2562: Fever
When In Doubt

The conceptual hook driving Fever, the third full-length by 2562, is that it's Dave Huismans' “disco” album. No, don't get the wrong idea; Fever isn't some perverse riff on KC and the Sunshine Band's “That's the Way (I Like It)” or Trammps “Disco Inferno.” Instead, the album is the bass scientist's “reinterpretation” of underground disco music from the mid-‘70s to early-‘80s (Huismans himself was born in1979). In assembling the album's eleven cuts, one rule had to be stringently followed: every single sound had to come from a disco record, and no additional synthesizers, drum computers or other sample sources could be added. Putting further distance between the project and his previous longplayers, Aerial and Unbalance (both issued on Tectonic Recordings), is the fact that Huismans chose his new imprint When In Doubt as the release platform for Fever.

Some of the tracks hit hard with stop-start, hammering pulses that lurch like monstrous colossi (“Winamp Melodrama,” “Flavour Park Jam”), and the album sometimes feels like an exercise in beat sculpting so cold it verges on inhuman (“This is Hardcore”). It's nevertheless easy to get swept up in the lethal, bass-throbbing swing of “Brasil Deadwalker,” despite its unyeilding metallic sheen. The tracks that make the strongest impressions, however, are the ones that flirt most directly with standard house conventions, such as “Aquatic Family Affair,” which slides into its house-funk groove with aplomb. Production details matter little when a track digs into its churning neo-trance groove with such determination, and strong too is “Intermission,” whose title suggests a throwaway character, though the track itself proves to be anything but when Huismans lays out its deep, bass-thudding funk with such force. Though Fever is an experiment of sorts, it's one executed with obvious craft and care, even if it's a recording one sometimes more appreciates than warms up to. One comes away from the project agreeing with the assessments put forth by fellow producers Martyn and Pinch, who basically concluded that, concept and production methodology notwithstanding, Fever sounds less like disco and more simply like Huismans.

April 2011