- Seth Troxler and Phil Moffa embark on another tripped-out adventure with horn players and vocalists in tow.
- Seth Troxler has a lot going on. In addition to being a popular DJ, he runs multiple labels, owns a food business and raises his children during the week in between gigs all around the world. That kind of schedule doesn't always leave much room for production, but Lost Souls Of Saturn, his long-term collaborative project with Phil Moffa, is special, so he makes time for it. As Troxler told me last year, it's a sort of legacy project—a multi-hyphenate art piece, not a mere 12-inch.
Troxler's DJ sets may linger in the memories of tens of thousands of people, but he's more concerned about his work outliving both his fans and himself. He wants something to hang on a gallery wall somewhere, or in a collector's art storage, music to be performed in front of other pieces of art. Lost Souls Of Saturn's music is more cerebral than their solo productions. Crucially, it keeps Troxler's druggy swagger and sense of humour, with the killer production values and genre-hopping muse of Moffa. This is serious music that doesn't take itself too seriously.
But it does take itself somewhat seriously. Condensed into 44 dense but catchy minutes, the duo's second album, Reality, also comes with a larger augmented reality experience that includes an interactive comic. (The comic is, if nothing else, entertaining and well drawn, and the technology around it feels spiffy and new.) Like the last LP, Reality concerns itself with hefty themes (epistemology, capitalism) and takes influence from the likes of Adam Curtis and Wassily Kandinsky. It tells a story of two hackers called John and Frank (avatars for Moffa and Troxler), though you probably won't pick that up from the music. This is only for those who really dig into the multimedia project—Reality is meant to work on multiple levels. As an album, though, the duo said they tried to "reach out" to regular music fans after getting the museum creators and art world figures in with the first one.
As such, Reality ends up playing with a populist and high-art dichotomy. Any fan of Troxler's going back to his Boogybytes mix CD will probably enjoy this collection of weirdo, muggy grooves, but the jazzy instrumentation and leisurely pace of the record remind me of some of Francis Harris's mid-'10s masterpieces. It's all warm analogue glow and perfect mixdowns, like dance music made to be heard at a Japanese listening bar. Greg Paulus, who also works with Harris, plays on both artists' records, and in addition to his trusty trumpet, Ravi Shankar-trained sitarist Rishab Sharma appears, plus a handful of vocalists including Lvv Gun, Adam Ohr and Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr. The rotating cast lends Reality a communal feel, with Moffa and Troxler's pulsating grooves acting more like a canvas for their collaborators to scribble on than the main attraction.
That's both good and bad. The album's opening section is especially lovely, rising from a murmur into the overheated dub of "Scram City," before diving into the dark depths with "Realization," which calls back to when Lost Souls Of Saturn was still an ambient-leaning project. These are leisurely, seductive grooves, especially the backmasked skank of "Scram City," but the atmosphere is expertly punctured by "This Foo," a track that quite literally sounds like ketamine dissociation, with rhythms crumbling all around and high-pitched voices snickering in the periphery.
"This Foo" is entertaining, and one of Troxler's best dance-ish productions in some time (along with the topsy-turvy "Metro Cafe"), but it also completely changes the vibe of the album from a smooth ride into something bumpy and jarring. "Click"'s sultry yet unnerving torch song from Lvv Gun pulls things back into order. She sings about "strange smells coming from the vent" over impressive jungle-lite drums. I don't really know what the song is about, but it doesn't matter.
The LP ends with two vocal tracks that hint at bygone eras. "Mirage," featuring a vocalist named Adam Ohr, is a dead ringer for imperial-era Art Department—its sticky, bassy house groove sits alongside an almost absurdly deep vocal—but the chorus, "How did you get yourself back in this place again," with a sweeping brass section, has a level of grandeur almost worthy of Madonna's Ray Of Light. Like so much of Troxler's work, it balances humour and pathos with the gravitas that only someone who has experienced extreme ups and downs could pull off. It feels personal.
Reality is available as both individual tracks and a continuous mix, which says something important: Lost Souls Of Saturn don't do things by half measures. They've basically tried to make their own Dark Side Of The Moon, and they've invested a lot of resources, financially, energetically and technologically, into it. But the LP is also surprisingly approachable given its laundry list of ideas. Sounding almost like a career-spanning look at each producer's musical life, it's the kind of record you make at the top of your game when you have basically everything you could want at your fingertips—a dicey situation for popular musicians whose ambitions can get the best of them. Fortunately, Reality lives up to its creators' reputations, epic and humble all at once.
Tracklist01. Zorg Arrival
02. Scram City
03. Realization
04. This Foo
05. Click feat. Lvv Gvn
06. Metro Cafe
07. Mirage feat. Adam Ohr
08. Lilac Chaser feat. Protomartyr