January 26, 2018 - NovaMute
Charlotte de Witte’s Brussels EP comes on to you like the soundtrack to a gallery full of modern performance art, but it’s much more fun because you can dance to it. I’m not sure what came first—contemporary sound art or techno music, chicken or egg. Or maybe this is a scenario where the egg had an adult chicken inside of it the whole time.
Anyway, with her Brussels EP, de Witte offers a leathery three-song exploration of the musicality of humans talking to each other. Once you get past the initial darkness of her moody techno style, the songs are tongue-in-cheek, and they give us a taste of what she hears in the words people speak. The soundscape is only starkly populated with instrumentation, so we move through the thrum-beat to enter the work through the words, which are the easiest access points. Humans are pretty simple, honestly. We naturally like things that speak in human tongue because it reminds us of ourselves. And that’s when de Witte hooks us to her coattails and takes us along for the ride.
The first song, ‘Brussels,’ opens with a pounding beat that punches in time to our hearts’ pulse. De Witte’s first priority as musician is to remind us that we are alive. She then begins to introduce the vocal part, a deadpan woman’s voice repeating the same open-ended phrase throughout the song. It’s a blank slate, and it is hypnotic. We begin to meditate and dissociate from the meaning of the words as they are slowly emptied out by the repetition of the song’s mechanics. It feels like someone is handing words to us like objects too meaningless for their message, and we focus on the objects in our hands because the message is too emotionally-charged to consider. It might electrocute us. Our ears begin to ring to the pitch of the vocalist. It’s the same feeling we get when someone tells us we’ve won an Olympic Gold Medal, or that our lover has died suddenly. The pitch starts to bend down, and things start to sound like a Roman Polanski film. Then de Witte cuts the fuzz abruptly and brings us back to the beat, limbered up and open for the next song.
‘Control’ is pregnant with irony. Again, a woman’s voice is repeating to a pulsing beat, this time digitally abstracted and illegible but for one word—the song’s namesake. The concept is surface-level, but it’s witty nonetheless to name a song ‘Control,’ but prevent us from understanding the words. This track is certainly the meat in the Brussels EP sandwich, and it’s making our stomachs happy on the dance floor. This is some fine dark-meat techno music.
De Witte finishes the EP with a third female voice that engages us directly in ‘Look Around You’. She adheres a dry inspirational band aid, the likes of which a mother pastes over her daughter’s emotions in a world built to make daughters cry. It’s a sardonic moment, this final song, and we laugh uncomfortably but are still moved to comfort by our own laughter, like droll chimpanzees dancing for an audience at the zoo. Dancing feels good. And we can’t help but agree that life is beautiful while we are dancing.
In addition to this EP’s primary concept of word objectification in human language, Brussels EP presents three more objects to us: three robots trying to be ladies. The first attempts to convey the sorrow of loss. The second attempts to command authority. The third attempts to inspire. Some might say this mode of vocal delivery is a standard techno move, sure. But I also think de Witte’s smart vocal meditations are what sets her apart from all the men in her field. Plenty of male techno artists “ironically” objectify the female voice in songs. But de Witte has shown us what it’s like to ironically objectify feminine humanity from an insider’s perspective. And we know gender identity and how it relates to the music world has been on her mind during her career so far. She used to perform under the name Raving George.
All in all, Brussels EP is a solid release from Charlotte de Witte that makes our hearts pound with excitement in time to her beats. Although we don’t agree with her decision to hide behind a male moniker at the beginning of her career, we’ve genuinely enjoyed watching her emerge in the techno scene as a talented musician with rich taste and witty sensibility. Her work is sharp. Plus, it is unbelievably refreshing to hear a female perspective in a testosterone-rich corner of the music world. Get out of the way, boys. ☔