno” I think of hard, pounding, nasty, synthetic, distorted, static noise, punctuated by beats and sweeping, spatial stereo effects.
For the longest while, I thought that such a thing did not exist, that my idea of techno only existed in my head. Then I discovered Speedy J.
I’d first heard of Speedy J, or Jochem Paap, many years ago. He had several releases on Plus 8 records, and to be frank, I didn’t like a single one of them, and still do not. Then, he produced some softer material in the mid 1990s, which I also didn’t care for.
But as of Loudboxer, and his freakin awesome live sets, I am a huge fan.
Jochem’s a true techno pioneer. He makes records that only have short endless sound loops on them, his personally crafted loops, which he feeds into Ableton Live, a cutting edge realtime music mixing software. He then tweaks some knobs and creates, live, an organic, flowing, cerebral mindfuck music that slowly mutates and morphs over time. Motifs emerge to the ‘surface’ of the sound and dive back into obscurity; patterns overlap each other, speeding up and slowing down, asynchronously intertwining. Like Plastikman’s seminal Consumed album (but much, much harder), this music is simultaneously purely synthetic and technological, while at the same time organic, fluid and ever-changing.
This is deep, nasty techno, and if you’ve never heard anything like it, you’re in for a treat!
Hear Jochem cook up a cerebral, spatial, morphing main course for the adoring crowd with these incredible live sets:
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