Haunted funk

Broker/Dealer evoke the early morning spirits.

By Amanda Nowinski

TEN P. m. Friday is sounding like 5 a.m. Sunday as local techno outfit Broker/Dealer stand behind a mountain of gear in the warm, red cocoon of a dance floor at Pop, their weekly event at An Sibin, crafting a melodic techno sound that transports me to an hour just before sunrise, the most portentous time of day. "Forest," a single they plan to release on German label Traum, is the quintessential morning song – a little witchy, slightly ambient, and uplifting enough to remind you that true gospel doesn't always need words. Like Pepe Braddock's "Deep Burnt" and Frankie Knuckles's classic "Whistle Song," a morning song pulses with a haunted, dubby funk so sublime that the rhythm sinks effortlessly into your bones.

Funny thing is, Broker/Dealer's Ryan Fitzgerald and Ryan Bishop never did time in the rave scene, and when I ask them if they've ever played an all-night warehouse event – the perfect venue for their sound – they recall a weird party in someone's flat that featured a puppet show. Huh? "We're coming from rock," says Bishop, who began experimenting with electronic music in the mid '90s. "But it makes a lot more sense to make this kind of music than it does to pick up a guitar." Although they've sidestepped those old, outdated raver and club kid initiations, they've emerged with an experienced sound that feels as if it were inspired by years of daybreak debauchery.

The dusky, restrained morning-song aesthetic pulses through most of their work. "Dig Deep," their latest release on Traum, builds gradually, collecting padded layers of ambient dreamscapes as it bumps on, sounding like a group of faraway phantom disco queens on their way to work (it). The B-side, "Boots and Pants," begins with a dirty, nearly distorted bass and slowly expands into higher vibrations with sinewy keyboards that soften the hazy journey. As with all of their music, the tracks finally kick in when the listener is solidly hooked by the rhythm – like dub, the repetition of the beats captures the listener before the rest of the effects play out.

While their earliest work displays an ear for softly sculpted beauty, their more recent tracks reveal a knack for catchy melodies, a skill that places them in the running for a pop future – or at least for a quick underground breakthrough. After hearing "Forest" and "Satin Jacket" a few times, a listener could easily hum back the melody, which is something altogether rare in beat-driven dance music, particularly techno. The L.A.-based Sentrall label put out Broker/Dealer's first official release, "Haulin' Oats," a cheeky take on Hall and Oates's horrendous "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)" in December of last year. But their big break came last summer after they met minimal techno producer Jonas Bering at the Mutek electronic music festival in Montreal. Like a pair of eager young fans, the two slipped Bering a tape of their live recordings, and Bering in turn passed the work on to Traum's Riley Reinhold. Reinhold took an instant liking to Fitzgerald and Bishop's work and months later included the "Stormy" single on the label's compilation, Elektronic Musik-Interkontinental. In March the Cologne-based Traum released "Dig Deep" and "Boots and Pants," and it has commissioned a full-length from them for release this fall. Two hopeful guys from Orange County who made Broker/Dealer T-shirts four years before their first official release could not have asked for much more.

Like many indie kids who fell for dance music in the mid '90s, Fitzgerald and Bishop first encountered electronic music through the brainiac IDM sounds of Mouse on Mars and soon after discovered producers on Warp, like Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada – artists who fucked with the original Detroit techno program and transformed it into itchy, dubbed-out art-house brilliance. But soon the two, who met as students and punk fans at UC Santa Barbara, were turned on to minimal techno through German labels like Basic Channel and Kompakt. After experimenting with electronics on their computers, the idea (and T-shirts) of Broker/Dealer was born. Then came the sad truth.

"I remember going to see Funky Porcini in L.A.," Fitzgerald says. "And all he did was DJ drum 'n' bass. We were pulling our hair out and thought, 'This is awful. We wanted to hear your great super album, and all you're gonna do is DJ?' It started happening again and again – these guys would be producers but would only DJ. It wasn't what we wanted."

"That's our rock background," Bishop adds. "You're not going to go out and just play records. You're going to play your instruments."

But the usual laptop click-and-drag method isn't what the two had in mind. "Our only response to [the laptop trend] is to not use them at all," Fitzgerald says. "We're trying to add a little bit of something – more action than just sitting behind a laptop. It's a little more interesting to see more gear and wires, instead of just someone's computer."

"And I know most people don't play live with their laptop," Bishop adds. "They're just playing tracks."

But it's a serious pain in the ass to lug synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, and sequencers to a club – a laborious chore that explains why most producers opt for vinyl instead. Not to mention that the dance music scene is programmed to expect the DJ, who's obviously going to play a much greater variety of music than the live act. In other words, you'd better be incredibly tight – or at least extremely bizarre – to capture a dance music crowd, whose attention span tends to be only slightly greater than that of a large flea. After all, wasn't it the subversion of the stand-there-and-watch-me-I'm-in-a-band syndrome that turned many of us on to dance music in the first place?

But Broker/Dealer didn't start out trying to appeal to the dance music scene; they began with the audience they knew best: indie kids. "We started playing live in Santa Barbara with rock bands in '97," says Bishop, a former punk drummer who hosted an indie and experimental electronic radio program at the college station. "I think that's because we like to play events or shows that would cross over; we're not just playing to techno kids. We want to reach a wider audience, and the response has been good. Lately I've seen indie kids shift toward dance music. I don't know why it was, but I think people got tired of standing there watching Sonic Youth or Unwound; people need to move."

Because much of the original dance music crowd in San Francisco has grown up or burned out, new initiates are needed. As we reported last month, the new electro scene has opened the dance doors to the indie crowd, but how much of that population forays into techno? Judging from the vast numbers of strange socks, Converse trainers, and mullet haircuts floating about at West Coast techno and IDM shows, it's seems clear that Kid 606, Kit Clayton, O.S.T., Sutekh, and Twerk have attracted a solid amount of attention from the indie side – a fan base Broker/Dealer are poised to expand. "Because of our indie rock background, we bring people who wouldn't normally attend a techno event," Bishop says. "I think that the music is new enough and everyone has seen enough four-piece rock bands. I can see this sparking someone's interest."

If your average 24-year-old clubgoer was only seven when the first techno record came out in 1985 – not exactly the perfect age for clubbing – it's clear that the new wave, as exemplified by Broker/Dealer, has the ability to breathe fresh life and perspective into a maturing and partially stagnant art form. Unlike many veterans in the dance music scene, Broker/Dealer are anything but jaded – years of hardened clubbing have not yet taken their toll.

Still, Broker/Dealer realize that the prehistoric house scene has a few good things to offer. "We'd like to cross over to the house scene," Fitzgerald says. "Where we lie is in that more academic techno scene – or at least that's where we've ended up. The house crowd doesn't come to see us play. The crowd that comes to see us isn't dancey, which is a struggle. We're relying on people to dance – it's the music we're playing and DJing."

"You've scratched your chin all week," Bishop adds. "So come dance at Pop. You've heard all this academic music and know what's good about it – you can sit and listen to it. It's deep and technical, but it also makes you want to dance."

The warm, emotive Broker/Dealer style isn't as academic-sounding as that of their peers. It certainly fluctuates between Thomas Brinkmann-inspired minimal techno and Slam Mode-tinged ambient house. But because this is dance music, we must obey the Imperative Law of Genre Classification, which means avoiding any stylistic gray areas at all costs. Accordingly, minimal techno is where Broker/Dealer fit. Well, kind of. There's no doubt that the machine is all their music needs – distinctive house embellishments like vocals, pianos, strings, and other acoustic instruments are absent on this pared-down palette. Minimal techno is composed of gradually shifting layers of pure electronic sound that eventually coalesce into a tightly restrained final outburst over steady yet skeletal rhythms – as on "Boots and Pants" and "Dig Deep." But while techno can be viciously cold and overly mathematical, a sense of human optimism lurks beneath the Broker/Dealer sound, which closely mirrors the sentiment of house.

"We don't know how to classify our music," Bishop says. "But we're not offended by people who do," Fitzgerald adds. "To tell you the truth," he continues, "there's nothing more difficult than talking about your own music. Do we have to?"

Broker/Dealer perform Wed/5, 9 p.m.-2 a.m., Boom, Border Cantina, 1192 Folsom, S.F., $5. (415) 626-6043; Fridays, 9 p.m.-2 a.m., Pop, An Sibin, 1176 Sutter, S.F. $5-$10. (415) 929-1992. Visuals by Del Ray. www.dreamchimney.com/brokerdealer.