Friday, January 17, 8 p.m.
Rozz-Tox, 2108 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
Rozz-Tox continues its Northern Parallels series of curated house and techno events with a January 17 visit from veteran producer FBK, who performs live alongside DJ sets from residents Mike Derer and Higgy.
Under the FBK alias, Kevin M. Kennedy has been making music and DJing since the early '90s. Born in Ohio, he’s been a mainstay in the Detroit-to-Chicago axis of dance-music history in various roles, from promotion to production to running his own label Absoloop. Like many of his peers who started in the '90s and persist to this day, FBK maintains a relatively low profile in the eyes of above-ground heads, but is a bona fide legend to those in the know. His music continues to pop up in the set lists of hypnotic techno-minded DJ contemporaries, and his extensive discography offers a bottomless rabbit hole to fall into and explore.
FBK’s own production approaches some platonic ideal of house music, wrapped in gestures and ideas from the techno, electro, and acid traditions. His tracks typically revolve around short, one-bar loops that air out for long stretches of time, highlighting funky, kinetic drum patterns that almost always build from four-on-the-floor kick drums and staccato high-hats. Over this solid bedrock of percussion, the harmonic and lead elements that FBK chooses to feature tend to fall into the short loop template as well: individual bursts of color, whether in the form of pitched or smeared drum tones, electronic noises, or blocks of synth. He knows how to build tension over the course of tracks that typically stretch past the six- or seven-minute mark, with minutes at a time in which the same elements will lock into place and carry the dance floor into a fugue state. When changes finally hit, they’re usually seismic shifts in the arcs of his tracks, with multiple synths or drum elements rocketing into view. This strategy creates a kind of gradual leveling-up effect – if you needle drop on different parts of his tracks, you’ll hear the same loops reoccurring throughout, but the elements around them will have intensified, rising from subtle textures in the back of the mix to giant swathes of activity that rise even above the drums.
Take a track such as “Rollin on a 6/4” from FBK’s Knobs & Switches release on Frictional Recordings in 1996. The track coasts over a classic house beat, with hi-hat patterns locked into place and a steady, reliable kick drum that’s not too crunchy or distorted, but just thick enough to always be animating the track. For the first two minutes, he generates tension with one noise format – probably a stretched shaker sample – that jitters between the central beats as a loping scrape. By the song's one-third mark, he has introduced a one-bar dissonant synth phrase that rises through the mix as a fragmentary electronic bubble. With nothing other than one other one-note synth voice to harmonize with, this looped bubble becomes the focal point of the song, and he tempers its tone continually for the next five minutes, dialing up the resonance and the distortion and letting it take up more and more space in the mix. By the end, this eternal electronic burst stretches and jitters across the entire track, rising above the percussion. This simple yet extremely effect approach to track construction allows FBK to tailor each element with hands on tone manipulation, steering the dance floor into a state of hypnosis where every element of the production is geared towards body-shaking rhythm.
Taking a look at a more recent track from his catalog, there's the excellent “Past Ownership” from 2015, which appeared on a compilation on Marcel Dettman’s MDR label. FBK dispenses with the four-on-the-floor kick drum here, letting the kick bounce and bob in a funkier cadence as it kicks right out of the gate with a wobbling, ascending bass synth voice. The producer starts to frost the track with a series of syncopated blips that serve as both harmonic and percussive elements, and he spends the intro of the track laying on additional swirling synth voices. By the time the hi-hat and clap-snare voice arrive to steer the whole pulsing mass closer to a legible rhythm, the groove is massive. From here, he starts to introduce dubby washes of effects, patches of orchestral string texture, and arrhythmic washes of noise, all of which fold into the seams between the drum elements. With a more quickly shifting narrative arc than the pure hypnosis of his more straightforward house tracks, “Past Ownership” shows what FBK can do when he lays out a tightly plotted road map built on new turns instead of eternal loops.
FBK plays the Rock Island venue's Northern Parallels 040 alongside Mike Derer and Higgy starting at 8 p.m. on January 17, admission is $5 before 10 p.m. and $8 after, and more information is available by calling (309)200-0978 or visiting RozzTox.com.
