- The Dutch artist delivers another exciting objection to what she calls "one-dimensional" techno and house.
- When Marcelle Van Hoof isn't experimenting with her gear, she's typically playing abroad on three turntables, making a home out of every set-up with a vase of flowers and an extensive record collection. The Dutch artist is driven by spontaneity during these gigs, where she'll often feel out an unfamiliar song's soft and loud sections just by eyeing the grooves in the vinyl. She applies the same improvisational spirit to her own music. In a recent interview, she explained that she rarely reads the manuals for her equipment, but prefers instead to rely on her ear and sense of rhythm. Given her intuitive ability to make connections between various genres and cultures, her productions are often compared to her whirlwind DJ sets, where she says, "there are always people that go crazy because of euphoria".
Taking cues from tribal, dub and acid, Marcelle's debut album, One Place For The First Time, proved that her off-the-cuff method works. Her latest LP, Saturate The Market, Now!, seems to take the most out-there elements of that record and develop them further. Marcelle is at her best when she's having fun, and her love for play and mischief colors every track, right down to the song titles. Take the album's thrilling opener, "Community Garden Plan Schedule Idea Exchange." This one's a chaotic mashup of bird caws, seesaw drones, a galloping drum pattern and a continuous dialogue between a mischievous voice, asking "Are you ready for your turn now?", and the horrified response: "No, no, no, no, no!" "Everything Not Yet" sounds like a wonky theme song for a sitcom, if all the sounds had been isolated and unevenly stitched together again. There are moments that sound like she's desperately trying to mix two tracks together, but the beat keeps lagging. In the world of DJing this would be called train-wrecking, but in the hands of DJ Marcelle it's satisfying and hypnotic.
When Marcelle opts for more stripped down sounds, Saturate The Market, Now!, feels like it's missing the groove and charm of its predecessor. "Technicians And Their Light Effects," for example—presumably the sequel to the previous album's "Technicians And Their Smoke Machines"—feels too rigid and repetitive. But at the end of the day, Marcelle's album is another exciting objection to what she calls "one-dimensional" techno and house, and it has a comedic appeal that's hard to resist.
In the music video for "Everything Not Yet," a scruffy stuffed gorilla perches a ledge above eight brightly-colored and smiling toys. As the track's rhythm buckles and lags, the toy tumbles facedown in slow motion, creating a domino effect as it knocks over a poshly dressed doll and a four-headed wooden figurine. I couldn't help but smile watching this, thinking this is exactly what Marcelle does with her music: present pleasant oddities and knock them down.
Tracklist01. Community Garden Plan Schedule Idea Exchange
02. My Own Cesspit!
03. Everything Not Yet
04. Indecisive
05. This Works For Me
06. Brutalist Beauty
07. Technicians And Their Light Effects
08. Wet Again
09. German Bread
10. Applause Please