Data Breaker

April’s lineup for Broken Disco exemplifies what makes the
resurrected monthly night great. The two top billers/ballers,
Ghislain Poirier and Thomas Fehlmann, occupy space at
almost opposite ends of the sonic spectrum, but both are among the
elite of their respective styles.

While Poirier’s first release, 2001’s Il N’y a Pas de Sud,
came out on minimalist-ambient imprint 12k and dealt in that label’s
chilly, technoid tone poems, he later bloomed into the sort of producer
whose bass frequencies and beats are typically sonic foreplay to raw
sex; the producer/DJ’s parties in his native Montreal, Bounce Le
Gros, are reputed to be low-end, bootycentric bacchanals bursting
with extroverted hiphop, baile funk, and dub. Poirier’s transformation
has been one of the strangest and unlikeliest of recent
electronic-music history.

On the other hand, Fehlmann followed a stint in German/Swiss
new-wave mavericks Palais Schaumburg by playing crucial roles in
3MB—a techno supergroup with Juan Atkins and Basic
Channel’s Moritz Von Oswald—and the blissful ambient
dub/techno outfits Sun Electric and the Orb, while also
maintaining a successful solo career. He’s become one of the esteemed
Kompakt label’s most revered producers, thanks to excellent works like
the Visions of Blah and Honigpumpe full-lengths and
contributions to the Total, Schaffelfieber (with the
Orb), and Pop Ambient compilations. Lowflow, Fehlmann’s
2004 LP on Plug Research, proved he excels at what can reasonably be
called dubhop, as well.

While Fehlmann’s forte is über-danceable, subliminally dubby
minimal, he shows versatility with lush, swirling ambient cuts and
heavier, shuffle-rhythm techno. As a live performer, the bald,
bespectacled Fehlmann dances his svelte Teutonic ass off while whipping
crowds into their own blur of swaying limbs. The fiftysomething
beatmeister stays in constant motion behind his laptop, proving against
odds to be a phenomenally riveting entertainer. For Broken Disco, he’ll
be focusing on the dubbier end of his repertoire.

By contrast, Poirier’s music is about the radical rupture and
contort-your-face bass pressure. Working increasingly with MCs
(including Seattle’s DJ Collage and Anti-Pop Consortium’s
Beans), Poirier shoves rap into some aural avenues down which it
rarely creeps. Purists may scowl at the tracks on 2005’s
Breakupdown and 2007’s No Ground Under, but Poirier
vitally scrambles hiphop’s rhythmic atoms in his international genre
(s)mashups. The new Soca Sound System EP finds Poirier exploring
rambunctious Caribbean rhythms and boisterous, alpha-male vocal
cadences. It’s music to jump through the ceiling to.

Finally, don’t sleep on Miami’s Romulo Del Castillo, a member
of experimental-electro units Soul Oddity and Phoenecia.