- A hitchhiker's guide to the Sex Tags universe.
- For over a decade, the brothers Mitterer (AKA DJ Sotofett and DJ Fett Burger) have built one of dance music's most singular and complex ecosystems. Centered on their Sex Tags Mania label and their own collaborations and aliases, they've released everything from obscure reissues of Norwegian disco to a locked groove attributed to a TR-909 machine to a recent remix pack from Jennifer Loveless. Their productions move between dub, bleep, disco and house, sometimes in the course of a single track. Trying to get a foothold is a bit like getting dropped into a Real Housewives reunion episode and trying to piece together the drama. Luckily, for those not interested in keeping a million Discogs tabs open, Fett Burger has teamed up with fellow weirdo Dama for Emotional Tripper, a record that distills everything good about the Sex Tags multiverse onto two discs.
The A-side is like a Sex Tags thesis statement. About halfway through the tech house swing of "Elle (Percussion 404 Viiibe Mix)," the rolling hand drums break down into starts and stutters and a barrage of 303 squelches. But as quickly as it fragments into haunted acid flashbacks, the track slowly reassembles into a groove. Fett Burger & Dama invert this pattern on "Elektronic New York," one of the best tracks on the record. It's a bit like their take on Bunker New York-style techno: the lead arpeggio is psychedelic and cerebral, but lest things get too trippy, they mix in spacious hand claps that keep the track tethered to reality.
Emotional Tripper balances off-piste goofiness with straight-up beauty and functionality, harkening back to some of the best collaborations in the Sex Tags catalogue. The pair are particularly good at smuggling emotive melodies into their fraying hardware circuitry. The Italo synths on "Senza Paura" are bright and brilliant, but the low-end sounds like it's coming through a waterlogged iPhone still drying out in a bowl of rice. At the end of scuzzy breakbeat track "Sirius (X35-7)," there's a killer steel drum melody and the murky layers of dub on "N9 (Arte Rumero 7 Version)" slowly reveal an earworm horn line.
Fett Burger's tracks tend to be primed for the daylight hours, ideal for the open air and a backpack speaker in a park. But for a few tracks on Emotional Tripper, he and Dama also take a cue from Sotofett's playbook (check his ongoing work with LNS or this absolute classic with Madteo). Fett Burger can also get a bit dark. "FX Arkalia Sun (Unconscious State)" has some pillowy pads, sure, but the track closes in on itself with an industrial chug coming into focus like a ghost ship on the horizon. And when the duo nod to trance on "Disco Storia (Fizz Trance)," it's surprisingly tough with a driving bassline and anxious bleeps, before it eventually dissolves into arcade game kitsch.
In one of his few interviews, Fett Burger explained to Finn Johannsen how while growing up in the coastal Norwegian town of Moss, he and his brother would spend their free time drawing and listening to one of Norway's three radio stations, NRK P3. The station played everything from funk, disco and house to techno, hip-hop and downtempo, introducing the brothers to alternative music without any genre elitism or snobbery (like a cooler, Norwegian version of Columbia House where I once got a Godsmack, Bikini Kill and Shania Twain CD for $1). Emotional Tripper is like NRK P3 reimagined for the streaming era. All those references and genres are compressed into an hour-long record that dances breezily and funkily across the dial.
TracklistA1 Intro One
A2 Elle (Percussion 404 Viiibe Mix)
A3 Ellesse (Afterhour Dub Out)
B1 Electronic New York
B2 FX Arkalia Sun (Unconscious State)
C1 Fibonacci's Interlude
C2 Senza Paura
C3 Disco Storia (Fizz Trance)
D1 N9 (Arte Rumero 7 Version)
D2 Sirius (X35-7)
D3 Servi Outro