Data Breaker

Made Like a Tree‘s Struggle (Shawn Kralicek) and
D’jeronimo (Jeremy Grant) aren’t content with being two of
Seattle’s finest DJs. Now they’re hell-bent on hosting one of the
region’s reigning websites, www.madelikeatree.com.

Backing up a bit, the duo oversaw the elite techno weekly Oi
Vey! at Baltic Room in 2007–08 and held a brief residency
till August at the defunct Clubhouse, where they threw some of that
underground venue’s most transcendent dance parties with their
selection of soulful, cerebral techno and house cuts. They
currently get deep and eclectic on the decks every Tuesday at Grey
Gallery, where you might hear early Traffic, mid-’70s Herbie
Hancock, French disco obscurity El Coco, or the latest 12s
on Hessle Audio and DC Recordings freshening up the chic
Capitol Hill bar/lounge from 8:00 p.m. to midnight. Ascend the stairs
and chat with these personable heads, and they’ll gush about what
they’re spinning, as well as stuff like Tim Lawrence’s disco-history
tome Love Saves the Day or Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of
Western Civilization documentaries.

Made Like a Tree’s website fruitfully augments their vital real-life
activities. Podcasts by Seattle techno maverick Jon McMillion and Montreal experimental-techno don Dave Aju reveal
M>L>A>T’s left-field yet hedonistic aesthetics. The latter
coup underscores the collective’s desire to curate future mixes from
people like DJ Qu and other global luminaries. Watch out,
Resident Advisor.

“The music chosen for this project is sometimes fun, sometimes
brood-ing, sometimes sexy, but always forward-thinking,” reads the
M>L>A>T mission statement. “Made Like a Tree is for people
who want to use the dance floor for dancing more than foreplay, for
people who want to invite conversation instead of oblivion, for people
who want a unique experience instead of a replay of the Top 40
playlist.”

•••

Back in February, I reviewed Ya No Mas‘s Straight Up Hussl
Hussl CD-R, calling it “fun, but it also cavalierly fucks around
with frequencies in a way that recalls iconoclastic Schematic artists
like Push Button Objects and Phoenecia.” Now YNM
counterpunches with the full-length Cloud City Sound (Pleasure Boat Records), and the local producer is delving deeper into
electro’s more rarefied realms. The textures are even stranger and
more exotic than those on his previous disc. Fun? Not as
much. But overall, Cloud City Sound is more aesthetically
satisfying.

Although this album is more of a home-listening/headphone work than
a collection of explicitly party-friendly choons, Cloud City
Sound is no sonic killjoy. Ya No Mas’s music seemingly will always
bear danceability in its DNA. However, he strives not to make you move
with obvious tricks from a genre lousy with practitioners who’ve been
spinning their wheels for years. Ya No Mas’s questing spirit and
off-kilter creativity ensure that he’ll continue to evolve in the
electro field, even as most of his peers prefer to lazily retrace
former glories.