Matt John - The Bridge

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  • Bar25 is dead, long live Bar 25. The storied Berlin venue, the home of after-after parties that routinely stretched the city's clubbing schedule into Monday (and Tuesday), is gone, although rumors of its successor have already begun to surface. In the interregnum, the Bar's label keeps the spirit alive with The Bridge, a double 12-inch from Matt John, one of the venue's more celebrated residents. John's sets there were a serendipitous concision of venue and sound, so neatly did his otherworldly brand of minimal techno synergize with the Bar's psychedelic-carnival atmosphere. What gives Matt John's tracks their singular weirdness is that he never met a non-sequitur he didn't like. He laces his tracks with Easter eggs—some beautiful, some unsettling—whose abrupt entrances and exits make you wonder if you heard it at all, or if it was only a dream that rushed by you. "The Bridge" comes front-loaded with such things: the middle of "Hello Again" suddenly swells with a lush backwards melody that's replaced by a clownish male singer, and ends with John stating coldly, "Once, in 2006, a Japanese cab driver from Paris drove me home." "Meatball" fires heavily disorienting rubber-ball boing-boing noises at you while a Mary Poppins-like voice announces, over and over again, that "the dog didn't eat the meat." Good luck wrapping your head around that one. Such is the Matt John world that even when you think you're safe, you're probably going to be hit upside the head at some point. Take the title track: just when you think you're settling into a sweaty, disco-tinged workout, the groove comes to a halt, a drunken pub singer suddenly elegizes the "little old country!" and then the rollercoaster goes into overdrive, plunging you back into beats. But this isn't to say that it's all oversized gimmicks in these parts. The rest of the release abounds with more subtle examples of inventive production: "Space Caravan" sounds indeed like it was recycled out of parts from a Tatooine freighter, and the lysergic density of "Rising Horse" takes me right back to the Bar, where I'm dancing at some numberless hour of the night, in a sweaty throng of grinning strangers. You see, the song says, Bar25 was inside you all along! It's in each and every one of us.
  • Tracklist
      01. Hello Again (Californian Sunrise) 02. Meatball 03. Dolphins 04. The Bridge 05. Spacecaravan 06. The Rising Horse (Version 5) 07. Krienuluzullu
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