Various Artists — Soft Touch Express Vols. 1-3 (Trax Only)
Soft Touch Express Vol. 1 by Trax Only
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: When the pandemic settled in and quarantine kept everyone home, New Orleans-based party promoters Trax Only were left with a lot of time in the space where DJing and socializing might’ve been. The collective — Kathi Kniess, Brett Labauve (Bouffant Bouffant) and Mark Louque (Father Figure/FFigure) — were caught in the anxious state of energy without direction, creativity in fits and bursts but nowhere to put it. There was a lot of napping.
But as 2020 went on, the idea of a compilation slowly, intriguingly came together. Now, with the release of three mini-albums in March and the delivery of a 90-page risograph-printed zine to accompany them, Trax Only has not just a musical manifesto for its wild nights out, it has a snapshot of dance music’s stalled months, too.
As Kniess says in the zine’s final pages, “the quarantine had a silver lining: There was more time to focus on production. Why not provide a digital platform for this output and bring along other queer producers we love and admire?” After six years of promoting dance nights featuring a mix of names passing through — I recognized Egyptian Lover, Horse Meat Disco, Octo Octa and Rayna Russom at a quick glance of the thank yous at the back of the zine — that took cues from the cities they loved (New York, Berlin, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) and incorporated them with their own homespun party-making mentality, they now had a chance to give back.
And how they’ve delivered. Trax Only may be based in New Orleans, but as these compilations show, its reach extends far beyond the bayou: Of the 21 producers featured across these three volumes, only five are based in the Big Easy. There’s representation from locales near (Atlanta, Memphis) and far (Los Angeles, Portland, New York, Berlin), and the ground covered isn’t just in where perspectives or where the musicians are from, either: The sonic territory slowly blooms as you listen through each volume.
The music centers itself with house in the restrained future cruisin’ of Ruth Mascelli, Olive T, Jacob Meehan, DJ NSA and a deep house queens’ anthem from Love Letters, but it also covers a great deal of ground beyond that broad umbrella. Shaun J. Wright’s “I Pray How My Ancestors Prayed” is an ideal opener for what’s ahead and could easily be envisioned as the opener to any set, a stripped back, drums-forward number with just the barest hint of keyboard and a tense vocal intoning the title. Sappho and Jon Damon Boucher’s “I Want You” is an early highlight, its chorus airing out over a swooning harmony and a surprisingly busy percussive clattering that, once you hear, you can’t take your ears off trying to pick it apart. Bouffant Bouffant’s “Night Blue” is another, featuring piano and what sounds like bongos and a dubbed out melodica.
Sfireman’s “All Right” that closes out Vol. 1 is one of the set’s more interesting sonic outliers, a 16-bit videogame soundtrack clocking in at less than three and a half minutes that makes for the shortest track here. But it opens things up a bit for the second and third volumes, which feature the malfunctioning robotics of FFigure’s “Self Checkout,” Marceaux Marceaux aka z72.52’s appropriately named light breaks throwback “Time Warp,” the acid of Juana’s “1E Strategy” and Ephemera’s cosmic wandering “Lava Lava.” Indeed, Vol. 3 might be the most eclectic and hard-hitting of the bunch, peak-hours energy exuded by Bézier’s jacking “Vocalise,” the dark techno thumper from Ariel Zetina on “Security Theatre,” the outright fastest bpm of the bunch on Jasmine Infiniti’s “iono” (so fast that the track can’t seem to stop itself, truncating abruptly at the finish), and the sample-happy (Flava Flav most prominent among them) “People in the House” from Good Xtreme to close.
Credit is due in part here to the mastering done by Lucia Martinez aka DJ Saskia, a producer in their own right who’s helped forge a coherent vision for the label and, as an added bonus, offers suggestions for a home studio starter kit. Though she has no tracks present on these volumes, their deft touch behind the boards is evident and each track comes through clearly.
The Soft Touch Express volumes are a cogent representation of club culture’s frustrated id. The biographies, interviews and essays are engaging and enlightening, but there’s no mistaking what’s absent, that raw ache, that irrefutable yearning for the soft touch of another, that desire to commune in what is still one of humanity’s few remaining egalitarian spaces: the dancefloor. Humans funking together is what this stuff is all about, and say what you will about its effectiveness as a motivator for dishwashing, there’s no denying where it belongs — and what’s absent in these songs and across the pages of this zine is, well, us. At the precipice of a possible return later this year, Trax Only has gifted us a moment of reflection, what it means to care about partying and what a better world might sound like amid the sweat and smoke when our bodies finally, gratefully return to one another.
