Key Tracks: Pépé Bradock’s “Deep Burnt”
How do you drop the name Pépé Bradock without summoning the almost inevitable association of “Deep Burnt,” the notorious 11 minutes of time around which Pépé wound the inspired strings of a Freddie Hubbard classic around a propulsive house beat. Released as a mere B-side on Kif Recordings in 1999, “Deep Burnt” emerged as the melancholic hymn of choice for deep house disciples, selling out at top speed with lingering copies traded like gold dust. Some 16 years later, and in anticipation of a reedit, to be released on his Atavisme label, Pépé Bradock recounts the track’s story for the first time.
I decided to create the conditions necessary to express what’s bothering me, and the only way I found, was to do what everyone else does and bootleg myself in an attempt to escape the closed-in echo-chamber of my electro-acoustic experimentations!
I am a sinnerman and I need to get by.
Forgive me!
This tambourine doesn’t belong to me. This tambourine is the tambourine of proclaimed emancipation. The tambourine that says “We Insist: Freedom Now!” A collective improvisation recording.
These violins come from a luxury elevator where one of the greatest jazz trumpet players would have been stuck with a singer capable of seducing even the most classic of audiences.
Jazz, the miraculous, the worthy prodigal son of the tambourine’s banishment. With hard work and dignity, it turns the military fanfare into a joyful, redeeming abstraction for the feet, the heart and the mind.
I’d like to know who these violinists were. The faithful fiddle that demands such work to get right. The redeeming violin. The reuniting violin. The tear-inducing violin. Journeying from old Europe to the New World. “Deep Burnt” is a banal bit of techno with violins and a tambourine, Cubism for ravers. A potentially impolite reappropriation, but a sincere one. Juvenile and sonorous sleight-of-hand.
I dreamt it up while working as a smuggler of hip hop etymology: dealing in sonic relics, vinyl miner, at a time not so long ago when a rare disc was a Grail, the prize claimed by those willing to travel for it, to plunge their fingers in to the dust and to spend their last dimes on a whisper of soul to share. The obsessional search for a few infinite seconds to honor, to celebrate, to rescue from oblivion. To resurrect. It was my passion, before the death knell of those electric tambourines, the SPs, the S950s and other MPCs. The blow that broke the crate-diggers code. I want to take the opportunity to salute, with humility, those who hacked dehumanised robotic music, CDs destined for landfills, with semi-instruments so as to to transcend the force of despair with poetry, in the Bronx and elsewhere. The children of the sun showing the way to the light, transforming the silent, polluting vinyl into solid gold.
Is Paris Burning? Paris is Burning like the film that reminds us what House is: a dash of gaiety in the sad and iniquitous world of hypocrisy. In a world that bows to dealers of death-engines and sleeping pills, who sell the very ground they stand upon. The workplace terrorists. A world of cynics who rule their neighbor with an iron rod they’d never bow to themselves.
It’s a spiritual thing... not the kind of boom-boom used to go fish at the supermarket or the club... a soul thing, a joyful alchemical boom-boom, to make walls vibrate in the night, to summon the evil-eye and rouse the sound-asleep and clear-of-conscience: to reunite rather than divide.
I hope that this track belongs to us. I’m the schmuck that composed and played it with borrowed bits of string in a 25m2 shoebox on mystical plastic boxes with the latest in built-in obsolescence, with an audience of two wonderful witnesses filled with doubt and benevolence, in the hope of getting the tribes to dance together instead of standing-off. Not everyone understands – Together Forever!
The state of mind I was in before things got crazy? I remember joys and laughter. Endless thanks to those who played and promoted “Deep Burnt,” and to those who danced to “Deep Burnt”, but my apologies to those that I offended. It was a happy accident, I hope nobody got hurt...
When things get crazy there isn’t much to be done... Here’s what electronic tinkering and easy laughter have earned me: profound joy, the kind so deep it brings you tears, and a good hard pillorying. A bittersweet experience of exponential vanity.
The two sides of this bootleg present the same track with subtle but manifold differences, that I alone know – micro edits, micro processes. We have the choice between admitting that it’s the very same track that got me in trouble in the first place or getting into the strict analysis of minute details, splitting hair til we burn out.
As Jules Berry would have said, “It’s an outside bet but you might as well play it, it starts badly but once it gets going…”
Translation E.Lewis/MND
