- DJ Sprinkles and SND (that is, Mat Steel and Mark Fell) might seem like an odd match, the former known for wispy deep house charged with queer theory, the latter for deconstructed club sounds on labels like Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux. But both acts share a kind of playfully avant-garde approach to dance music, and over the past two decades they've maintained a friendship and creative dialogue that's led to some fantastic records. Fell and Thaemlitz have teamed up for EPs on Thaemlitz's label, Comatonse Recordings, and Thaemlitz says Fell was "key" to her getting invited to The University of York's Sir Jack Lyons Music Research Centre, where she produced Soulnessless, an album she's called her "magnum dope-us." Sometime in 2002, Steel, Fell and Thaemlitz got together to indulge their love of a sound quite unfashionable at the time: classic deep house. They produced a small batch of tracks under the name You Speak What I Feel. One came out the following year on a Comatonse anniversary compilation. Another, "My Good Friends Tell Me That," appeared last month on a one-sided 12-inch from Boomkat Editions.
Without knowing how it actually worked in the studio, it's tempting to imagine Fell and Steel at the controls while Thaemlitz plays creative director. The sounds are classic SND—ultra-crisp and utterly synthetic, as if rendered in CGI—but instead of the frenetic rhythms that define their own music, they form a drifting, blue-note house groove that's DJ Sprinkles through and through. The nine-minute piece is smooth and thumping, its bassline swelling and receding, its mellow chords glowing over drums that feel carved out of marble. It all dissolves in the last minute or so, then returns with a garage-y coda that ends as soon as it's begun, hinting at what another off-the-cuff track from these three might have sounded like.
TracklistA My Good Friends Tell Me That