When it comes to booty music, Baltimore is the new Detroit. Which
makes this Friday a collision of old and new, with DJ Blaqstarr
representing Baltimore club and DJ Starski representing Detroit
ghettotech. You remember ghettotech, right? At the start of the
millennium there was a flash of attention for the sound, with its
raunchy lyrics and accelerated beats, a perverted child of ’80s
electro and excess porn. Over the last few years the same attention
has shifted to Baltimore club, another regional product that has made
inroads in the club underground, with an entire wave of club production
centered around its now overly familiar breakbeat.
Both ghettotech and club got their start by black producers for
primarily black audiences, before eventually migrating out of their
initial confines. In the case of ghettotech, hypersexual lyrics gave tracks a bit of novelty value among DJs, many unaware that the
“popping” referred to in the lyrics was a result of the genre’s
popularity in Detroit strip clubs. As with any other novelty, interest
eventually wore off for much of the newly adopted audience.
While it lasted, the rise in ghettotech’s cultural stock gave
Detroit DJs like Starski the opportunity to act as ambassadors for the
genre. Starski, half of the duo Starski and Clutch, produced “Belle
Isle Players” and the CD Don’t Stop ‘Til You Jit Enough, two
hallmarks of the sound. He’s also been involved with labels like DJ
Godfather’s Databass Records and Twilight 76. Starski’s regarded as a
favorite in “the D,” so if anyone’s got the pedigree to show where
electro-bass has gone since the spotlight moved away, it’s him.
On the other hand, the club sound is currently at a critical
period. There’s no shortage of MySpace producers taking the
stuttered club break and applying it to everything from Justice to
Michael Jackson, usually with mediocre results, dulling the luster of
the once-fresh sound. Then there’s DJ Blaqstarr, producer of Young
Leek’s “Jiggle It,” who takes the club template and molds it into
something refreshingly original. Yes, you can still hear “the break” on
his King of Roq CD, but it’s often chopped or subdued, and
sometimes it’s entirely absent. The CD proves that club is a production
aesthetic rather than a set of rules—exactly the injection the
genre needs lest it recede back into a merely regional phenomenon.
***
In jam-band-related news, EOTO are playing Saturday. EOTO
consist of Jason Hann and Michael Travis, two members of the String
Cheese Incident. For this project the duo have taken their jammy
aesthetic to electronic music, creating entirely improvised sets of
live, looped samples. Jam-band members switching to electronic gear
wouldn’t be noteworthy on its own, but the fact that the output is
actually worth your time is. Rather than masturbatory noodling, Hann
and Travis’s tracks show a surprising degree of direction, building,
peaking and flowing with an internal cohesion that quells any
misgivings about their musical background. 
DJ Starski plays Electric Avenue Fri Feb 15, CHAC Lower Level, 10
pm–2 am, $10, 21+.
DJ Blaqstarr plays Sing Sing Fri Feb 15, War Room, 10 pm–2
am, 21+.
EOTO play Mon Feb 18, Nectar Lounge, 8 pm,
$8 adv,
21+.