Green Velvet
Green Velvet
F-111
This is a new release of some not-so new songs from longtime Chicago producer Green Velvet (aka Curtis Jones, aka Cajmere). His sound is a unique combination of hard house with minimal Detroit influences, hard techno, and more often than not, his own spoken word musings, dealing with dark and bizarre subject matter (stalking is a prevalent theme here). Many of the tracks here are dancefloor staples from as early as the mid-nineties, but have only been available on 12-inch vinyl up until now.
The disc kicks off with “Flash,” a classic hard house track, with tongue-in-cheek commentary on drug use and media hype, while “Answering Machine” samples a week of tragic messages on Green Velvet’s answering machine (girlfriend dumps him, he gets evicted, his best friend has sex with his girlfriend, his psychic friend says his life is over, etc.) backed by a hard techno beat. “Stalker” is probably the most well known track on here – pounding techno and dark and twisted spoken word from Green Velvet personifying himself as a stalker, speaking to the woman he is pursuing.(“They were out of roses/ so I got you daises instead/ and dyed them red with my blood”).
“Land of the Lost” is a dark hybrid of electro and hard house, with monotonous, almost scary vocals that could probably squeeze its way into the dancefloor at a goth club, while “Thoughts” starts as a controlled minimal techno track with low vocal utterances, and ends up with Green Velvet screaming at the top of his lungs, and probably tearing out the little green implants he has on his head. “Water Molecule” is another bizarre, minimal tech track, with Mr. Velvet reflecting on finding freedom in embodying himself as a water molecule, while “Destination Unknown” is hard, robotic tech-house music with some ear-splitting oscillations towards the end.
The disc ends with “Abduction,” a 14-minute long bubbly, acidic track, with more musings about a first-hand alien abduction experience, which is actually very funny (“And then all of the sudden, I guess they saw me looking at them/ If I weren’t looking at them, I guess they wouldn’t have seen me looking at them/ you know, I shoulda been doin somethin’ else, like watching TV/ or I wouldn’t have gone through the things I went through/ But you don’t believe that I went through anything!”).
Four to the floor electronic music doesn’t get much weirder than this, folks.
F-111, http://www.f-111.com
