
This is old school in distribution, not in sound. Dennis Ferrer seeded this in the hands of a select few for several months – almost since WMC 2010, it seems – and it’s finally getting out to the public at large on vinyl this month.
And amazingly, it hasn’t leaked since then (or not much, at least). What is involved in keeping the genie in the bottle for the highly anticipated follow up to “Hey Hey”?
Strange unshareable soundcloud links (the first I’ve ever seen, I think):
A splash page like this for the only site that at this point promises to be selling it, downtown304.com:
And probably a blood oath sworn by the handful of DJs endowed with a copy. On pain of death.
This is peculiar, considering that the last few Ferrer releases (“Hey Hey” and “Sinfonia della Notte”) were widely pirated for months prior to their release. Probably the only person who could do this is Dennis Ferrer: I haven’t seen a record successfully promoted like this in years. I also haven’t written about the buzz behind a single in at least that long, either, so… touché.
As far as the track itself – only blips of the Original Mix have leaked out – remixes are promised and if a 12″ vinyl is going to take precedence, you have to expect there will be some. Dawn Hulton does her best Siouxsie Sioux impression (though I will always have the hots for Siouxsie, Dawn objectively has a better voice) over a swirling palette of sounds. I mean, this thing is dense. The first four times I listened to it, I picked out something else that in retrospect seems essential but missed entirely the previous spins around.
One thing it’s certainly not, and that’s a knock-off of “Hey Hey”. The two tracks have as much in common as “Hey Hey” did with “Touch the Sky” – which is to say, nothing at all. Ferrer is pushing the envelope even further, which I thought impossible. This is one more reason to respect the man as well as the songs he writes, and why I’ll be eagerly waiting to see how this whole thing unwinds.