Idjut Boys & Time Sweeney Billed For The Garden Festival 2013
Croatia’s founding festival is back as The Garden Festival reaches its 8th season
Live acts so far are Crazy P, Auntie Flo, Outboxx, Paqua, Land Of Light and Face and Heel with more to be announced• First wave of DJs includes Floating Points, Eats Everything, Thugfucker, Krystal Klear, Theo Parish, Soul Clap, Idjut Boys and Wolf and Lamb• Psychemagik, Young Marco, Maurice Fulton, Bicep, Crazy P, Greg Wilson, Huxley, Eric Duncan, DJ Nature, Tim Sweeney, Maxxi Soundsystem, Toby Tobias, Deep Space Orchestra, PBR Streetgang and many more feature too• Argonaughty and Barbarellas shows are curated by Just Jack, Beats in Space, Resident Advisor, Futureboogie Recordings, Tief, Leftfoot and more.
"You’d have to be an idjut not to pick this CD up"
“Cellar Door” (Idjut Boys)
Their moniker notwithstanding, when it comes to music making, the duo of Daniel Tyler and Conrad McConnell are whip smart. Their new album, Cellar Door,” is a surprising collection of eight songs that transcend the mundane playlists that other DJs get away with. Firmly rooted in dance music but with a deep echo chamber and delay, their songs vacillate between garage band realness and glorious, soaring soundscapes that are, simply put, bad ass. The two admit that, “What we’ve tried to do is make an LP, four tracks a side on vinyl,” said Conrad. “You stick it on your stereo, have a cup of coffee and read the paper. When it’s finished you stick the other side on. So we’ve make an LP in the traditional way.” Bugge Wesseltoft plays the Steinway and Grace Jones bassist Malcolm Joseph jump in for the banging instrumental track, “One for Kenny,” in honor of the late Kenny Hawkes. In cuts like this, the tradition they have seized on seems to be dramatic action-adventure movie soundtracks. It would best be described as the personal soundtrack that plays in Samuel L. Jackson’s head whenever he walks onto the set of a new blockbuster film. From the intro salvo, “Rabass,” which draws you into the listening experience with its catchy acoustic guitar, to “Shine,” with the soaring voice of Sally Rodgers from A Man Called Adam, the album is pure cool. She returns to great effect in “Going Down,” a song that evokes Erasure remixes, with its sweeping electronic riffs studded with guitar. Rodgers shines again in “The Way I Like It,” another lush, electronic soundscape recorded in Cornwall, with Rodgers singing, “Trust in me and I won’t let you down.” Tyler notes that this is a great song to, “take your partner by the hand and caress each other via this piece of musicality.” They admit they named their quirky track “Love Hunter” after a Japanese cowboy shoe, pointy with buckles, which seems apropos as the song is a messy of disco and progressive rock, with George Double on the drums. They bring a reggae feel to the forefront in “Le Wasuk,” a trancey, sometimes frenetic instrumental track with Wesseltoft again on piano and Hammond, and Andy Hopkins on guitar. “It’s an ode to [Jamaican jazz pianist] Monty Alexander if we were dreaming hard,” said Taylor, noting that they also recorded a vocal version with a musician called Dollar from the Dominican Republican. With a flourish of electric guitar, they launch into “Jazz Axe,” a sad, short tune that only leaves the listener wanting more. You’d have to be an idjut not to pick this CD up.
Idjut Boys ”Cellar Door” was released July ’12 on Smalltown Supersound
"Cellar Door is a frozen moment, a triumph and an oddity"
The recent resurgence in Balearic pop music is a contender for the most innocuous trend redux of 2012. Forthcoming efforts from mainstays like Mungolian Jetset, Woolfy vs. Projections, and Windsurf exhibit an enthusiasm for the sound even though the spotlight has turned elsewhere. Newcomers Poolside prove that outsiders haven’t lost interest, even if their debut album mostly just remind us of the halcyon days of 2007-08 when both Air France and Studio were going concerns. The Idjut Boys were content to let that last wave of attention pass them by, popping up mostly on remixes and some EPs, but they’re the OGs of this very particular game, clocking 12″s as far back as 1993.
The duo– Londoners Daniel Tyler and Conrad McDonnell– would rightly bristle at being lumped in with any kind of movement, because when you’ve been making music for 18 or 19 years, you’re likely to have made enough of it differently, even if just to you, that such label tags will seem extra silly. They’ve crafted a career of dance music that has steadfastly avoided the prevailing dance paradigms– house, techno– of their day. For the last half-decade or so they’ve hovered around the Smalltown Supersound galaxy in an uncle-shaped saucer, steering artists like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and Mungolian via remixes and collaborations. They specialize in lightweight bodyrock, not explicitly beachy but breezy enough to serve as a proxy.
Cellar Door is, shockingly, their first artist album, a 38-minute tart that wisely avoids the temptation to sum or define their career. (Though might I humbly request a collection of 12″s/remixes, friends?) Instead, it’s a idly stitched collection of funk, disco, and pop so unassuming that its lack of coherence feels like a virtue. Eight-song records feel like they should have a center, something to talk and build around, but Cellar Door’s keeps shifting, like light moving on the floor as the day progresses. The first single, “One for Kenny”, is the album’s most danceable track, candy disco that moves at the same pace as a comforting lava lamp. Halfway through it eases (there are no sharp movements on Cellar Door) into a gorgeous, jazzy piano line. It feels like someone draped a warm blanket over the track.
Two long vocal ballads– “Shine” and the “The Way I Like It”, both featuring Sally Rodgers– are well-formed and tender. The latter, in particular, details an appreciative lust, thankful and tense until its beautiful, windswept second half. “Going Down” and “Love Hunter” employ ringing acoustic guitars, harmonic complexity coloring standard rhythms. “Le Wasuk”‘s proggy, diffuse raggae is the only true misstep, and the Idjut Boys redeem themselves with sunset-beautiful “Jazz Axe”, two minutes of honeyed electric guitar to close the album.
Churls will indict Cellar Door for a lack of coherence, but the Idjut Boys have built a career on a lack of coherence. Dance versions of these tracks are reportedly forthcoming, and they’ll probably be great. Cellar Door, though, is a frozen moment, a triumph and an oddity. Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.
"Oft-delayed, long-overdue, but quietly, subtly worth the wait"
This is the Idjut Boys’ first album. Seriously. They ain’t exactly been idle over the years, but that still seems hard to fathom. With output spanning almost 20 years of dance music, the duo—Dan Tyler and Connie McConnell—have been Beardo Renaissance men of a sort, between assorted twelves, edits, an album with Rune Lindbaek as two-thirds of the Meanderthals in 2009 and a series of high-profile mixes perhaps topped by their Press Play set for Tirk in 2005.
For Cellar Door, the Idjuts return to Smalltown Supersound, the home of their album as Meanderthals, and, as they’ve mentioned in interviews, set out to make the kind of double-sided LP you can savor over morning coffee; savor, flip, return to your waffles to revel in side two. And in doing so, the two has mostly forsaken the dance-end of their kaleidoscopic pedigree. This is music designed for the slow creep of first light, whether you’re just waking to mark its passing or are at the bleary end of a footloose night. Unsurprisingly given their solo material and edit work to date, the album’s a loose, meandering collection of heat dazed slo-mo disco, stoner dub and Balearic rock, arranged in a loping narrative.
For much of the record, Sally Rodgers acts not so much as anchor but more as a kind of smeared, blurry accoutrement for the duo’s jammy, journey-struck outings. She’s a soft focus guide of sorts through the glare. There are spacious strum-alongs like “Rabass” or “Jazz Axe” bookending the dubby, fuzzy half-dissolved rock of the Rodgers-led “Shine,” the Ibiza’d Fleetwood Mac strut of “Going Down,” or the crawl-bass and sky bent guitar work of “The Way I Like It.” There’s the wonky, drug-spent “Le Wasuk,” which begins a slow piano warm up before spreading into this strange electronic spazz-waltz of sorts. There’s the excellent expansive rock of “Lovehunter,” which kind of amazingly sounds like something Roy Harper would have made had he fronted a Balearic disco outfit.
In fact the only thing on Cellar Door that leans remotely floor-ward is lead single “One for Kenny,” with its muscular bass roll, strident synth peals, scratchy guitar and funky piano work courtesy of Bugge Wesseltoft. It’s the rare accelerant here on an album bent on steady heartbeats, the pace of nights at home or reading soundtracks. It may be the duo’s debut, but it works as a perfect companion piece to the drifting pleasures of their work as Meanderthals. Oft-delayed, long-overdue, but quietly, subtly worth the wait.
Words /
Derek Miller
Tracklist: Idjut Boys – Cellar Door
01. Rabass
02. Shine
03. One for Kenny
04. Going Down
05. The Way I Like It
06. Love Hunter
07. Le Wasuk
08. Jazz Axe
