Squaredancing in a Roundhouse

The tracks on Chicago house music top dog Derrick Carter’s Square Dancing… from 2002 are particularly original and idiosyncratic; he has a unique, almost ramshackle, intricate-sounding, multi-textured, abstracted disco aesthetic, a kind of avant-oddball Chicago House meets P-Funk sound. There’s some kind of DJ-informed programming and production alchemy going on here; he does something to his drums that gives them their very own idiosyncratic character, a clattery, interlocking syncopation to the rhythms and a unique lollop/bounce/shuffle to his groove. Rubbery synths stretch and retract, percussion clashes then locks in, synthetic and organic sounds, distorted human voices, samples from records long gone, multiple bleeps and sampled clips rub up against each other, each area of the sound field filled,  and a raucous, dubbed out, leftfield order emerges from the mélange. Relentless Chicago House and alt-disco straight from the future.