Were You There? Looking Back On What Metro Area Means To Dance Music
How a duo of DJs quietly changed the face of electronic music, even if no one noticed
Tristan Young @talltristan
The sounds of New York are inscrutable and iconic at once. Epoch defining moments in music seem to emerge just as often as emergent and nascent trends reveal themselves only in the obscurest of locales. Often we can tell in real time when an artist or album is truly making a scene or having its moment. New York history is rich with these events from Burning Down The House to Last Nite to Losing My Edge. Just as often we have to remember the moments that were initially overlooked. People forget The Velvet Underground was met with a collective shrug at first glance. Not every artist gets the accolades they deserve for their influence in genres, and the likes of new disco and indie dance are no different. For all the effusive praise we have for the likes of Hercules & Love Affair or The Juan Maclean, a lot of that sound started with a group and moment that history seems less inclined to highlight. That moment was 2002 and it was called Metro Area.
In the late 90s a DJ named Storm Queen that made his rounds through the Manhattan/ Brooklyn scene ended up on some online music forums. Think of something akin to Reddit but without the infrastructure or palpable fear. Storm Queen, or Morgan Geist, met fellow producer Darshan Jesrani. Jesrani indicated once that his interest in electronic music first emerged after hearing the blown out sequencer part of Tom Sawyer by Rush. This has no real bearing on our intents and purposes here other than just being kind of interesting. After meeting they formed what would eventually become Metro Area. They spent the next few years releasing a series of singles and EPs that eventually would coalesce together into their 2002 self-titled LP. Released on their own indie label, Environ records, Metro Area would be the focal point of a burgeoning ecosystem that examined the intersectionality of once thought disparate genres like disco, boogie, punk, and deep house. The rest wasn’t exactly history, even if maybe it should have been.
We take for granted how naturally, even inexorably disco and electronica work together these days, a former decade’s most triumphant testament to that likely being Blind. Back in the early aughts, things were a little more segregated, a little less obvious. Metro Area’s mission statement of sorts was to dissolve those barriers and see what kind of solution would emerge. The spirit of disco and boogie was transplanted into the technical body of house and drum & base. Italo disco in the vein of Giorgio Moroder, sculpted into beat heavy four by fours purposed for the club, the more neon the better. The reverb heavy wake of low-end base in Miura acts as a facsimile for the arpeggiated base scales of grimy early 80s funk while the up-tempo tunnel of congas recreates the humid and sweaty spirit of the more ostentatious side of disco. Brassy flourishes in Orange Alert and Dance Reaction along with its boogie guitars add splashes of extroversion and extravagance, making it almost wonderfully gaudy. Machine Vibes, far from its cold and alienating implications flourishes with coquettish wind instruments and back room lounge keyboard rides. It has an affluent, even bougie flippancy to it, as it dials winding and strange synth pads around its curves. The procession of Latin style drums in Square-Pattern Aura will make you shake your ass before your head. There is even some cowbell.
Indeed, it’s this album that helped create many of the hallmarks we associate with the sonic acumen of modern day dance hall, indie dance, and pop electronica. The mixture of fiercely assertive drum machines doubling up on themselves paired with quintessentially nerdy synth design in Orange Alert recalls Shit Robot at its best. The starkly bold, almost tempo morphing strikes of the piano in Pīna put on marvellous display how instrumentally momentous indie dance could get. The searing burn of industrial static from the electric guitar lick in Square-Pattern Aura doesn’t so much scream as it does whisper early Death From Above Records. The album, for all the influences and references it built it self from to situate its moment in time, was also looking forward even to where techno and electro house could fit in. The hypnotic waveform pattern of Atmospherique, a perpetual motion machine of sublime pacing, sounds like an up-tempo offering by Com Truise or a prototype for Tonite by LCD Soundsytem. It’s mixture of regal, starry synth and grime slicked low-end moves beyond thematic intent and is an expression of pure taste. In it’s retrospective on the album, and the percussive explorer Strut, Resident Advisor aptly observed that it, “makes the entrance of the high hat or hand clap a major event”.
Part of what makes Metro Area so successful is Geist and Jesrani looking for whatever way the could to inject some real life humanity into a project that was built largely from the decks. 90s techno was about as far from analog as it gets (but still very good!). Metro Area opted to find some living people and put them to excellent use. Most notable has to be Dee Silk and his contribution of Latin guitar to Pīna. It gives it a garish and hedonistic quality. This track wants to fuck. The transition from Silk’s scandalously alluring strings into the spaced out howls that follow is wonderful. Elsewhere, Environ Records alumni The Kelley Polar Quartet bring sporadic bursts of life to the album in their own way. The wicked sharp turns of Dance Reaction add a sense of regalia to what might be considered too benign otherwise. The soft plumes of strings at the end of Caught Up are unnervingly beautiful. In an album that is objectively characterized by a lazzie-fair attitude, its surprising the extent that Caught Up, with the contribution of Polar, can elicit an genuine emotional response. No wonder it’s the album closer.
These human contributions integrate into the album at no point more fascinating than in Miura. The only track on the album with real vocals (“vocals”), Miura uses them to develop the song in atypical and engrossing ways. In hopes of forming an anchoring connection between Metro Area and the glittering eras that preceded it, they enlisted the help of Dei Lewison, daughter of Woody Cunningham, who was the drummer in disco outfit Kleeer from the early 70s. Kleeer is a long story. With Lewison on board, Miura starts off reasonably enough, the main attraction not being her breezy howls, but Polar’s elegant strings and the conga train. However, for the chorus her voice transforms entirely. Seemingly outputting only one single note, her stretched out voice is then sequenced and abruptly rocketed up the scale. A zig zag pattern of climbing the octaves, it’s jarring and alien but sounds fantastic. Metro Area may not be as engrained in the history of music as it should be, but a lot of people remember where they were the first time they heard Miura.
Metro Area likely had not considered the implications and potential impact of their LP on the shape of things to come. Whatever they were thinking, they sure as shit weren’t sweating it. Metro Area is a breezy, spaced out record. It takes its time getting where it’s going and lets every moment, err, have its moment. We have examined in the past ways in which electronic music can be layered and pressurized to create all sorts of moods and environments. Metro Area goes in a different direction, spacing almost everything out to create a lackadaisical and carefree mood. The base line in Dance Reaction moves in a casual stroll. Pīna is highly free form, content with just having fun with the back and forth of guitar and piano. In Machine Dreams there may be many components- frenetic synth, bourgeoisie flutes, and the like- but they all seem to shuffle along one after the other, none of them vying for dominance. Atmospherique is comprised of several acutely different synth tides but they are all careful to stay out of each other’s way. The echoing pangs of key boards in Strut effectively nudge all other elements from its center in to a wider orbit; no need for anything to collide when we are out in space.
Geist has detailed his mindset in regards to this in past interviews. He was very attentive to the aesthetic look of the visualized sound wave of a track and how that translated into the way it felt. He described in an interview years after the release of Metro Area that in looking at the wave form of most modern pop music it just looks like a block. Everything is crushed together, the high end, the low end, and everything in between, stripped of its flow and smashed into a square. In such claustrophobic conditions all of the details are suffocated, there is no room to breath. This is not the kind of music meant to be heard on a proper sound system or utilized by a DJ with any real reverence for the craft. Look to Justice for example; I actively still love early Justice but there is no denying how forcibly dense it feels. These are to an extent subjective things still, just as the earlier point makes on the merits of intense layering of musical loops and how that can create wonders. But there is something to admire about the continuity of intent to execution in Metro Area. Geist once said that he was very obsessive about sound textures in his music, and making sure they were intelligible. Listen to the granular friction of the synth lines in Atmospherique and you’ll appreciate why he thinks the way he does.
Running a label and being an active part of Metro Area proved more bureaucratic and disillusioning than Giest had expected. By the end of the aughts he had grown less and less content with the state of the music industry and his place within it. One wonders what he would think of it in the present now that streaming has completely transformed how artists, labels, and consumers interact with each other. Is this an ecosystem that would have garnered Metro Area more attention? Would Geist and Jesrani care? There is little indication that Metro Area was ever intended to accommodate the trends and patterns of music back at the turn of the century. It’s no wonder then that they were met with a reciprocal dismissal for the most part at first. Still as the years went on, it’s more and more apparent that they were on to something, and that enough people eventually took notice for the seeds of change to be planted. It’s not always easy to discern the value of what exactly you’ve discovered as it happens; this can be true of those creating music and those listening to it. But that’s part of the fun of discovery.