Prima Edizione

text

New Jersey garage producer Todd Edwards is widely acknowledged to have exercised a formative influence over the UK underground scene. While some British artists (e.g. Tuff Jam) continue to emulate his funky disco basslines and bustling lo-fi beats, it is Edwards' sampling technique which has proved most influential across the spectrum of UK garage, linking his work with the 'vocal science' so apparent in 2-step. Like many producers on both sides of the Atlantic, Edwards sources most of his samples in 1970s disco. However, rather than extracting bar-long loops in the manner of DJ Sneak et al, Edwards' preference is for tiny fragments of vocal and instrumental texture, which are stitched together in long, ragged, jump-cut skeins. The result is a bubbling, shifting, uneven sort of sound, full of unexpected ruptures, sudden jerks, dizzying plunges into the internal workings of Edwards' production technique. This is a far cry from the slick, masterful opacity aimed at by many US garage artists - in many ways it has more in common with the deliberately abject practices of the best contemporary electroacousticians. With the obvious exception of Terre Thaemlitz, though, few artists working in the latter field are as sensitive as Edwards is to the affective properties of melodic, populist dance music, the multifold possibilities which exist for creative realignment of these supposedly 'debased' materials. And yet it is from precisely this unembarrassed openness to 'cheese', to the unconstrained expression of human longing, that Prima Edizione derives the breathless, hyper-emotional quality which ultimately makes it so compelling. It's as if one's brain, attempting to process each impassioned gasp and swooning string-pulse for specific emotional content, is in the end incapable of generating anything other than a vertiginous wash of objectless feeling, a near-Ecstatic jouissance without referents. "I love disco / I'm never never gonna let them go" exclaims one voice, ambiguously and slightly scarily, on 'Steal Your Heart': listening to Prima Edizione, we know exactly what she means.