X-Press 2 or why "just" house music is the highest calling
Plus DJ Haram, Danny Daze, Yaeji, Julia Holter and Johnny Jewel
In the early 1990s, New York ruled house music. Masters at Work and Todd Terry were the leading producers; Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia the number one DJs and clubs like The Tunnel and the Sound Factory had legendary status among dance music fans. And in there, among it all, were a British trio called X-Press 2, who loved New York and New York loved back.
When I spoke to X-Press 2 last week for a Line Noise interview (coming to your radio / podcast platform soon), DJ Rocky, one half of X-Press 2’s 2023 incarnation alongside DJ Diesel (Ashley Beedle having departed in 2009), explained that the group loved DJ Pierre’s modish, highly percussive and very New York Wild Pitch sound, which they combined with European influences like Hardfloor.
“We tried to do something that borrowed bits and ideas from one thing and then borrowed bits and ideas from the other thing and blended them together and ended up with with something else,” Rocky explained. “In so doing we did appeal to people like Junior Vasquez, [New Jersey legend] Tony Humphries and all the other DJs that ended up playing the records.”
“What we're saying is,” Diesel added, “We borrow from America, we do our thing, and then the Americans go, ‘Wow, that's really great.’ And then they take it and it's just constant bouncing backwards and forwards. But, as Rocky was saying, we were also being influenced by the rest of Europe, with Hardfloor Acperience, that German sound, and that whole European thing of having these huge breakdowns.
“A lot of those Italian records, German records, Dutch records, would have these breakdowns and then have this big drum, snare roll and then back in, whereas the Americans tended to be very groove based, which was what we were doing at the time, completely obsessed by DJ Pierre and that whole Wild Pitch sound. And those early Strictly Rhythm records, they were all really groove based.”
Fast forward to 2023 and New York house - the wild, percussive, Latin-influenced sound that used to eat clubs whole in Tenaglia’s 13-hour sets - is largely out of fashion. So much so, in fact, that when I suggested a New-York-style night to a Barcelona club promoter he laughed me out the door. But X-Press 2 keep on grooving. Thee, their fifth studio album, was released in October and is a fabulous piece of work, whose dedication to the pursuit of the elusive groove is expressed in tons and tons of rumbling, skyscraper-heavy drums.
The album’s cover of Tones On Tail’s ambient goth classic Rain is the obvious highlight, a brilliant case of musical lateral thinking which makes the original melody sound entirely at home when held aloft by snake-ing drums and a touch of acidic 303. But the real meat of album is a series of reassuringly solid, drum-heavy, ultra percussive grooves that have no real intentions as songs, home listening or for anything but moving the collective behind.
You Know (Everybody) fulfils all my Junior Vasquez at the Sound Factory fantasies using nothing more than an impolitely large, echoing drum pattern, barreling around the spectrum like two furniture show rooms going to war, of the type we once would have considered tribal house, and a couple of vocal samples that are employed for their rough, percussive qualities. (And, yes, tribal house is a horrid name. But, listening to You Know (Everybody) you can kind of understand it.)
I Can See The Love throws a nagging two-chord progression into a similarly drum heavy mix, Muse takes the chord limit up to an almost jazz fusion-y four, while Reach For Me - now there's a New York 90s house title! - adds a billowing bass line that suggests you had better leave the club and hail a taxi right now if you want to escape its embrace. (The reference to Murk’s 90s house classic Reach For Me is, I am sure, no coincidence.)
In no case does traditional song writing come into the mix; there is no attempt to push the musical envelope and most tracks are more than happy to ride the interaction between three or four musical elements. And if this sounds like a dismissive comment then you really haven’t been paying attention. Sure, I love songs and experimental music. But I also love the pursuit of the simple groove and X-Press 2 are absolute masters at it.
Crucial to their art is the fact that X-Press 2 make it all sound so easy: each sound they use appears inevitable, the obvious next step on their sonic journey. But if you have ever tried to make music like this - or endured bad attempts at other people writing this kind of thing - you will know it isn’t.
It reminds me of when I first heard X-Press 2, back in the early 90s, just as I was first getting into electronic music. For someone who had listened to a lot of indie music, classic rock and Iron Maiden, songs like Muzik X-Press and London X-Press, X-Press 2’s first two singles, sounded incredibly easy to make. This wasn’t The Beatles’ vocal harmonies, finely honed over hundreds of hours of Hamburg gigs; this wasn’t Iron Maiden’s metal symphonies or Aphex Twin’s slippery ambiance; this was a handful of elements, at most, most of which sounded pretty easy to put together.
This was kind of by design. “That's how we pretty much always worked and to a degree still do” Diesel said in the Line Noise interview. “Go in the studio, throw a load of stuff together, see what things work with each other. And then you kind of work with those, like, ‘Oh, okay, those five things work. Let's go with that.’ So, it was very much like that. We weren't trained musicians or anything like that. It was just going on what sounded good to us. And at the time, it was a bunch of samples and a borrowed idea for a bass line and that was all all it was.”
Mention of Muzik X-Press takes me to Daft Punk. It’s not talked about so much but the French duo were heavily influenced by New York house. Thomas Bangalter spent three weeks in New York in 1993, going out to clubs like NASA and the Sound Factory, where he witnessed Junior Vasquez at play; later, Daft Punk would tour with New York DJ Roger Sanchez and call in Masters at Work, Todd Terry, new York transplant Armand Van Helden and Roger and Junior Sanchez to remix their early singles.
They were also X-Press 2 fans, playing Muzik X-Press and London X-Press during their 90s DJ gigs and naming X-Press 2’s Ashley Beedle as one of their Teachers on Homework. And if you listen to Muzik X-Press - first released in 1992 - and Daft Punk’s Musique, first released in 1996, I am pretty sure you can hear the influence of X-Press 2 on the Parisian duo.
The comparison with Daft Punk isn’t such an abstruse one to make. Both X-Press 2 and Daft Punk crafted their own take on US house music; both recognised the power of stripped down grooves; and both had considerable chart success, with X-Press 2’s Lazy making number two in the UK charts in 2002. But Daft Punk had a myth and X-Press 2 didn’t; Daft Punk expanded way beyond house music and X-Press 2 didn’t.
This is no slight on the British band. But it does mean that X-Press 2 are maybe a slightly difficult act to sell, in a music business where story telling rules. Daft Punk became robots; Fred Again has his found sounds and Instagram sampling; James Blake works with the cream of US hip hop and R&B; and X-Press 2 make house music. Not deep house, tech house, Afro house, Chicago house, French house, ambient house or amapiano: just house music. At a stretch, I would maybe call their work New York house; but that doesn’t really work for two people from England, when New York house is really no longer a widely recognised thing.
Of course, you could argue that we live in a post-genre musical world, where people will happily put emo alongside trap, Hyperpop, K-Pop, disco and jungle on their playlists. But in terms of finding music in the first place, genre is still important. And if you were working in a record store and a new X-Press 2 album came in, where would you wrack it? If you were working for a music streaming service, how would you tag it?
Very few musicians like to talk about genre. But I decided to ask Rocky and Diesel the record store question when I interviewed them, claiming that their new album had set off an existential crisis. Diesel says he would wrack Thee under house or perhaps “house / techno”, which sounds a far too close to the tech house phantom for my tastes. Rocky agreed. “It’s house but not one particular brand or blend or style of house,” he said. “They're kind of different influences and different flavours there but that's where we come from. We come from house, so that's where it’s… yeah.” And he came stumbling to a stop.
House of not one particular brand or blend or style doesn’t sound like anything to write home about; as a description it’s not going to rouse the troops or cause X-Press 2 mania to sweep the nation. So let me put it another way: X-Press 2 are Britain’s finest New York housers; an all-gliding, all-kicking groove machine whose devotion to the art of making you move should be hung in a gallery. More than anything, X-Press 2 are just house music, for people for whom just house music is the best thing in the world.
Some listening
Handplay, taken from Haram’s forthcoming EP of the same name, is so satisfyingly grotty that the industrial synths and drooping bass line seem to turn the speaker air green; bonus points, too, for the filthiest flute line I’ve heard in a long while. Having a bad night out to this record seems physically impossible.
Danny Daze’s forthcoming album ::BLUE:: is one of those records I have thoroughly enjoyed struggling to get my head around. You can hear Daze’s enduring love for Miami Bass and electro over the album’s sprawling 90 minutes but this collides with elegant soundscaping, ambient wash, IDM trickery and restless creativity, to create an album that won’t sit down and let you study it, like the observer effect meets bass filth. I could swear that Time Lapse, the second single, has neo-classical synth melody and jumpy bass-drum beat; but maybe it will be something else entirely when you hear it.
Yaeji calls easy breezy “a sequel that weaves a thread through my past releases (and my past selves)”. And if, by that, she means a work of sunshine samba drum & bass knocking boots with a vocal that appears to have escaped from a late 80s Field Mice record, then I couldn’t agree more.
Julia Holter is perhaps the only artist who could use bagpipes on a song and not utterly revolt me. (Look, my grandparents used to live over the road from a bagpipe school - it wasn’t pretty.) And so it proves on the wonderful Los Angles sprawl of Sun Girl, a song that sits charmingly between amateur band hour and Holter’s own pointed musical expertise, like a band of kids covering mid-period Animal Collective.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise with Ragga Twins’ Flinty Badman
It’s only a few weeks since I wrote about my love of Ragga Twins for this very newsletter. “Jungle has more than one father; but ragga jungle pretty much starts with the Ragga Twins’ first records,” I said and I stand by that. Flinty Badman, one half of the duo, got in touch, I asked for an interview and it came to pass. (Deman Rocker, the other half of the duo couldn’t be in on the interview but I am hoping to speak to him soon.) Flinty was totally charming, as I fan boyed for the best part of an hour about rave, jungle, Shut up and Dance and more and you can now hear the results in podcast form. We talked about London soundsystems, rave, political commentary, reggae owing them money, Skrillex, James Blake and more.
Coming fresh to you from this morning (Wednesday, if you’re counting): a Line Noise interview with Johnny Jewel, ahead of his gig at Barcelona’s Mira festival this weekend. We spoke about soundtracks, gore, Twin Peaks, remixing The Weeknd, Primavera past and present and his very favourite sound. And if you’re at Mira, I’ll see you there (Friday only).
With 33 likes, my playlist of the best new music is now the same age as Jesus. Shall we see if it can go one further?