PRE-ORDER ITEM : Expected
January 1st 1970.
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Madteo (aka Matteo Ruzzon) creates music whose understatement is overwhelmingly compelling. An Italian native who moved to New York City in the early ’90s, Madteo has forged a production style that casts techno, house, and hiphop in a gritty, strippeddown subterranean murk. His keen ear for unusual tonalities and his inventive tweaking of rhythmic tropes lend his music a functionality that feels anything but perfunctory.
On the Strumpetrocracy EP, Madteo constructs a distinctive sound world that throws a very strange light on dance music. “LaissezFaire Couture” instantly transports you to bizarre realms: Its offkilter, midtempo funky beats haloed in swirling, celestial synth drones and angelic female swoons glow in stark contrast with strident Roland 303 twangs and unsettling, growling bass frequencies. It’s as if a romantic tryst were happening in an alternateworld auto factory. Hazily reminiscent of illbient and abstract triphop, “LaissezFaire Couture” is an oblong oddity that exists in its own unique sphere. “Mr. Gecko” is a steelyeyed shuffle with corrugated, slategray synth vapor arcing in the distance and a loop of someone saying the title in a tremulous voice. It’s so evocative, you want to base a crimethriller movie around it.
The EP’s most clubfriendly cut, “We Doubt (You Can Make It)” threads a male vocalist singing a paradoxically bold mantra —“I just can’t make it”—over a broken techhouse rhythm that’s both jaunty and heavy, bolstered by a sooty, strutting bass line. DJ Sotofett’s Radio Mix of “We Doubt” adds an urgent blaxploitationflick bass line and a more festive tempo and wildly fluttering flute and warped percussion accompaniment. Dresvn offers a chilled dub version of “We Doubt” that bumps along with weirdly timbred percussion (think horse hooves on a cobblestone road) and an eerie, shivering drone in the background that sounds like the intro to Todd Rundgren’s “International Feel.” All of these variations twist a venerable genre into unorthodox shapes and highlight Madteo’s thrillingly eccentric musical vision.