Fremdtunes

Once in a while, Coco Bryce, enlightens us with some great words about a piece of music he loves. So here goes ‘Coco’s Curiosities #3’…enjoy reading!

“Again, another gem I’d love to own on vinyl, but don’t, because it goes for silly prices on Discogs, eBay and the likes… Shout out to the man like Perttu Häkkinen aka Randy Barracuda aka half of Suomi electro outfit Imatran Voima for playing me this a couple years ago. I’d just gotten acquainted with the whole Skweee thing/movement/genre a couple months prior and so I contacted Härmonia (the label Perttu runs together with Mesak) to see if they were up for swapping some wax, only to find out he was living in Rotterdam, which is only about half an hour away from my hometown. We exchanged phone numbers, I went over to his place, where he played me this track, kind of as a hint to ask me if I were married or already seeing someone, you know, because at first he was really shy, a bit too shy to ask me flat out… So instead of asking me himself, he played me this tune… One thing led to another and now we just had our second child together…

But no not really, that’s not how it went.. We did exchange phone numbers tho, and I did go to Rotterdam to visit him. He played me a shitload of Finnish Schlager records, proto Skweee, about half of the Dance Mania catalogue, and then this track. I fell in love with it straight away; from all the fantastic stuff he put on his turntables that particular afternoon, this one stood head and shoulders above the rest. Thank God for Soulseek btw, as I finally managed to track down a semi-decent version there a couple months back, which of course is nowhere near as cool as owning it on vinyl, or smoking cigarettes for that matter, but it still beats the YouTube rip I had to make due with up until that point. Speaking of YouTube tho, there’s a couple of uploads that simply feature the label artwork as “visuals”, but there’s one version that comes with a fan-made video, which fits the song astonishingly well imho. Just black and white images of people moving through a city (no idea which city tbh), nothing too fancy, but it works like a charm.

Now the reason why I like this tune so much is probably the combination of how weird it sounds and yet still manages to make perfect sense. It’s very sparsely programmed, minimal, but not in the “minimal techno” way (again, thank God…nothing wrong with minimal techno of course, except for the fact that it sucks balls). It starts off with a very repetitive bass drum and hi hat pattern. Very basic, yet not entirely 4×4. Kind of reminiscent of a Baltimore/Jersey club beat, but not quite the same. Then at about 10 seconds into the song they drop, well, basically all the other ingredients in there in one go… A very sweet sounding little synth loop, a very basic yet imo extremely effective bassline, and a vocal asking the same 4 questions over and over again: “are you married, are you occupied, you got kids, how about HIV?”. With a different voice answering “no, oh no” to every question. And that’s basically the whole tune right there. Only other elements in there are a clap and snare pattern that pop in and out every once in a while, but that’s about it. Simplicity at its best. A perfect example of how “minimal” doesn’t have to equal ‘ boring’…”