On the heels of their hard, hypnotic remix of the MK and Becky Hill track “Piece of Me,” the Saunderson Brothers have just dropped their own “Other World” EP. (It’s billed as an EP even though it’s only two tracks – a vocal version and an instrumental version of the song.) The Detroit born and raised techno legacies – sons of the great Kevin Saunderson – start here with a base of rumbling, percolating drums, add a dash of disco, a bit of House, some synth accents, looped vocal phrases, and top it all with an otherworldly female vocal insistently pleading for someone to “get me to another world.” In keeping with dance music’s core promise of escapism, the duo bottle the need for escape and the pleasure in achieving it. They loop themselves into the core impulse of dance music, into conversations with denizens of the dance-floor and all the musicians/DJs/producers who score the journey. As the track unfolds, an old-school flavor flashes through (Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City classic “Good Life” comes to mind in) without the track succumbing to fetish for nostalgia; it collapses time and eras.
Photo courtesy the artist.
