Just who are the “agents of time” in the title of Mathew Jonson’s new album? Is it a reference to futurism, or to the here and now? Is it us, are we them? Maybe it’s a nod to all the elements that factor into getting older—late nights, breakups, trans-Atlantic flights. Oxidants, fatty acids and dancefloor revelations. Maybe it’s something in the circuitry of Jonson’s vintage hardware, something built up in the veins of his machines over the years of static charge and oscillators and ADSR.
Whatever the case, it’s a suitably open-ended name for a record that presents a side of Mathew Jonson you’ve never heard before.
Not to say that the Berlin-based producer has ever been exactly one-dimensional. On his own, as a member of Cobblestone Jazz, and as a co-founder of the Wagon Repair label, Jonson has continually pushed and prodded electronic dance music’s familiar forms into more distinctive shapes, without ever losing focus on the dancefloor. But the visceral, psychoactive thrills of his biggest tracks—2004’s “Decompression,” “Return of the Zombie Bikers”—have sometimes eclipsed the deeper side of Jonson’s music. Agents of Time remedies that, building upon his signature sound by veering into slower, more expansive, more contemplative territory.
It might come as a surprise to learn that this is Jonson’s debut solo album. He’s been a major figure on the scene almost since the moment he emerged on Itiswhatitis in 2001, with hotly tipped singles for Perlon and Minus quickly raising his profile. Since then, he’s turned out 20-odd singles and EPs, plus remixes for the Chemical Brothers, Moby, Swayzak and even Nelly Furtado. Add to that another nine singles and two albums with Cobblestone Jazz, plus two more EPs with Midnight Operator (Jonson’s duo with his brother Nathan Jonson, aka Hrdvsion) and the Modern Deep Left Quartet. He keeps busy.
Despite all that activity, Agents of Time finds Jonson sounding intensely focused, even as he displays more range than ever before. The very first track, “Love in the Future,” wipes the slate clean with five minutes of pensive, cycling synthesizer arpeggios set to a sparse drum machine pattern hovering around 100BPM—the kind of pace they used to call andante, or “walking” tempo. It’s ambient, but ambient with a decided pulse.
A more familiar side of Jonson returns to the fore with a stretch of cuts aimed squarely at the floor. “Girls Got Rhythm” outfits a loose, swinging groove with a bright, sidewinding arpeggio—something about its stacked harmonies and weird modal twists tingles the spine, practically sets your teeth on edge, but in a good way. It’s a classic Jonson move, jangling your nerves with an unusually full-spectrum assault. “Thieves in Digital Land” is darker and more driving, with a snakecharming melody recalling earlier, Eastern-tinged tracks like “Symphony for the Apocalypse” and “Return of the Zombie Bikers.” But there’s a real sense of melancholy here, too, as shimmering synthesizer pads bubble up underneath, balancing visceral funk with something harder to put your finger on, something that feels a lot like loss. And then “Sunday Disco Romance” shrugs off its worries and dives into almost eight minutes of pure funk, a giddy sprawl of handclaps, flashing disco hi-hats and a bass/vocoder line that winks in the direction of Michael Jackson.
“Marionette (The Beginning)” switches up the pace once again. The song will be familiar to many, having first appeared in 2005. But as the title indicates, this is actually an earlier version, one Jonson initially deemed not appropriate for a 12″ release. A funny thing happens here: without the cascading synthesizers of the now-familiar version, the tune opens up, revealing previously unheard depths in the bubbling arpeggio and diamond-sharp drum programming. It’s more hypnotic than ever.
From here, the horizon blows wide open, reminding you that Jonson’s musical interests don’t lie solely in the club—that this is an album that rewards deep listening at all volumes, in any context. It’s an album that adapts to different settings and molds itself to your mood. It is, in other words, an album.
“Night Vision” finds Jonson exploring sub-100BPM depths with a brooding, modal melody and glacially-paced 808s suggesting cryogenic electro, or a funeral march for an Ice Age B-Boy. “Pirates in the 9th” is almost as slow, and considerably darker, with a nodding groove and a dubbed-out, subsonic shudder. Just barely nudging past the 100BPM marker again, “New Model Robots” swings slowly, but with intent; between nimble drum programming inspired by classic boom-bap and plaintive synthesizer counterpoints, it connects the dots between RZA’s Ghost Dog score and Autechre’s early work in surprising ways.
The album goes out with a bang—and a whisper. First is the whisper, “When Love Feels Like Crying.” Previously released on vinyl as the B-side to “Walking on the Hands that Follow Me”, a release that minimaland has reviewed, it’s been remastered specifically for digital formats, and the difference is striking: even if you know the track, you may be convinced that it’s a new version. Cycling for almost 10 minutes around a melody that never seems to resolve itself, it’s a profoundly mournful track, but it’s never maudlin. Something about its open-endedness, and the way it cloaks its frequencies, smuggling sounds under cover of filters and reverb, renders it unusually ambiguous. It’s mood music for a feeling you can’t name.
And then the bang: “Agents of Time” pulls all the threads of the record together. The unease, the release, the force, the funk, the use of every frequency, from gut-rumbling sub-bass to highs that tickle in your ear canal. It rolls it all up into an eight-minute journey to the outer limits—kosmische synthesizer music reconfigured to techno specifications, and yet freed from a 4/4 kick. It’s a powerful conclusion to a stunning stretch of computer-music songwriting, and an indication that Jonson has his sights set even farther in the distance, his ears trained on sounds humming faintly in the recesses of his analogue circuitry.
Tracklist:
01 Love in the Future
02 Girls Got Rhythm
03 Thieves in Digital Land
04 Sunday Disco Romance
05 Marionette (the beginning)
07 Night Vision
07 Pirates in the 9th
08 New Model Robots
09 When Love Feels Like Crying
10 Agents of Time
Label: Wagon Repair Ltd.
Catalog#: WRL001
Released: 07.06.2010
We start the year correcting some errors of the past. “Doesnt Like You Back” is one of the best releases of Wagon Repair 2009 portfolio last year and I couldn’t let this one pass by! Danuel Tate is part of Cobblestone Jazz along with Mathew Jonson and Tyger Dhula and this is only his second work on solo mode, and it’s in fact a very good one! The EP goes through an enormous range of different environments, sometimes deep, others acid, but never forgets to add those environments with lots of danceable jazz! If you compare this release with his first EP “Pushcard” you’ll notice that this one is has more energy and is more dancefloor directed like in “Careful Mind” or “Remember You”, two deep jazzdance minimal tracks that will remind you the first productions of the duo Kreon & Lemos with lot’s of quality and amusement! “415″ and “She Like You?” show a different side on Tate’s productions, but they are both very good tracks, bringing back a little bit of the acid stuff of 90’s techno.
