P055: Cabeza de Vaca – The Mole

It wouldn’t be surprising to find the Colin de la Plante aka The Mole in Japan one day. His musical road trip has taken him steadly eastwards from Vancouver to Montreal and now to Berlin where we find him for this weeks special on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM. Te focus on the show is his new material, but we have a bit more space and time here to chart in detail is journey.

Colin de la Plante started off recording with Danuel Tate, Mathew Jonson and Tyger Dhulathe, three individuals who would go on to form Cobblestone Jazz. But as a quartet the group made a single EP called “Babyfoot” for Canadian label Wagon Repair who would later be home to some de la Plante’s solo material as The Mole.

Legend has it that all four migrated to Montreal when it was the centre of the electronic music universe, the city kicking off Mutek and also stimulating the legendary “Montreal Smoked Meat” compilation on Force Inc back in 2002.

But Cobblestone Jazz eventually returned to British Columbia and The Mole stayed put, launching his solo career with a number of 12”s on labels like Philpot, Arbutus and Kompakt Extra. His Canadian links were always strong and he not only collaborated further with Mathew Jonson

But released a lot of material on Canadian labels like New Kanada, Musique Risquée and the aforementioned Wagon Repair who would publish his seminal debut “As high a the sky”. Clearly the standout track was “Baby you’re the one" which we use this week to close the show. The album and single versions differ a little, with the former being shorter and sequenced into the albums continuous flow.

Such success that the album received made it inevitable that The Mole would eventually move to Berlin and the company of electronic music’s elite. The highlight of his post-album singles was featuring a track on the split “Panorama 04” release of exclusive tracks on Ostgut Ton.

However, much like Deadbeat who formed his own BLKRTZ label to control his own releases once in the German capital, de la Plante too started up Maybe Tomorrow with Jon Berry, the marketing manager of Kompakt. The inspiration behind the label comes from The Littlest Hobo, a Canadian TV show about a homeless dog wandering around and helping people. The theme song is called "Maybe Tomorrow".

Sadly this type of export made it as far afield as Australia as did the Degrassi High school series

As did the completely random The Beachcombers whose theme song is forever stuck in brain where it will stay forever without permission. Ohh, Canada…

Indeed, one of the criticisms of The Mole’s recent material is that maybe he stepped too far from Canada, forsaking his disco, funk and soul records and incorporating perhaps too much of Berlin’s techno soul without quite producing bangers either. However his recent album “The Caregiver” works well because of its collage feel and its indifference to the dancefloor. Here it seems more an option than an obligation; The Mole is easy going enough to let you decide.

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Fred P	Reach	A Harmless Deed	2013
2	The Mole	History of dates	Perlon	2013
3	The Mole	(When) Monkey punches Dog	Maybe Tomorrow	2013
4	The Mole	Special invitation	Maybe Tomorrow	2013
5	Gerry Read	Crave	Forth Wave	2013
6	Anthony Collins, Distant Phase	Come down	Natural History	2013
7	Marcello Giordani	Comin' down	Endless Flight	2013
8	The Mole	Baby your'e the one	Wagon Repair	2008

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Recent gigs – Monkey Bar 2nd anniversary

The full review can be found here, but a few additional points.

One is timing: I didn’t mention, but perhaps it is better proposed as an open question than a final remark, but maybe it would have been better to stagger the artists than start and finish them all at the same time. The reason for this is so that everyone can see the opening of Tama Sumo and the end to give thanks (or not if that was your inclination). Meantime, you can move around and catch the opening of Fred P and likewise do the same for Santiago Salazar and close with everyone who wants to say moving up to Jeff Mills. Sounds like a simple idea for a two-room show, but maybe not as easy as it seems given that each artist was given a good (and proper) 3 hour set. Add 2 x 3 hours plus one to stagger and you are talking about 7 hours. No problem for afterhours all day clubs like Berghain, but in Barcelona we don’t have that luxury. That means closing at 5am (albeit early for a club here where the normal time is 6am) means starting at 10pm for one of the principle acts when nobody will show. That is, you can’t do it. It’s too early. The early crowd at the party was a good example: pretty full upstairs, but very quiet downstairs (and was a bit the same later on for Santiago as well). But the complaint here is most definitely not against the organization, unless you want them to tone it down (I don’t), but rather is a complaint against the club hours. Three hour sets are really almost a minimum expressive time for a DJ (maybe some live acts might find longer than 60-90 minutes harder) and Micro Mutek got that right with Theo Parrish’s (relatively) lengthy closing set, just to name one example. So the open question is, how do you shoehorn several lengthy sets into a night that you want to be big if you have to close early? Hats off for Alfonso Lopez for realizing that big sets are more expressive and for trying to fit them all in even if it wasn’t perfect.

You can’t beat Salazar’s set on the night nor his podcast for XLR8R  from earlier this year. Get it before they take it down!

Second point: how to identify tracks in a club. I listen to tons of techno, house, whatever, but I still find it damn hard to work out whether I ever heard a track before in a set. The problem is the big difference in sound between your crappy speakers at home and the big stacks at clubs, which make everything sound more banging than it might normally do. It’s harder still to pick tracks with excellent DJs like Sumo or Salazar who range so far and wide that even the best knowledge is lost trying to work out the tracks. Even with Jeff Mills, who put in such a tight set in terms of sonic range, you have to wonder whether it was really all him, or not, without having his discography (dub plates included) on your iPod in the club. Mills was incredibly striking on the night for his streamlined homogeny of sound, so electric in a weird way, when compared to everyone else, who brazenly showcased some funk, jazz, soul, minimal, whatever sounds, but Mills kept it so narrow and interesting for the parts I saw, unbelievable. Some of the tracks that were easier to spot were Jark Prongo’s excellent and weird 1997 track “M-Tech” which was re-released by Mojuba off-shoot a.r.t.less in 2008 backed with the 1995 track "Spadet", both originally on Dutch label Pssst Music.

The other was Âme’s “Rej” which is one of the more celebrated tracks of recent years and easy to spot, but somehow a surprise in a heavier Detroit set.

Upstairs with Mills though it was a lot harder. Is this “The Bells”? “The Dancer”? “Alarms”? So many tracks go around in your head at the moment that un less you have a better memory than me (or drink less vodka and Red Bull) you might have trouble recalling scientific detail when you wake up in the morning.

Thanks to Alfonso as always and see you at DJ Qu!