Hagedorn - Home Grown
While Home Grown falls rather solidly into the micro house category, Hagedorn's approach has a more flesh and blood feel to it, a sensation that the artist is more directly plugged into his work. When he crosses into terrority previously mined by Thomas Brinkmann in the Soul Center series for "Funk Infection" for example, Hagedorn brings a vibrant organic pulse to the collision between the Motown R & B samples and the micro rhythms and textures.
Roseli Ferreira croons on "Heart," a micro-textured torch song built around her cool and reserved voice. Wispy bleeps and translucent bloops rise around her like soap bubbles, snaring her voice in rainbow-colored spheres. When her voice vanishes, all that remains is a layer of soap bubbles near the ceiling, and they pop eventually, captive flecks of sound expiring as they fall. "dc 16" intros for a minute, laying down the programmed beat and hi-hat, before changing the melodic elements as if Hagedorn has suddenly ripped off his shirt to reveal a more colorful crew neck beneath. You fall under the spell of the new textures, the bubbling bright tones and bouncing rotund melodies, and -- carefully, slowly -- Hagedorn gets his sleeves back in the orginial costume and everything new and bright vanishes until only the drum programming remains. And even that peters out eventually. "Electronic Music Machine" has a looped vocal sample (the ubiquitous phrase of the title) as if to remind us that everything we hear has been provided by an EMM, and, while true, that fact slyly tries to distract us from the reality that all the sounds on this record are driven by a man's desire.
This is one of the great appeals of this genre: it isn't just a matter of programming a series of loops and letting the tape run for twelve minutes. There is a granular intensity to micro house, a very particular sort of attention has been applied to all the sounds you hear. "Nam" is only two and a half minutes long, but there are at least four distinct phrases of instrumentation which pass by in that time. It is all set to a very static beat, but in this tiny space of time, Hagedorn plays out a theme and variation. The deftness of micro house is that it takes all of the full scale repetition of the dance floor house anthems and micro-manages them with the addition of tiny elements that dart and splash through the mix like tiny fish. Home Grown may seem to be locked into 4/4, but the tiny shifts which each element undergoes belies the florid gravity of the repetitive beat.
Onitor [2002]
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