:Brownstudy - Tell Me More About Bubbles EP (Really Nice Recordings/Third Ear)

Dooooood, Detroit is a weird place. To an East-Coaster, it's got all these little pockets of bizarro world, where things are 180 degrees off from what you expect. In Detroit, techno is recognized for what it is: a black music, not the purvey of skinny white suburban kids, like back east. You've got the taboo-twisting phenomenon of jitting and ghetto tech...vertical breakdancing? To Rotterdam-speed ass-ass-titty-titty ditties? What the...? And you get this peaceful collusion of elements that are simply un-kosher in other places. Techno and hip hop, which in so many uppity US cities might as well be pork and dairy, hold hands and skip happily down the deserted avenues of this carcass of a metropolis in the old, odd Motor City.

Is it because they get radically liberal radio leaking across the Canadian border from the University of Windsor? Do cultural stereotypes completely melt down in a place where even the squirrels are black? Or maybe they dance that fast because it's so damn cold. Whatever it is, and man, I do not know, this battle-scarred, midwestern Little Engine That Could has given the world more than its share of fine and funky traditions. The new guard, with flagbearers like Jay Dee, Amp Fiddler, John Arnold, Ayro, Platinum Pied Pipers, Dwele and more, are fearless in their mixing of techno, soul, hip hop, and everything else that has long fed Detroit. I say, gawd bless 'em.

It makes complete sense that this city would birth a sublime genius-weirdo like :Brownstudy. Jason Hogans, which he claims as his human name, has been around for a minute. A sound tinker-er from early on, he had stacks of knobby boxes around for years. In 1999 he turned his toys into "Peter and the Rooster", his recording debut for Carl Craig's Planet E imprint. After that, the studio was quiet for a while as his first audio baby learned to walk in a big, scary world.

So ironically enough, the first release on his own Really Nice Recordings label, hit the streets around the time his first human baby came on the scene. "Tell Me More About Bubbles" is a bouncy, thoughful snapshot of life before the fam, weighing love, money, no money, dreams, auto theft, the soul-sucking nature of corporate wasteland, and even some chin-stroking 'pon what Jesus would do. It's a very, very smart EP sonically, lyrically, and stylisitically, mixing goofy and serious, sublime and silly, nuanced and simple, usually in the same phrase.

Let's start with the sonics of it. Oh boy, he's definitely a student of Detroit detail and minimalism with a sense of humor. There are moments of contemplation, where light soundscapes shimmer like a lake at sunset, there are moments of bounce with proper beatfulness to make you wiggle, and yo, there's like chipmunk voices and shit.

Lyrically this dog is thick, thick, thick. It's got this brick of transparent layers that lets you either nod your head to the pure flow, or lose your shit over the scathingly funny but vindictive social critique and storytelling about everything from sticking it to the man, to eating organic. I have to keep rewinding it to make sure I really heard what I thought I heard, and it makes you cover your mouth and gasp like, naw, he didn't really say that. But he DID! :Brownstudy's lyrical style is a tumble of words with inner patterns to it, which would not suprise me one bit if, under the microscope, turned out to be a futuristic permutation of classical poetic structures, or some verbal-math riff on the hidden meaning of pi. Yeah, it's like that, effortless and complex.

And style? Lordy, think Lower East Side creative geniuses on a shoestring, Punky Brewster, clean hippies, and corn. I don't know. I can't explain it any better.

This EP is like... it's like the album that's always just out of reach. You hear it and you want him to come over to your house and talk at you for a few hours. It has the level of goofy sophistication and intelligent weirdness that you get when you listen to NPR half asleep, that snappy surreality that usually falls flat in the light of full consciousness. Kofi Annan went skinny dipping in a fountain? What? Oh, no, Kofi Annan made a speech, and then a Bryn Mawr University alum recalled Katherine Hepburn skinny dipping in a fountain. Damn, the first one would have been funnier.

Remember when you were a kid and certains words and corners of your house were full of mystery and potential, that as a grown-up just feel like vocabulary and walls? Remember that feeling when you first caught a glipse of some ridiculous hottie, before that first conversation where scratching the surface turned up someone disappointing and vapid? You know how it feels when you catch a snip, just a tiny snip of a song that fascinates you in its lack of context and stem-cell ability to mushroomly morph into anything in your imagination...until the next beat comes and washes it away in predictability? Well check it, this EP holds all the fascination of neurons newly formed, perceptions not yet shaped, and fulfills your wildest dreams of a relentless push at quality and spontaneity, that can take a step back and have a good giggle at itself. This EP is as pure and innocent as a newly baptized soul, and as smooth and fresh as a baby's bottom.

Really Nice Recordings
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