- The long-awaited debut album from one of techno's most beloved improvisers is a weightless trip through the cosmos.
- Jordan Czamanski and Terrence Dixon feel like kindred spirits. Across their long and varied careers, both have remained dedicated to coaxing understated (and often strange) dance music from their arsenal of machines. Thanks to some matchmaking from Antal, the two began working together in 2019 in an almost wordless jam session that resulted in an EP, Outnumbered. It's easy to see the fit—the A-side is vintage Detroit techno (Czamanski is a Midwesterner by birth, after all) while the flip is all pulsing synths beamed in from the outer reaches of the cosmos. As part of their ongoing collaboration, Czamanski is now releasing his debut LP on Dixon's Minimal Detroit Audio. My Brain's Brain wanders further into the stratosphere with gravity free ambient and jazz improvisation folding themselves into the Israeli's brand of analogue house and techno.
As should be clear from the William Gibson and Star Wars references in the track titles, this is an album that wears its sci-fi references on its (literal) sleeve. While there are plenty of drums, they're usually secondary to the dense stereo fields of eerie synth bleeps that evoke the cold austerity of deep space. These are classic techno tropes, sure, but there's also something theatrical about how he deploys them—"Alienation Ditty," for example, is closer to Fantasia than Blade Runner. Things get even campier with the Rhodes Fender line buried deep in "It's Chinatown," and the delectable guitar picking on "One Note Ain't Always Enough" (something we haven't heard Czamanski do since Juju & Jordash's Sis-Boom-Bah!). Although Czamanski can occasionally project cranky uncle vibes—just listen to the tirade about "economies of hands-in-the-air" dance music in this podcast—My Brain's Brain is a reminder of how fun the fringes of the galaxy can sound.
Czamanski's taste for melodic noodling goes back to his jazz roots. In a recent interview, he tried to describe the new LP's genre and got stumped—"I mean, to me it’s all techno, it’s all house, it’s all jazz."
As both a trained jazz pianist and half of, as Andrew Ryce memorably put it, "techno's most popular jam band," Czamanski has always drawn his own Venn Diagram, but his releases as Jordan GCZ have tended to be straight-up club tracks (even the 15-minute "Fission Transmission" eventually earns a kick drum). As anyone keeping up with his prolific streams on YouTube may have clocked, however, Czamanski hasn't really been thinking about the club lately. Good luck to anyone who tries to play the album's centerpiece, "Who Spiked The Cantina Band?" out—it's full-on free jazz made with synthesizers.
The DJ-friendly tracks have a few unexpected twists, too. The slinky, modulated bassline and angelic chords on "Terrace House Love" are deep house crowd pleasers, but the twisting arpeggio may be a bit too too eerie for the open air crowd. The same is true of the record's grooviest track, "Science Funk." That staggered snare and hi-hat pattern are moreish, but the flute crescendo that ends the track—think Fred P remixing Kenny G—is probably not to everyone's taste. Both "Bah Bah Rhodes" and the album's sole techno track, "Mining The Moon," play it a bit straighter, but Czamanski has no problem dropping the drums out and bringing them back only sporadically to end the song.
Czamanski has released plenty of LPs over the course of his two-decade career, though always as a collaborator, while releasing one-off solo 12-inches on his Off Minor label as breaks between major projects with a rotating cast of characters, from Shawn Rudiman to his longtime sparring partners David Moufang and Gal Aner. Lockdown changed all of that for Czamanski, forcing him to spend more time in his studio alone, recording, by his telling, hundreds of tracks. My Brain's Brain is a welcome portrait of Czamanski slowing things down and leaving behind the laws of earthly physics.
Tracklist01. Burning Chrome
02. Zero Gravity Blanket
03. It's Chinatown
04. Terrace House Love
05. Digital Worlds
06. Science Funk
07. Mining the Moon
08. One Note Ain't Always Enough
09. Alienation Ditty
10. Who Spiked The Cantina Band?
11. Bah Bah Rhodes
12. A Walk In The Park