Starecase

For years, the US music industry has been searching for a suitable bottle in which to capture the DJ culture lightening bolt, an artist capable of dragging electronic music out of the clubs and into the consciousness of every music lover. Enter Bristol, UK duo Starecase, whose album Firstfloor is set for a June 11th release on Kinetic. With a full-scale, band-based live show, astounding pragmatism, and blissful electro-tunes, DJ Paul Crossman, aka General Midi, and "engineer's engineer" Al Watson are ready to accept the challenge.

"Performing electronic music for people who are seriously into dance music is a bit like preaching to the converted," says Crossman, an established breaks DJ and party promoter (of legendary Bristol night Shimmy with Hope Recordings' Leon Alexander, and recently Coda, also in Bristol) in his own right. "People are already aware, they know the way that it works. They have a general sense that when the snare rolls come in, you're supposed to go, 'Woo-hoo, Woo-hay.' But we wanted to get it to people who wouldn't touch dance music with a barge pole, and make them go, 'OK, there is actually something in it, there's a reason to listen to it.' That's what we're trying to get across in the band."

Starecase is, as Crossman calls it, "the classic overnight success story that took 10 years," a production outfit at its heart with a slew of original releases and remix upon remix (for artists like The Orb, BT, and Soft Cell) to its credit. The two first met in the summer of 1996 at legendary club Lakota during Temptation, a party promoted by Alexander. Crossman was DJ-ing and working on Shimmy, while Watson had just moved to Bristol after doing some freelance engineering in Nottingham and "fancied a change." They started writing and recording in Crossman's small home studio, got signed to the Lakota record label (which Alexander ran) in 1997, and soon after released "First Floor Deadlock." The track became an instant classic, and a definitive release in the development of progressive UK dance music.

Frequently mentioned in the same breath as production duo Way Out West (also from Bristol), Kosheen (also touring as a live band), and Timo Maas (also identified with trance 'n' breaks), Starecase has a sound that is very much its own. It's part the bulbous bass of Maas; the synth swell/breakbeat cocktail championed by BT and Sasha; the blippy electronic wasteland of Underworld; the seismic boom of Leftfield. And smartly, the boys don't shun any label or comparison: "It's all house music really," says Watson, who released club classic "You Must Admit" as Flybaby in 1994. "The way I look at it is that people need to brand it so that people can buy it. Whatever you want to call it; it's just another name."

Firstfloor is very much in the tradition of the recorded work of the UK "festival bands" of the '80s and '90s (Prodigy, Orbital, Underworld), a long, strange, trip of an album that's meant to be a listening experience before a dancing one. Watson and Crossman consciously made songs rather than tracks, shaking themselves out of the remix rut and refocusing on the music that shaped their early lives. "I discovered dance music at the beginning of the '90s and had that complete religious conversion on it," says Watson. "But around the time we first started writing the album, we were like, 'Let's put a hold on that for a moment and dig through our early collections and get a load of stuff out; anything that would really interest us." That included the aforementioned bands as well as old goth, Joy Division, Kraftwerk, The Stone Roses, Ozric Tentacles. "There was a slight element of, 'Oh fuck it, we don't have to get another kick drum out and set the tempo to 132 BPM, we can actually do what we want,'" says Watson. "I'm sure a lot of people have a problem with that, but I don't."

The Starecase live show marries the psychedelic spectacle of those old electronic bands' performances with live instrumentation: a