CLAUDIA BONARELLI may '68

CLAUDIA BONARELLI May ‘68 10”, No Type

It’s groovy, deep and funky, yet there is nothing happening. A few clicks here and there, the same keys relooped over and over again, an almost inaudible bass and the straight drumbeats lost even further down in the mix. It is cool, relaxed and will make you bang your head nevertheless. The invisible disco. Minimal is the word. Four tracks for the modern lounge right before the night breaks loose.
And no one will care if that lounge is in some urban hotspot or your own livingroom. Or if you make your living room into a hotspot. If you have style, style is where you have it. Claudia Bonarelli from Sweden has released on Mille Plateaux and Mitek. And she has style, I am sure. Listening to these four tracks you wonder, why she never released on Kompakt, but she is not from Cologne. See. Four tracks not too different from each other, only in the intensity or non-intensity of the four-to-the-floor house-beat that is subdued somewhere in this mixes, and sometimes missing completely because it is transformed into a repeating static-click. So these tracks make for good at-home-listening as well. If you want to play that at home. And I know, that there are more people doing DJ-Sets for themselves at home than you might think. This is one of those records, where you think that listening really closely will reveal that there is a lot happening that you don’t hear if it just plays in the background. This time it is not true. There is not a lot happening. It is the mix and the relations between these few ingredients that make the magic of these tracks. This is where the space between sounds becomes as important as the spaces filled with sound. Minimalist. Another vinyl brick in an ongoing musical revolution? If so, it is a silent one. No flames and bombs, only dancefloors and DJ-sets slowly progressing onwards to something new. “May ‘68” is named as a “DJ ready, 120 gram clear 10” release” – does that say it all?

08/2003