Ray Okpara - Loving Moonbuah

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  • The best of the deep house revival has been extraordinarily pleasant music, which makes it almost impossible to identify what it does so well. Taken out of the context of the set of your favorite warm-up DJ, this stuff could just as easily be soundtracking your decision to go with the beige or red dish cloth at your local Pottery Barn. Let's face it: Oftentimes if you traded an Indian sample for someone talking about how real this house sound is, we'd be pretty close to Buddha Bar territory. Drumpoet Community rides this uncomfortable line with each release, and Ray Okpara knows it. Hidden on the flipside of this 12-inch is a man (Okpara himself?) talking about how "deep house sounds stiiiiiiiiiiill sweeeeet." The monologue gets increasingly funny and stream-of-consciousness-heavy as the track goes on, but it's a one-note conceptual gag ala "Techno Vocals," bound to infuriate and delight in equal measure. Like Houle's joke, the actual track is conceptual rigorous—a brilliant example of the form it's sending-up. Lovely dubby chords float over some suitably in-the-pocket drum programming. I'm still not sure whether it's brilliant or terrible. Then again, I'm still listening to it, which I suppose is the point. On the front side, however, things aren't quite so funny. Okpara plays directly into the clichés he acknowledges on "Please" on "Loving Moonbuah." Tribal vocals, some congas and an unimaginative bass-and-drum combo work the magic of staying ignorable for more than seven minutes. Like Nekes' remix, which graces the flip with "Please," it's a track that revels in its stasis, waiting for something, anything to take it elsewhere. These two tunes are exemplars of this mini-genre based on stasis, a transition to or from—Johnny D's "Orbitalife" started as a segue, after all—and, as a result, sounds like the most boring thing in the world outside of the context of a DJ set. Put it in a Pottery Barn, though? Soma.
  • Tracklist
      A Loving Moonbuah B1 Loving Moonbuah (Nekes Rmx) B2 Please
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