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While DJ’ing at long-running Old Town arcade and bar Ground Kontrol, Paul Dickow noticed something about the “unknown, silly, fun, outrageous, cheap dance music” he was spinning.
“I noticed that the same samples would appear across all these different types of dance music,” Dickow says. “And it just led me to think: Why was this so sticky for all these different people, all these different audiences, these different genres, and different producers coming from different countries and cities? So I started to think: Maybe there’s something really elemental about those samples.”
Unexplained Sky Burners, Dickow’s new album under his Strategy moniker, is his attempt at a sort of anthropological study of these samples. Though the music Dickow makes as Strategy is often beatless, ambient and abstract, Sky Burners is dance music. More specifically, it’s breakbeat house, which combines the pulse of house music with vintage drum samples known as breakbeats.
Though it’s appropriate that Dickow’s most dance-oriented release should come when clubs are back in full swing, these tracks were made between 2012 and 2015. Dickow put out an EP of similar material in 2014 called Pressure Wassure, and Sky Burners came from the same sessions.
It’s also coming out on the same label: Peak Oil, the L.A. label home to some of Dickow’s clubbier work that celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
In making the nine long tracks on Sky Burners, Dickow identified some of the most commonly used samples in dance music, most of them by ‘60s and ‘70s funk and soul artists both well known (James Brown) and obscure (the Winstons, whose “Amen, Brother” is one of the most sampled songs in history).
“I’d always start with the sample and then build something around it,” Dickow says. “It was really cool to pull that thread and feel like I could understand the journey of producers who came before, or be able to step into their experience of whatever inspired them in the moment.”
The rhythmic language is a little more jagged than on most conventional dance records. Rather than maintaining a danceable groove or building to ecstatic, climactic moments, the drums on Sky Burners engage in so many rhythmic detours that the album plays as much like a jazz album as a dance album at times.
While making this music, Dickow was drawn to “simple, bold, brash sounds that sound like something that we recognize from life.” Many of the samples Dickow identified feature some kind of spontaneous-sounding exhortation: a peal of laughter from Yaz’s “Situation,” a shout of excitement from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” Others, such as an electronic beep from Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” evoke the machinery of everyday life: cellphones, elevators, checkout scanners.
“People were interpreting the noises that were prevalent in their environment and putting them in the music,” Dickow says. “When you hear old dance records, there’s a lot of dial-up modem samples. They’re trying to say, ‘Hey, this song is about your world,’ and so there’s literally sounds from the world in it.”
It’s tough to pinpoint any of those sounds amid the percussive blur of Unexplained Sky Burners—and, unless you’ve been going to raves for a long time, it might be hard to identify some of the samples Dickow uses. This is the easiest Strategy release to recommend to a newcomer, but the more you know about the history of electronic dance music, the more you’re likely to get from it.
“I don’t think it’s so mutated that people can’t relate to it,” Dickow says. “I think it satisfies some of that hunger for the past that people have. But others don’t want to hear the same thing they’ve heard in the past, especially people that have lived through the rave culture already.”
Given the alien contexts of these familiar sounds, it’s appropriate that Dickow named the record after an aerial phenomenon that occurred on Nov. 20, 2013, when what appeared to be a fireball soared over the Willamette Valley and disappeared into the rising sun.
Dickow considers himself a “skeptic,” and indeed it’s likely the fireball was simply a dramatically illuminated jet contrail, but it fits in both with electronic music’s history of sci-fi kitsch (“there’s like four rave versions of the X-Files theme”) and the record’s mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.
“I was in this process of trying to probe these mysteries of music, and I was just kind of entertained by this mystery happening right here in our own world,” Dickow says. “We should never get so jaded that we can’t enjoy a mystery.”
GET IT: Unexplained Sky Burners is available on digital and cassette at strategy.bandcamp.com. $8-$12.