Expensive Looks - Dark Matters

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4...according to our Dave on Wed 25 Jan, 2012.

A hark back to basics (Ohhh!) from this dance lad Alec Feld, a New Yorker who just loves house music, disco and Ebeneezer Goode (probably). This LP/CD or whatever the fuck you wanna call it, “Dark Matters”, combines a lot of these elements and does feel like a loving homage to early '90s raves, Spliffy jeans and euphoric musical dropouts. This album flows seamlessly from one sweet cut to the next. It does sound strangely familiar does this rekid, it has samples that will please many a Detroit house music nut, and it has elements that have definitely been danced/gurned to by many a worshipper of the church of Rave. It also somehow sounds quite scrappy and honest. It's not clocked in to much scenester bullshit. It seems to be more of an experiment in dance/house music production; the notion that there is no way to make music correctly. Some of the tunes though are anything but blind stabs in the dark, some of the cuts on this puppy do sound like genuine house classics, like the fantastic 'Tracewave' and the housey squelch of track 2 'Nothing More'. It's a sweet album that's quite an all encapsulating listen from self-confessed space nut Alec Feld. Step back to the early '90s and recall where you were when MR C dropped that bomb... ”...anybody got any Veras...?? LOVELY!! HAHAHAHA!!!!”

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Alec Feld grew up in New York on a steady diet of Chicago house, disco, old Motown stuff and a smattering of his parents' psych records, as well as "trashy '90s dance." As a kid, he didn't really know how any of the songs were created, or that sampling was even a thing that people did-but he wanted to be part of it, so he taught himself to DJ. From there, he began to produce. Feld has been surrounded by electronic music his entire life, but with no blueprint for how to make what he wanted to hear, he figured it out on his own. "I became sick and tired of the notion that there are right and wrong ways to create and be creative," he says. Dark Matters is his debut LP as Expensive Looks. It flows continuously across nine tracks, touching on elements of all the music he grew up on: hypnotic house, textured minimalism, and the gorgeous moment of musical epiphany that happens when a beat drops out and all that's left is the aural equivalent of taking a deep breath and staring at the stars. It's a dance record with the sort of scrappy, open heart that can only come from someone like Feld. Expensive Looks is all encompassing, it draws from all genres without border, pulling everything into one warped but pointed mass. "Dark Matters comes into play as confusion and constant bipolar shifts all for the pursuit of happiness," Feld says. "I kill for euphoria and use it as a venue to get that polar-shifting depressive state across. This isn't about me not being happy, it's more about my frustration with the pursuit of happiness. I'm also kind of a space nut. There is little logic behind what 'dark matter' is and how it works." Dark Matters feels like the beginning of something for Feld. It's a survey of what it means to spend your whole life trying to figure out what you want from music without any guidelines. "Smashing keys turned into sequencing and sampling," says Feld. "I have no creative process. I don't write songs and I don't know what I want. I've narrowed down what Expensive Looks represents, taught myself a skill set previously non-existent in my mind and engaged myself in something that was once a fantasy." Dark Matters is a strange record, but it's also familiar. A summation of a sound or mood, and a fantastic beginning point for what will come next for Expensive Looks.

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