Danny L Harle chews pop music into sugar sludge. From the progressive radio moves of his early songs for PC Music to newer tracks for Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX, he melts familiar forms into their most basic elements, enjoying the bright gloomy noises that gather around the edges. Each track reveals his supernatural humor coupled with his love for saccharine melodies and exotic sound design, a philosophy that spans media: His most iconic girl piece is a T-shirt PRAY DANNY.
Harle ‘s new album relates that polished approach to another of his ideas, dance music. Harlecore exploring the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its shiny edges: tooth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, psychedelic cell, and other chaotic club decisions. But with Harle behind the decks, the album is not just a collection of nostalgia tracks. It’s also an “interactive club experience where the raven never ends,” an immersive digital space where a resident DJ tracks each room. All sorts of trials like this have revealed how corporate clubs are still closed – Harle played a party there Minecraft last year – but Harlecore feeling special. In the art of the album are some of the avatars that Harle thinks are playing these tracks: a tall lupine animal, being of pure light, a cosmic slipper, and a reduced cartoon character. The record’s remarkable absence illuminates the unique power of dance music to separate performers from the day-to-day heterogeneity, to build a new world.
Credit for the news is DJ DJ, who makes celestial club cuts; Ocean DJ, who plays water beats; MC Boing, who raps with energy drink mascot jot energy; and DJ Mayhem, a force of true gabber chaos. The alter egos feature the album’s collaboration (Ocean and Danny’s work is with Caroline Polachek, the Mayhem tracks are with Hudson Mohawke, and the Boing cuts are with Lil Data’s PC Music alum consortium), but the concept also provides logic and narration to the absurdity of the record. flurry of dance music subgenres. You seldom hear so many different sounds broken together on one news, but you can imagine a party where all these DJs could sit under one roof, united in the rounded euphoria of a big night out.
Throughout the album, Harle works with non-sexual intensity. In the infamous video for “Interlocked,” DJ Mayhem, a crowd of ghostly spies flew under the shadow of a giant bipedal canine that destroys the place with a big shiny hammer – as if you were one of the hire monsters from Rampage a DJ for a party. Built around a gabber cave with a chest cave, the trail is stunning, ecstatic and awesome – just like any memorable raven. Even the most open and daring tracks (like DJ Danny’s breakbeat trance ballad “On a Mountain” or DJ Mayhem’s pastel hardcover of “Shining Stars”) are top notch, even by the standards of a reputable producer turn pop music on his head.
The paths credited to MC Boing are the clearest example Harlecoreunhindered energy. On “Boing Beat,” a biased voice screams about a night that will never be. ”It’s a little silly, especially the digital didgeridoo sounds that give the elastic beat the track, but the energy is definitely vibrant. He plays a late-night rambling conversation with friends in a club smoking area, optimistic and naive about the world outside its walls. “Everyone here is safe and nice,” he said. “Making me have a good life. ”
Harlecore takes its name from a real club night that Harle started in London in 2017, welcoming friends and DJs such as AG Cook and Evian Christ to celebrate the youth ‘s top dance music with a crowd of com -partners of the same mind. Harlecore, of course, the album is an attempt to celebrate and preserve the energy of those nights, but it is also a statement of the power of this type of music. Harle repeats the notion that Harlecore a party that will never stop, this is a testament to the strength of predators who – even at a time when clubs around the world are closed – have found ways to keep in touch and dance. When marking seems impossible, music like Harlecore you can be transported to a world that is brighter and more interesting than your own.
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