TROVE 032 | Gi Gi

Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Gi Gi didn’t discover his love of dance until he moved to Boston for university – a period marked by frequent trips to go clubbing in New York. Drawn to the experimental and off-centre corners of dance music, Gi Gi found himself frequenting Bossa Nova Civic Club, Palisades and a rotation of warehouses and DIY spots.

Amongst this plethora of parties, a Laurel Halo live set at Williamsburg venue Baby’s in 2014 sticks out as a formative moment for wanting to pursue this further. From 2015-2017, Gigi had two stints as an NYC resident before moving back to his hometown of Austin. In hindsight, returning to his roots helped a truckload.

1. Porter Ricks | “Explore”

The entire Chain Reaction roster looms large in my life, and Porter Ricks is no exception, but I particularly love this one for how much of a departure it is from virtually everything else the group has done. Rather than subaqueous dub techno or mangled static ambience, what’s on offer here is a surprisingly bouncy slab of downbeat that combines heavily swung, boom-bap-adjacent drums with cyclical call-and-response dub chords and a garish loop of what sounds like a heavily flanged guitar solo. A combination that shouldn’t work on paper but adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This is one I like to play either in the opening stretch of longer club sets or in more dancefloor-focused downtempo sets. Despite sitting at a modest 104 bpm, the stabs and guitar give it an inertia that makes it feel like the energy is perpetually pushing upwards.

2. Stranger | “Vesuvius”

Another one that evades easy classification stylistically— a theme of a lot of my favourite music, I suppose. In essence, it’s a piece of early-90s UK ambient techno à la Global Communication, but a few elements push it into a different zone altogether. A lively soca-tinged snare pattern significantly ups the energy, and a rolling dub bassline brings the sub pressure. Then, on top of this ultra-tight groove, pensive keys and cosmic Detroit-style pads are splashed across the canvas, meandering about for minutes at a time. Another great transitional tool— all the melodic elements allow it to slide into the deeper introductory part of a set easily, but that insistent, loping groove creates the perfect opening to push into something a bit more heavy and rhythmic.

3. Xes Noiz | “Untitled A2”

Speaking of heavy and rhythmic…this is one for a little later in the night, to push the temperature up a bit. Dub techno in its purest form— not the homogenous “one filtered delay chord on top of a pulsating kick for 8 minutes” kind that proliferated in the 00s, but some truly raw early 90’s UK techno smothered in gauzy chords and a cheeky one-love vocal refrain that evokes roots reggae in a much more direct way than 90% of tracks labeled with the genre tag. That is, until the vocal starts to disintegrate in front of your eyes in the second half, getting minced by a tremolo effect and overtaken by a wash of darker, watery textures.

Every track on this record is incredible in its own right. I love how they all serve their own role as variations on a theme (and I’ll admit I probably play the A1 most often for its playful yelps and being a bit more functional overall). Still, the more overt dub elements at play here, and the way the track evolves over its runtime, make this one a uniquely dynamic experience on the right dancefloor.

4. Sans Soleil & Genevieve | “Love From The Iss”

One of my favourite finds of late (shout out to Cory), Sans Soleil has a handful of LPs that present an impressively singular interpretation of various strains of techno, house, IDM, etc. His first record came out on Transmat, and the Detroit influence is there for sure, but by the time of this album’s release, that sound had morphed into something altogether different. This track, in particular, is a dizzying machine-funk epic, gradually building a squelching yet head-down electro groove around an impassioned R&B vocal performance from Genevieve. I’m really drawn to tracks that infuse deeply emotional human qualities into an otherwise decidedly computer-based electronic context, and this is a prime example. The way the vocal is played with, alternatingly chopped and layered into micro hooks and then left to play out with all of its original heartache, is stunning to me.

This also checks another box for me—tracks that seem to come from outside a functional dance music context but can nevertheless work in that environment under the right circumstances. This track initially reads to me as more of an IDM piece intended for headphone listening. Still, the brisk electro drums and ricocheting glitchy vocal chops make it ripe for a dancefloor moment if framed tactfully. In a way, it almost reminds me of certain Perlon records —squint hard enough, and you can hear a little Villalobos or Dygas in there somewhere— and I’ll often play it when I’m hovering somewhere between that zone and more contemporary leftfield club sounds.

5. Blaze | “Lovelee Dae” (Eight Miles High Dub)

This one has been with me for the better part of a decade, ever since I scooped the 12″ expecting the original mix’s sun-kissed house euphoria and instead ended up with a killer trifecta of remixes from Carl Craig, Freestyle Man, and Roman Flügel, appearing here as Eight Miles High. A mesmerising and idiosyncratic piece of electronic dub that melts the original vocal hook across a skanking halftime groove (that, to my ears, feels like a premonition of the UK dubstep sounds that were to come half a decade later), creating a mood that’s much more ambiguous than the original, and totally irresistible.

Whenever possible, I like to end closing sets with a bit of a wind down, gradually bringing the energy down to land rather than banging it until the lights come up, and this is one I often turn to in that moment— the tempo and iconic vocal create a through line with whatever house/techno etc might come before but the halftime sway and cavernous dub processing make for a perfect eyes-closed final moment on the dancefloor.