Technical Ecstasy

ACTIVE VOICE: "I think what grabs audiences are the vocal melodies," says Dear. "I've always heard people say, 'if only techno had vocals.' Well, here it is."

Microhouse maven Matthew Dear finds heaven in the dirty, secret side of techno.

by A.D. Amorosi

Matthew Dear is not as concerned about bottle service as he is about BPMs. As a turntablist, he has not spent his few years in the biz mixing connect-the-dot compilations that litter record-store shelves. He has no link to Ibiza, nor is he a "name" like grand tech-head Richie Hawtin. He has not, of yet, done a car commercial or been sponsored by an energy drink.

Instead, with little warning -- he’s put out just a couple of EPs, and some 12-inches under a pseudonym -- Dear has made one of 2003’s best CDs in Leave Luck to Heaven. It’s a melodic, micro-tech-house joint, as creeping and moody as it is cheerfully popish, but sans the syrupy camp and sentiment its title infers. Filled with banging crepuscular instrumentals and abstract narratives with queerly processed vocals, Dear’s minimalist-techno (especially on a war of the roses called "It’s Over Now") is one of a hollow point jaggedly ripping, slowly, through curvaceous, tender flesh.

A month out, his full-length debut on Spectral/Ghostly has won raves in The New York Times and Rolling Stone, though neither is a haven for harbingers of avant-electro epicureanism. "This genre’s been ignored for a really long time by critics and the mainstream," says Dear, 24, nursing a cold. "But, I think it’s a dirty secret amongst a lot of listeners, a hidden pleasure within a bigger marketed sound." Though he didn’t expect crazy accolades, he’s not unaware of its hows and whys. "I think what grabs audiences are the vocal melodies. I’ve always heard people say, 'if only techno had vocals.’ Well, here it is."

Dear’s pop sensibilities -- as strong as his tech-headed ones -- come from growing up with an older brother’s record collection of soft-electro (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) and the harder stuff (Nitzer Ebb) in San Antonio. "I don’t even know where he got them. This was South Texas. Maybe he got them from Japan?" he laughs. "Either way, I was young. And this was pop music with great melody, electronic or not." Despite not being in the hub of electro-pop, Dear knew that melody meant luring people with one note -- be it a vocal, a synth line, a glitch. Dear also picked up on the musicality of his dad, a folk guitarist from whom he could bum some equipment. "Just the fact that he had PAs and eight-track recorders around was encouraging -- you could have this stuff, make your own music, without having to have a big recording contract."

After moving to Detroit, Dear borrowed Dad’s drum machine for a weird cheap rhythm to back his earliest guitar experiments. "When I went to my first warehouse party and heard that 4/4 rhythm, I connected the dots. Who could imagine liking nothing but a kick drum? Not me. That is until I saw a thousand people dancing."

Dear realized immediately what he wanted to do. Rather than DJ ("Why spin when you can create the actual music?") he moved into the live scene in 1998. There he made the acquaintance of Ghostly label pals who would put out the music of Dear and friends in the Ann Arbor area on the Spectral imprint. Along with a few 12-inches under the name Jabberjaw ("really quirkier, funkier stuff") on tech labels like Perlon, Dear made two EPs in 2003 before recording a full-length.

A workhorse who’d rather throw sounds against the wall than keep them on his hard drive, Dear carved, whittled and polished a mass of some 40-odd songs into the abstractions and interludes of the rough diamond that became Leave Luck to Heaven. The flow of the album is gently balanced between spooky slithering instrumentals with hard pulses and chipper pop songs with catchy synth hooks.

While "Fex" and "You’re Fucking Crazy" are tense and claustrophobic, "Dog Days" and "The Crush" are poignant and filled with wiggle room. The narrative of "But for You" feels like an attempt at rich storytelling, but the ferocious "It’s Over Now" (an attention-grabber, what with its militaristic character’s lyrical tone ripe with paranoid bigotry and homophobia) is a free fall through free association and wordy ideas Dear can’t express. "I don’t like to use hardcore literary devices," he says. "I knew I wanted to paint a picture of war, of how people are programmed to hate the enemy -- but an abstract picture. I wanted 'Over’ to have a third-person perspective on war of every kind."

That Dear has lyrical ambitions as radical and contagious as his musical ones makes Leave Luck to Heaven the best paradise this side of Paradise Garage.

Matthew Dear performs Sat., Dec. 6, 10 p.m., $6, Silk City, Fifth and Spring Garden sts., 215-592-8838.

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