Monday Minutes E7: The Lenzman Nest
“When a philosopher considers a nest, he calls himself by meditating on the subject of his own being in the calm world being. And if we were to translate the absolute naïveté of his daydream into the metaphysical language of today, a dreamer might say that the world is the nest of mankind.”
Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXTTmlW4xGg&list=RDIXTTmlW4xGg&start_radio=1
Damn. This shit sucks. And hurts worse than a gut punch by razored fists possessed by the spirit of Kimbo Slice.
So, the Drum and Bass world world is tremoring after a massive earthquake a few sun/moon cycles antes. Teije van Vliet, better known as The Lenzman, lifted into vapor with a rumbling sound felt in the souls/soles of Junglists with rapidly moving heartbeats and feet. For those in this universe, you know how powerful Lenzman was behind the decks, spinning sounds that created new planets of Liquid Funk for future souls to inhabit for the low price of a little more than a quarter…a North Quarter. I’m fortunate to have seen him move parties with unique space soul seducing dance floors of humans moving collectively while strutting to their individual shakes and twitches. If you ain’t part and parcel of this way of living, you’ll think we’re crazy. My cousins were definitely weirded out the time I took them into the halls of LA’s Respect one Thursday night. They didn’t last 5 minutes. These are the realms within which The Lenzman would pitch 174 bpms of inundating filtered soul and splintered breaks to thirsty ears and liberate spirits. In this music, we become ourselves perpetually. It has no overarching structure, even though some want to inscribe strait jackets onto its formlessness. Throughout the years, Tieje channeled intelligent wonder through his music that held shapeshifting as the only thing one could count on.
While Jack Van Impe was wasting viewers’ time and minds estimating the date of the end of the world by reading fantasy novels such as the books of Daniel and Revelation with crippled Hebrew and Greek, I knew the apocalypse was the dark atmosphere of an amen break chopped by Source Direct and living in Lava Lounge, Café Lura, and Spot 6. And who’d want heaven and a boring ass Christian God(s) when the chaos of Jungle Music was a more desirable dystopia where the globe met on message boards and sweaty dive bars with 25 people on North and Western (I think) before Felipe starting filming porn in LA. I'd be hanging with Grand Marquee, who would eventually become my DJ. We kinda got somwhat known for doing sets half Hip-Hop and half Drum and Bass. This is the dimension in which Lenzman got a hold of my psyche.
José (DJ Rhemalogix) and I used to hit up the legendary Grammaphone Records on Clark in Chicago’s North Side and spend hours there flipping through the hottest obscure new wax from across the pond. Most times, I’d spend about 5 minutes looking at the Hip-Hop and then make a beeline to the Drum and Bass bins to use the remainder of my time pouring over official singles and white labels from “Europe.” There was so much DnB vinyl being pressed at the time because digital spinning hadn’t quite taken over and DJs had to have tracks on wax to spin shows (radio and parties). It was literally overwhelming. I wasn’t a DJ but the music obsessed me to the point I amassed a small but nice collection of 12” intended for selektas. Painstakingly, I’d go through the records. A cover would attract me and I’d set it to the side to flip on the various listening stations armed with Technics 1200 decks. The demo was to amass a stack, go through it, cut the fat, and keep the fit…or perhaps the nest. A lot of shit I’d just set aside, so I wouldn’t leave with many pieces of wax. After giving my ears a peak, I’d discover many of the records weren’t the kind of waters to float my boat.
Buuuuttt….
All of a sudden, you find the gem that glides from your hands to the state of eclipsing the slipmat. Needle drops. You transcend and become the hi hats and synth lines of the track. Your mind and body moves as the groove connects you through the headphones. No one in the shop can hear what you hear. They’re having their own euphoric experiences digging or listening. Sort of like how each person at a DnB rave may be perceiving Lenzman playing the same killer set yet are entranced in their own world. Those tunes are Bachelard’s nests, those audio blankets where we hide. The tones that wrap us and still set our already free souls free anew. They click. Why? You can try to explain it all technically. The bassline on DKay and Epilson’s “Babylon” just compliments the drum break perfectly. BCee and Lomax’s “Dust ‘Til Dawn” ensures the intro keeps the listener in a constant mode of anticipation so that the rolling liquid drop into the body of the track is so much more impactful. You can do all that shit and still not realize why a particular song is a nest. There is a reason. But our antennae are so corrupted that for all intents are purposes it’s better that we leave it at “it’s just is a nest.” Philosophers aren’t supposed to give up that easy. But fuck that. I just did.
Lenzman’s tracks were always nests to me. They made me feel I was in a home I never knew but was too familiar with. Bachelard says that the poetic image can’t be analyzed, for analysis is of the realm of time and space, a realm of which the poetic image is not. The sonic is the same. For me, it started from the vintage sounds of “Respiration” with Submorphics and carried on with pensive bangers like “Sim City" to the classic and cool “Open Page” with Riya and the indelible smooth and clean Children of Zeus remix of “Still Standing” with MC DRS. You know the kid was nasty of the revisits. The prizm presented in the música hearkened to something beyond the empirical. Study his drum programming and you won’t find it. Translate the piece to formal notation and his unique majic spellcasting it into an unstable unity won’t be traceable. But you feel it when you see him live, subtly moving back and forth in his nest as the rhythms move him. This was truly primordial art, the likes of which will never be seen again. But the nests he revealed never were not, therefore they always are and will be (We’ll come back to that for the Thawfor reflection.).
May Allah be pleased.
