Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Checking in on an ‘electronica’ quartet

Friday, March 3, 2000 | 9:21 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Every Wednesday, he serves Tourists for Breakfast in the Vegas.com Lounge: www.vegaslounge.com. Reach him at carter@vegas.com.

Even as Matchbox 20 featuring Santana and Christina Aguilera abscond with their ill-gotten Grammys, a full-blown musical revolution is taking place.

Most of you have forgotten the so-called "electronica" boom by now and probably did the moment the Prodigy dropped out of the top 100. But those DJs and musicians haven't forgotten you. Four such talents bow in this week's column, and while they're unlikely to win any Grammys, you'll remember their work long after Aguilera's second album tanks.

"The Quick and the Dead," a collaborative effort between Washington, D.C., turntable wizard DJ Spooky and British avant-garde composer Scanner, is the least commercial of today's set, and possibly the least commercial combination of talents since John Cage hooked up with Ryuchi Sakamoto. One mixes Steve Miller and Beethoven records, the other plays a cellular phone scanner. Christina, run for your life.

The circumstances under which one can enjoy "The Quick and the Dead" are admittedly limited. "Heterotopian," "Uncanny" and "Dialogic" seem danceable -- in theory -- but any attempt to match steps to them will almost certainly result in injury, and playing them in the good old SUV will doubtlessly cause a rollover. This is the sound of the other side, kids, and welcome to it.

The operative term for this sound -- for want of a better one -- is "armchair techno." It isn't made for club play or wedding receptions; rather, it is intended for patient listening. Such music tends to find hardcore audiophiles, disenfranchised cyberpunks and anyone who likes the sound of freight trains in good spirits; everyone else will fear it.

Needless to say, I love "Quick and the Dead" with a passion -- every chopped beat, disembodied vocal and alien-sounding synthesizer wash. It's not often that I recommend an album that only sounds good on headphones -- you can stick your "Dark Side of the Moon" where the sun don't shine -- but I recommend this one. It's awfully good, and you should take both words at their fullest meaning.

Groove Armada also gets my stamp, but for entirely other reasons. "Vertigo" is a dance record to its core, with enough commercial oomph for Elton John to laud it in interviews (but don't hold that against it). One of two great booty-shakers to come out of London this year (the other, Apollo 440's "Getting' High on Your Own Supply," breaks soon), "Vertigo" borrows a mess of styles and wears as many perfectly.

The big beats of "If Everybody Looked the Same" could have come from Fatboy Slim; the man seems to bestow his blessing on the project with a sharp remix of "I See You Baby." "At The River" takes its time setting up, but when it does, it reveals itself as a perfect summer number, with its loping hip-hop beat, lazy trombone and winking appropriation of the standard "Old Cape Cod."

What Groove Armada does isn't too different from what George Acosta does. The Miami-based DJ runs a tight ship on "Awake," and while he composed none of the relentless techno/trance tracks on the record, he sure knows where to put them.

Half of making an album is creating cohesion, sustaining a series of moods. The "trance cowboy" births a dream with Ayla's "Angelfalls," develops it through Gouryella's self-titled track and brings it to fevered awakening with Nova's "Welcome to the Future" -- and at no point in this glorious delirium are you aware of the Man Behind the Curtain.

Acosta is being called "the best trance DJ in America" for good reason. If you've ever danced a solid hour at a club without really thinking about what you're dancing to -- utterly hypnotized by your own movements -- then "Awake" is your panacea. Even Carlos Santana, at one time a master of the fusion between music and movement, could appreciate that kind of thing.