Exposure - AC Slater
New rave is passé and old rave is new again. Does that make sense? Never mind. A new vogue in electronic production has it that only everything including the kitchen sink can make a set these days, and so we have guys like AC Slater from Bushwick, Brooklyn (Hipster Central now that Williamsburg is all used up, so they say) messing up our ears on the dancefloor.
‘Messing up our ears’? How so?
By producing a heavily layered, frequently high BPM morass of clashing genres, sneaking in scribbling acid hiss, a sanguine dubstep bass crunch, liberal doses of breaks and dissected vocal samples of the classic variety. ‘Big Brooklyn Bass’, he calls it, very appropriately.
Where might we have heard him?
Perhaps from his short-lived Pitched Up label, which put out a few releases earlier this decade when Slater was a youthful hardcore DJ in his native Philadelphia. Or maybe his own ‘Jack Got Jacked’, made after his relatively recent infusion of a wider array of dance music styles, which rips up Mr Fingers’ classic ‘Can You Feel It?’ Or possibly his remix of Moby’s ‘Stars’, which tears the original to pieces and rebuilds it from the ground up.
Where do I think I’ve heard of him?
That’ll be turn-of-the-90s US sitcom Saved By The Bell, which featured a character named Albert Clifford ‘AC’ Slater and from where he got the pseudonym. His real name is Aaron Clevenger, which is still quite cool.
AC Slater plays R-P-Z at the School of Art, Glasgow, Thu 6 Nov.