Cenk Sezer · Manuel Göttsching - E2 E4

You know one of those songs you hear that captures your attention, you want to know what it is but can't find out? You're at a show, or a DJ set, or listening to a mixtape. This song comes up that blows your mind? Makes you say "What is this?". I guess a 2021 version would be a new blend that a DJ plays which does not yet have an entry in the SoundHound or Shazam databases. This is one of those songs for me.

There was a 20 year gap between the first time I heard the song. I'd been dancing at places like Club Shelter, Body & Soul and Sound Factory. In the early 2000s, Saturday night catered more to the Carbon/Exit/Jersey Shore crowd, if you walked downstairs past that crowd, they played some really nice dancable house music. I'd show up at 3AM and dance until 10 the next morning. At some point, while in the midst of feeling the music and letting it out through my body, this song came on. It was a moment captured. While this sounded more like a song that would reside in Keyboard Magazine Flexi Disc than in a DJ's crate deck, I was unaware of its history, being considered a forerunner and an influence on techno music.

Over the next twenty years, this song would pop up at the most unexpected moments; a small bar on the outskirts of a large flaming city. A college DJ's radio show at 3:00 AM. Enjoying songs that had the similar sounds in part because they reminded me of that song.

Flash forward to the day after Christmas. I'm treating myself to a 26 mile bike ride in Brooklyn. I'm on a bike path, enjoying the pensive mood brought on by multiple cloudy days in the city. My body's reached a comfortable detente with 40 to 50 degree days that I couldn't have imagined in my youth. I had the Soulful House Music Collage channel playing very lightly. The DJ was ending his shift and all of a sudden...

I hear the two chord refrain, the solid and progressive bassline providing lots of inspiration to move, the percussion and guitar adding elements of unsequenced variety laid over that bass and those chords. I don't know if I can fully explain how/why this song has its appeal, but let me try. I feel that one side effects of electronic music has been the ability to capture a moment, a movement, and expand on that to explore the world within that moment. The appeal may be the ability to highlight, to explore, to expound on those nuances in that moment. It's a view which makes appreciation for different journeys later in the song. A bridge becomes appreciated as almost a new song with the added comfort of audio bliss that has been provided. In E2-E4, the guitar solo kinda does change the overall tone of the song.

Shout out to the Twitch crew for one again showing the benefits of a positive internet community. Y'all also helped a brother make a music connection that's been a long time coming.