Words: BEN MURPHY
Photo: SHAUNA REGAN
For San Francisco-based Claude Von Stroke, going deep and rocking the dancefloor aren’t mutually exclusive. With his second, more expansive album ‘Birdbrain’, the DJ/producer is determined to inject a little fun and club anarchy into the chin-stroking world of tech-house…
STROKEOFGENIUS!
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Barclay Crenshaw is not a typical tech-house producer. Despite hailing
from Detroit, he isn’t the type to drone on about his authenticity or
‘keeping it real’ credentials.
His first mega hit as Claude Von Stroke — 2006’s ‘Who’s Afraid Of
Detroit?’ — nabbed facets of the 313’s illustrious musical history, but irreverently
worked them into a bass-heaving, spine-tingling, stripped down masterpiece that
seemed to both acknowledge the city’s legacy and poke fun at the anxiety over its
huge influence on generations of producers.
Since first setting up shop in San Francisco, acquiring the Claude Von Stroke ap-
pellation and siring his two record labels, Dirtybird and Mothership, Crenshaw has
built a brand new form of house, bathed in the warmth of the California sunshine
— and the excitement of its dark, sleazy sweatboxes.
Through a series of subsequent smashes, most notably tracks like the ubiquitous
‘The Whistler’, ‘Chimps’ and ‘Groundhog Day’, Claude Von Stroke has managed that
most difficult of tricks — appealing to the underground heads and party people
simultaneously.
His new album, ‘Birdbrain’, out 19th October on Dirtybird, sees the label boss and
DJ further develop his signature sound over a short but sweet 10 tracks that dive
all over the proverbial shop while remaining distinctively Claude Von Stroke in
their sound. Throughout, his devilish wit and tongue-in-cheek production shines
through, and for Crenshaw, combating the ponderous nature of some club music
was one of his principal aims.
“During the production of the album I thought I was getting too serious,” Cren-
shaw confesses. “Sometimes there’s too much seriousness, and sometimes people
just want to have fun. The only unfortunate part is that a lot of the people who just
want to have fun end up getting classified as cheesy. A lot of them are. That’s the
hard line, I find, I don’t want to be cheesy but I want to have fun, too.”
There’s plenty of unabashed, hilarious hedonism on ‘Birdbrain’. ‘Big ‘n’ Round’
celebrates the female form with its “big ‘n’ round” mantra, bouncing, sub low
bass barrage and bubbling percussion, while ‘Beat That Bird’, a riff on the classic
Johnny Dangerous houser ‘Beat That Bitch’, is interjected with humorous, freaky
bird noises. But neither are reliant on gimmicks: both, vitally, burst with kinetic
dancefloor funk and unexpected twists ‘n’ turns, from the sudden, cinematic
dubstep-style breakdown and menacing guitar of the former to the drum lunges
and stuttering synth buzz of ‘Beat That Bird’.
“I made ‘Big ‘n’ Round’ because I wanted one thing where I was like, ‘Fuck it!’ on
the album,” Crenshaw giggles. “That one is just funny. I was listening to the
sounds of the track and I thought, ‘That sounds like boobs!’ But really, people can
get way too serious about their partying. People are going out to have fun, not
rate it like a critic. It’s kind of the same thing as if I was a winemaker. I would make
something that tastes good. I wouldn’t care so much about whatever the hell it is
people obsess over.”
This iconoclastic sense of fun lead Crenshaw to link up with another arch trickster,
funk freak Bootsy Collins, for one of the album’s most pivotal collaborations,
‘Greasy Beat’. A lubed-up, dark machine funk emission with a pulverising, warping,
warehouse bassline, the track’s nightmarish proclivities are brought into sharp
relief by the comical, surreal interjections of Bootsy, who tells us, “If the funk gets
too much for your rump, then turn the other cheekbone!”
“Bootsy just popped into my head. He’s really funny, the jokester of his genre,”
recalls Crenshaw. “I thought it would be a cool match up. I just called him — it was
super-easy. We could have just pounded it out and made a big cheesy No.1 type
thing but that wasn’t the point.”
Indeed, crass concessions to the commercial are not what Claude Von Stroke is all
about. Investing all of his tracks with an instantly recognisable, distinctive recipe
of ingredients — organic sounding grunts, yelps and freaky noises, and those all-
important submarine basslines — his music has a far more human edge, the sound
of a human manipulating the electronics rather than the other way around. With
Crenshaw, the devil is in the detail.
“Those kinds of sounds are all from James Brown and the hip-hop records that I
used to be really into as a kid. Even Michael Jackson, you could say. I always liked
the performers who would throw in lots of little hits and grunts and stuff into their
tracks. It makes it more human, and it’s like, ‘Here’s a little hit to show you that
we’re in the pocket.’”
Influences from beyond the horizons of house and techno are all over ‘Birdbrain’,
most notably on the sublime ‘Aundy’, a tribute to Crenshaw’s wife and a eulogy to
the ambient drum & bass sounds that first turned him onto dance music. Placing
the euphonious synth washes, Rhodes keyboards and deadly deep subs of prime
period LTJ Bukem and Good Looking Records in a house music context, ‘Aundy’ is
a disarmingly deep antidote to the bumping hilarity of much of the rest of ‘Bird-
brain’, and a combination of influences that Barclay is stunned no-one thought of
mixing before.
“I was a d&b DJ before a house DJ,” says Crenshaw. “That was totally what I was
going for, ‘Logical Progression Vol.1’ in a house track. That’s also my wife’s name;
she does the vocals on it. It just came out really cool, as kind of an accident. But
I’m surprised that hasn’t been tried before. I was like, ‘How come nobody’s done
this?’”
Elsewhere, the hip-hop that first fired his imagination powers both ‘Bay Area’ and
‘California’ (a collaboration with new Dirtybird alumni J Phlip), a pair of low-rider,
bass-heavy concoctions that doff a fitted baseball cap to San Francisco’s Hyphy
scene — an electronic hip-hop sound huge there.
“‘California’ is a Hyphy-style bass track. You gotta have some bass!” grins Barclay.
“I was a huge hip-hop fan when I was a kid, I wanted to be a hip-hop artist, in a
roundabout way. I did start an alias this year, Grizzl, where I’m going to be doing
hip-hop stuff. I did a Franz Ferdinand remix, that was my first thing.”
On a macro scale, the two hip-hop interludes also salute the city and state that are
his adopted home.
“I just love the people and the attitude in San Francisco,” enthuses Barclay. “It’s
not a very typical American city. It feels a bit like a European city when you walk
around, but it’s also not European, at the same time. It’s a little grungy and dirty
but also really beautiful. People here really like bass. We do these free parties in
Golden Gate Park and it’s just a different kind of person who comes out here. I
don’t know how to fully explain. I just love the area, temperature and everything
around it.”
With ‘Birdbrain’ barely in the bag, Crenshaw’s already got several other projects in
the works, including a remix of Kenny Larkin for Planet E, a link up with d&b pro-
ducer Fresh and a collection of his best remixes. Claude Von Stroke is one Dirtybird
you can’t beat.
