Dave Aude has traveled a good deal further in electronic music than many of his contemporaries, having produced three CDs of his own electronic dance music by the time he was old enough to vote, holding a full fledged MIDI instructorship position at the L.A Recording Workshop and being on the ground floor when house music went huge in L.A. back in 1991. Since then, he's established an estimable resume of remixes and jocking gigs, including residencies at "Rubber" in Orange County and Las Vegas, and bears the quizzical distinction of extreme longevity in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't genre.
It just might be that house continues to hold a kind of promise for Aude, who's a trained keyboardist himself, that's managed to keep him in the game so long. This collection of mixes comes at a time when Aude has just recently been awarded a shot remixing Madonna's latest hit "Music" and, to the extent that a house DJ can become well known outside the techno community, Aude is probably on the right about tat that precipice. And that usually only comes to an artist that's continuing to mine quality ore from the same pit everyone else is still chipping away at limestone.
Having said that, Rush Hour moves between relatively stock house workouts and more adventurous, quasi-psychedelic flourishes of mad-scientist flight. For all the heavy-duty production and tweeter-tearing synth-texture conjuring that glimmers like expensive rum cocktails through this sample, Aude never gives himself away. He wants to be a club DJ, adhering to all the stylistic limitations and BPM dogma that keeps him cheerfully untarnished by day job grime - Aude has a choice that many of his contemporaries never have, working within the house genre and making it smell new and freshly dressed, or borrowing from it and creating something new altogether, with his vast knowledge of harmony and technology. We think he could have done the latter, but he more or less settled for the former.
Within that context, this is a fun and occasionally surprising collection. The lead off track "Excession/Altitude" is all over the map, with Aude infusing the pulse with doomsday mechanics and a gorgeous sequencer break about 4 minutes in, a sudden vision of the cosmic through the moving bodies. Further down the program, "Hani/Baby Wants To Ride" spars with a grinning three note head and a skittish start-stop-start disco underpinning, a reluctant marriage of technopop, scratching and amphetidisco. But for our taste, the angry-robot trimmings of "Spearhead/Jump and Dance" and the unholy sonic indulgences of "The Fly" are the best moments here, especially the latter, where Aude has head down and his gray matter cranking, stretching, stretching until it almost the damn thing doesn't sound it belongs in a club anymore, like the soundtrack for a warped, 22nd century cartoon, where the smart little machines are pulling fast ones on the big dumb machines. It segs seamlessly into a undistinguished "Andy Ling/Fixation," which suddenly dissolves into a glistening break about halfway through and carries the tune through the rest of its breathless life, as if infused with a magic potion.
The truth about this stuff, though, is that it really does belong in a space, or at a party, or a club … and anything less reduces it to a nicely delivered DJ demo. Aude undoubtedly has plenty of ideas that may well extend beyond house, and we may get a chance to hear that sometime, but based on this, well, I'd hire the guy.
David Kirby | October 2, 2000
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