Jacek Sienkiewicz - Modern Dance

JACEK SIENKIEWICZ - MODERN DANCE (COCOON)

A Polish producer making minimal techno on a German DJ’s label fashioned out of a club that started in Ibiza. It’s all very 21st century Europe isn’t it. As I write this, it’s 20 years since the Iron Curtain began to crumble and give way, and we’re faced with a burgeoning dance music culture allied to some sort of vague idea about individual freedom, but ultimately is about nothing at all, and it feels all so neutered.

This is perhaps being very harsh on Mr Sienkiewicz, whose album was released on an anniversary that I myself keenly felt being a student of history, and whose music veers toward a sensible approximation of Robert Hood’s golden era of minimal techno, but without its true singularity and a tendency to follow patterns and paths established by older, more experienced producers without really standing out. Put simply, it’s all rather “I’ve heard this before” and somewhat generic and not helped by my current state of mind with regard to what techno sounds like now. As a straight up mindless hour’s journey of minimal techno to listen to whilst commuting, I doubt you could go wrong with “Modern Dance” (my wild and somewhat unrealistic imagination had perhaps envisaged a Polish re-interpretation of the Pere Ubu classic with drum machines), as it fulfils I suspect what Sienkiewicz has set out to produce. It’s got peaks and troughs, the odd bit of melody, a consistent groove, detailed soundscapes and time for a bit of what sounds like a smoky jazz section with Moodyman-esque crowd samples just so you know that it’s not all mindless techno coming out of the former Eastern Bloc. It fits together seamlessly, but it lacks individuality and identity, merging like the tracks on the album into a growing mass of producers who, apart from atomised levels of detail, sound the same.

To my mind it sums up much of what is wrong with how this aspect of European dance music has evolved, and the trouble is that it’s very difficult to stop it, because it spreads like the fucking plague if you pardon my language. If it’s not the same software, it’s the internet itself and the avalanche in the transmission of musical memes and ideas that percolate through the EU, infecting everyone with the same not-quite jacking beat, the inability to find any sort of conclusion to the music, and the relentless attachment to a rolling groove that producers seem to be locked into endlessly listening to, drummed up in a manner of minutes by all the software and hardware that they have on their hands, linked together by some sort of vague search for hedonism, albeit wearing a pair of sunglasses. And I guarantee that it will be picked over endlessly by blogsters like myself struggling to put together 400 words on essentially what are some drum machines and some noises. This is harsh, but given the quality of Sienkiewicz’s early releases, a problem I feel needs to be addressed. Music needs isolation, particularly with ideas, and the current situation means that homogenity is inevitable. Can we raise the barriers for a while? If you’re a techno producer reading this, go and lock yourself away for a bit and don’t come out. Do a Drexciya. Hermitic techno is probably our only hope.

Toby Frith