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LP
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PL 162LP
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Is DJ Marcelle a masochist? She hates musicals and called her 2022 album DJ Marcelle: The Musical. She dislikes cheese and calls her new album A Different Fridge For Cheese. Probably the answer has more to do with her wicked sense of humor and her love for original track and album titles. This new album is like any Marcelle production (and DJ-set): it's hard to pigeonhole. Dub, techno and avant-garde influences are clearly present but the overall feeling is one of freedom, excitement, adventure and playfulness. Ideas bounce off another and Marcelle is certainly not content with one single formula. Each track becomes a new beginning, a new adventure. Bristling with possibilities, structures are pushed and pulled and explode excitedly. Album opener and closer "Muslimgauze Was Right Part I and II" are short pieces of rhythmic noise, "Big Room Techno Looking For A Room" is a weird and very danceable techno track and the bouncy "Nice Feet" is not only another great dance track but also the second tribute on the LP ("Muslimgauze Was Right" the other one); this one is an ode to the best female footballer in the world, Barcelona midfielder Aitana Bonmati. "New Equipment" describes the mood of the track perfectly. For a The Fall fan the track title "You Don't Have To Be Weird To Be Weird" should ring a bell. Insect sounds dominate stop-start track "To Bee Or Not To Bee." "A Difficult Fridge For Cheese" (nearly the title track!) is a storming avant-garde track featuring voices of some of her (musical) friends like two members of avant dub outfit Holy Tongue and fans and friends she met whilst DJ-ing in amongst others Brazil and Portugal, asking in their native language to leave the cheese in the fridge, por favor. The title was inspired by a visit to her DJ-friend and fellow The Fall-fanatic Carlos Souffront in San Francisco. Souffront, in daily life a cheesemonger, does have a different fridge for the cheese in his house. Upon seeing this, Marcelle decided to name her new LP after this. For future album titles controversial phenomena like "pop choirs" and "DJ schools" are warned! After Explain The Food, Bitte (PL 113LP, 2021) and DJ Marcelle: The Musical (PL 126LP, 2022), A Different Fridge For Cheese is Marcelle's third album being released on the Berlin label 'play loud!'.
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LP
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PL 126LP
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Tina Turner. Princess Diana. Johan Cruijff. Jesus. Abba. Spider-Man. Jerry Springer. Mormons. A brothel. Monty Python. A gay remake of Shakespeare. Anne Frank. Nothing and no-one seems to be able to escape the fangs of the musical industry. So it's no real surprise that the last woman standing, DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess, has also fallen victim to this evil fate. The album, after 2021's Explain The Food, Bitte (PL 113LP) her second release with Berlin label Play Loud! Productions, is as surprising and up-to-date as ever. Marcelle's productions come into existence quite quickly, like sketches capturing a moment. Take, for example, "The Quarantine House Party Try-Out", a bouncy track dealing with those illegal parties people organized in their own homes during the covid period. With the pandemic now hopefully over, the DJ/producer travels the world again. Marcelle deals with this in "Soups On Tour", related to a link on her website where she documents all soups she eats on the road (and in restaurants). It's this individual approach to her creative process that gives her artistic fulfillment; her DIY attitude is inherent to everything she does and is reflected in her creative process as a whole, from the music itself to how it is presented: on the sleeve of DJ Marcelle: The Musical you see her literally "dropping" a musical. The freedom she grants herself is essential, she never had the difficulty of coping with certain expectations or being stuck with a certain perceived musical (ha!) profile, because she has always been able to make sure people didn't have any anticipation of where her music (and DJ-sets) would go in the first place. So it's no real surprise that, following danceable tracks like "Voted Best DJ School (25% Off)" and weird album opener/warning "This Record Is Scratched" on side A, we get only one track on side B: the 17-minute-plus technoid stomper "Smacznego!" (Polish for "enjoy your meal"). It's a hypnotic, continually shifting track which, even when it ends after such a long time, leaves you hungry for more. The hilarious promo video of the song hopefully satisfies this appetite. So now you have DJ Marcelle also being exploited as a musical. There is one consolation, though: DJ Marcelle: The Musical happens to be the first instrumental musical in the world.
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LP
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PL 113LP
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DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess is that rare combination of things: fearless, innovative, playful, independent, unpredictable and with a great sense of humor. The singular producer and DJ from Amsterdam lives in that rare league of artists who are out there, doing their own thing, continually pushing the boundaries of electronic music and having a great time in doing so as well. Her third album in just over two years is as versatile as ever. Steelpan (!) dancehall goes hand in hand with off the wall techno and weird avant garde. The album contains a surprising collaboration with Michael Vincent Waller, a modern classical composer/pianist from New York: "The Orphan Serenade" is Marcelle's most personal, sensitive track to date. As always, her track titles are a joy in themselves ("The Vegans Are Backstage", "Hum Hum Hum", "Technicians Leaving The Club"). The album is covid-19 proof: Marcelle wears a face mask on the sleeve. Join Marcelle in her unique musical universe. And try to explain her the food, please.
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LP
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JMM 216LP
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Calling Marcelle a DJ doesn't wholly represent what she's doing. (Three) turntables and a mixer is more the medium that she uses to create and share sounds, ideas, and moments. The same goes for her own productions. They don't have a fixed style, as can be heard on all five EPs released by the Munich label Jahmoni since 2016. They are free in attitude and music and cross boundaries between genres. Most tracks are a collision of ideas, a magically gritty, self-aware car crash, as if Muslimgauze grew up in sunny Lisbon with the PrÃncipe crew as opposed to the grim North of England. On her new LP One Place For The First Time, you'll find nine tracks brimming with ideas that ignore stale production norms. Sure, the pulsing drum 'n' bass-esque "Hippies Use Side Door" is weirdly danceable, just like the cackling stomp of "Respect Caged Animals", but can you dance to "Technicians And Their Smoke Machines"? (Answer: You'd certainly enjoy trying). It's almost a jazz song, but like with everything Marcelle does, it's jazz from a different world and has proven to be a dancefloor smash when she's played out the dubplate over recent months. Marcelle's life-long love for far-out dub is clear in "Dub (Dub)" and "Respect My Snack Foods" is in the same "educational" tradition as was the song about how to deal with constipation (olive oil!) from the 2018 Psalm Tree EP (JMM 209EP). "The Mother Of All Messes" (a UK newspaper headline about Brexit) introduces perhaps a more tender side, a comforting nursery rhyme plays while a muffled kick occasionally growls with distortion. "Don't Touch The Table!" This particular sample is taken from Marcelle's legendary Boiler Room performance at 2018's Nyege Nyege Festival in Uganda where the MC of the event repeatedly declares that "She Plays Vinyl" and therefore asks "Don't Touch The Table!". It goes without saying that the latter song is full of banging on the table noises. Marcelle is a genuine innovator who remains inherently relevant by not following trends, not focusing on technicalities, having a sense of humor, dissolving obsolete structures, being excited, defying others rules while creating new ones, eschewing #tagline posers and "tasteless A&R wankers", supporting artists that need it, supporting places that need it, supporting people who need it and not giving a fuck for as long as possible.
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10"
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JMM 203EP
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DJ Marcelle releases her first two-track club EP on Munich based label Jahmoni Music. In The Wrong Direction echoes what she does on stage: it's non-mainstream club music, and it's highly functional. Marcelle is on a life-long quest of proving that most music in club culture is quite boring but that's justified as having to be so because of functionality and audience expectation, while she claims that this is not true, it's just a lack of intelligence, courage and creativity on the part of most DJs. Genre-wise, In The Wrong Direction is: NL tribal techno, post-dubstep, broken beats, glitch.
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