Choice Mix: Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Applewhite’s track “Leave With Us” opens with a pitched-down vocal sample of the Heaven’s Gate leader that he borrows his production alias from: “Planet Earth is about to be recycled. Your only chance to evacuate is to leave with us.” The beat is a gross body, elements decaying with each kick and then stitched back together roughshod. It’s a snapshot of the style that he’s cultivating. Using techniques like those of the original chopped ’n’ screwed sound – playing the same beat twice at the same time, overlapping one another, and slowing it all down from 45 to 33 RPM – he warps techno rhythms and ghettotech vocals into uncanny beasts.

It’s a sound that Applewhite AKA Joel Dunn and his production partner, The Friend AKA Konstantin Papatheodoropoulos, have slyly termed “Detroit sludge.” It’s a raw, sort-of techno made by a white guy from Detroit who grew up on Cannibal Corpse and Slayer, and named himself after a cult leader that instigated a mass suicide in the belief that aliens would replace their bodies. It’s also a sound that’s as fun as it is menacing.

In high school, Dunn spent his days quizzing the Vietnam veterans who worked in his local record store about thrash and death metal, but they “couldn’t give less of a fuck about what I wanted,” he says, “and I started picking records based on the artwork alone. I always went for the evil and dumb ones, and they nearly always sounded terrible, but I was more into the shredding feeling than the real ‘content’ of the sound itself.” He spent his nights falling asleep to local stations that played techno, Miami bass, electro and ghettotech. DJ Dick, DJ Assault and DJ Godfather were the totems, and the harder the beat and the sillier the vocal, the better.

“Everything I do has humor involved,” he says. “I’m not a serious person, by any means, but my humor does have a cynicism to it.” What is he cynical about with all of this? “Oh, you know, I’m not down with that whole black and white, turtleneck-wearing, serious-ass techno aesthetic,” he says glibly. “I identify more with the metal crowd, and that’s where the ‘sludge’ part comes from. My dad was always in bands, and one day one of his buddies brought a drum machine over to our house and I thought, ‘So this is where all that bass comes from.’ After than, I was hooked. The sludge idea comes from metal: thrashed-out, pitched-down music, played deep and dirty, at a much slower tempo than your typical hard techno track.”

Applewhite’s choice of labels in recent years reflect this between-ness. His “Prostrate” track was featured on Dark Acid V, one of a series of V/A releases by Glaswegian label Clan Destine Records, whose output is centered on gnarly techno tracks with a trash underbelly. He and the Friend also co-run the label Yo Sucka!, a division of legacy ghettotech label Twilight 76, itself co-run by Brian Gillespie AKA Starski of production duo Starski and Clutch, whose “Belle Isle Players” release is considered a staple of the early ghettotech sound. Applewhite counts Gillespie as a partner in this game – “a well-known dude about town for, like, the past 20 years” – and it’s a partnership that sees him restlessly shifting between an affection for classic Detroit production techniques and his own, antagonistic ways of playing with techno.

“There are limitations to what we do with the sludge sound like there are with ghettotech,” he explains. “We work at odd tempos for DJs, and we often get backlash. Some say that they won’t play it because it doesn’t have any energy to it, but when you hear it on a dancefloor, it’s very different. This sound works a lot better in practice than it does in theory,” he happily admits. “I’ve always been draw to making records that work within the 108-155 BPM tempo, which doesn’t fit the vibe of the boring, 128 BPM DJs. Everything is more slow and low. I have friends who say, ‘I have no idea how to play this record – what speed is it meant to be?”

It’s a speed that dictates other elements of the production. Sometimes, Applewhite works with classic hip-hop instrumentals and vocals to make edits, which pepper the more abrasive stretches of DJ sets comprised almost entirely of his original productions. “Adam Beyer, for example, remixed a Ben Sims track from 2000 called ‘Manipulated,’” he says, “and it has a sample of this Cuban song with a chanting vocal in it. I recreated that for an edit, at my own tempo and vibe. I’ve always taking what I know from the past and recycling it,” echoing that Heaven’s Gate mantra.

Crowd reactions to this style vary, but that’s less of a concern to Applewhite. What does concern him is the changing face of the place where he plays this out: Detroit. He tears through issues like local government corruption, the downtown area’s private police force, “this thing called the Blight Authority, which is pretty much levelling whole neighborhoods,” and those who buy condemned homes for next to nothing, only to realize that being in Detroit takes more than signing a cheque. Change itself, though, isn’t something that he’s opposed to – and it’s all certainly had an effect on the club scene that he grew up in.

“Detroit is a touchy city and it can go sour quickly, but this change is opening more community dialogues,” he says. “Detroit has been divided racially from neighborhood to neighborhood for years, but the crowds at the parties are becoming a lot more mixed now. We don’t have an infinite crowd anymore here – I don’t know if we ever did – but with a lot of after parties popping up, and a lot of money coming back into the city, there’s a point where you step back and say that, in the end, we’re all shooting for the same goal within music. If it’s true to what you are, it shouldn’t matter who you are. I see a lot of that change happening right now.” What is the goal, then? “To keep it deep and dirty,” he smirks.

You can listen to Marshall Applewhite’s Choice Mix for RBMA Radio here.