FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

2015's Dream Dance Music Tag Teams

Ron Morelli and Robert Owens. Ricardo Villalobos and Prins Thomas. Andy Stott and AG Cook. Imagine the possibilities.

2015's kicked off with a pair of promising sounding team ups. The recently announced Proto, is the first full-length collaboration between Mumdance, the grimey Jeff Mills, and Keysound's avant-ambient maestro Logos, set for release on Pinch's Tectonic label in February. There's also been rumours that everyone's favourite Icelander Björk is working with The Haxan Cloak, and potentially Total Freedom, on her new album.

Advertisement

Given that the new year's the perfect time to celebrate remaining alive by agreeing to do things that'll never happen, we decided to have a think about more fantasy collaborations we'd love to see in 2015.

Ron Morelli and Robert Owens
Opposites, so romantic comedies have taught me, attract. In theory, then, chucking the kingpin of spat-upon, stamped-upon, trodden on, gutter dwelling, bleached, backwashed club tracks in the studio with a man who possesses one of the most sweetly melancholy voices in the history of house should result in an even happier ending than Sleepless in Seattle.

Ricardo Villalobos and Prins Thomas
Three truisms to live your life by: Coke's better than Pepsi, McDonalds is better than Burger King and long songs are better than short songs. No one knows that better than these two. Play their twinned discographies back to back and you're looking at a good ten year stretch of skeletal, disfigured ketamine house, wonked out stratospheric cosmic disco and pulsing Scando-krautrock. And that's just the 12"s alone. Hopefully 2015 sees them holed up in a bunker somewhere making a track so long that it actually goes beyond the boundaries of time and space. But still doesn't have a chorus.

Andy Stott and AG Cook
Stott's signature line in moody, monochromatic, ashen earthed, quietly-apocalyptic slow-mo deadweight downbeat is still going strong. Last year's Faith in Strangers was as good as anything else the miserablist has released in recent years. You just wish sometimes, for a while, for a minute or two, he'd wake up on a sunny day and cheer the fuck up and realize that life isn't actually an extended version of those horribly portentous opening monologues that Godspeed You! Black Emperor have misguidedly believed gave their ponderous post-rock a sense of gravitas for all these years. Chuck him a cheeky half pill and get him on Skype with PC Music main man and purveyor of teeth rotting sugary jams like "What I Mean" and see if he cheers up a bit.

Advertisement

Legowelt and Ruf Dug
Since living in the future's not really lived up to the hype yet - as handy as contactless bank cards might be, they aren't quite on par with the promise of human life sustaining itself in space - let's take comfort in the imaginary collaboration of two of dance music's mustiest retro-futurists. Bringing together Manchester and the Hague under a potent cloud of slack funk and psychotropic house as a means of attempted transcendence is just the start for RufWelt. It'd be the sound of 1982 via 2015 via 1982.

Nils Frahm and Fruity Loops
Don't get me wrong, Nils Frahm's sadlad, serious piano compositions are diverting enough and probably sounds great when you hear it on a rain lashed November night when everything's gone wrong and you're 17 and have no actual experience of life. But wouldn't it be better if there was a fucking huge kick drum underneath it? Right. Someone should show him how to torrent Fruity Loops, set the BPM to 122 (the best BPM) slap down a sturdy 4/4 and hey presto. Non stop emotional bangers for the lads out there who keep it vibey on Facebook but've never been in a club.

Miss Kittin and Whoever Websites Tell Us is the Hottest Artist of 2015
Since 2003 I've been banging on about the possibility of a revival of the glory days of 2002 electroclash. Do you ever stop to wonder what The Hacker, Peaches, Golden Boy, ADULT., WIT, or Toktok vs. Soffy O are up to these days before realising that the thought of it would most likely crush you? The world back then - that delicate post-9/11, pre-BBC3 world - wasn't really ready for Italo-indebted, knowingly nauseating plastic synth symphonies that posited a kind of monied-but-wearied hedonism as the only path to the transcendence. Even the scene's queen, Caroline Herve, aka Miss Kittin, moved on to churning out rote 'dark' techno records that replaced the affected boredom of electroclash with boring old genuine boredom. This could be the year that City Rockers make a comeback, the year we fuck off the short back and sides and get asymmetric again, the year that rightly reclaims his style icon crown. How do we make it happen? Someone you've heard a few mixes and a remix by must be begging for a flatly disaffected icy German woman sternly intoning about coke and sex over the top of their track right?

Ada and Willie Burns
It might not be the most immediately natural duo ever assembled for the purposes of an article that's rooted firmly in the realm of the hypothetical, but this seemingly disparate double team, all woozy post-Kompakt dreamhouse sensuousness and Burns committed to his cranky Noo Yoik outsider house schtick, could, we think, easily find common ground. Imagine her lovelorn, woozy vocals and trademark molasses thick analogue chord patterns sharing space with the stuttering boogie of Willie joints like "Rewind".

Todd Terje and Todd Terry
Suspend a bit of disbelief with this one*. Given the precious and precarious nature of identity, I reckon people who share a name have to get on - that instant sense of kinship and camaraderie doesn't come about easily in this world. Imagine how Mr Masters at Work Todd Terry felt when, taking a break from basking in the glow that comes with being one of the most influential artists in the history of dance music, he heard about another Todd Terry out there. A Norwegian Todd Terry. A Todd Terry who flits between extended edits of tunes previously thought to be unsalvageably cheesy and his own spangly nu-disco workouts. Let us all pray that they finally give in to the same name thing so people like me can stop making the joke and start listening to premier league disco-house excursions.

*Yes, I am aware that 'Terje' is pronounced 'Terrier' or 'Ter-yay' or 'Ter-yer' rather than 'Terry'

Follow Josh on Twitter: @bain3z