His fourth album, Silence in the Secret Garden, could teach San Francisco house fans a thing or two -- not necessarily about Afrocentricity, but rather that dance music delights most when it fucks with formula. While S.F. house labels typically turn out facile tunes in which jazz is pure affect and funk is the aura the DJ brought back after a week without showers at Burning Man, Moodymann's tracks -- many of them crawling at a laudanum pace -- eschew obvious dance-floor motifs for introverted intensity, despite their heavy use of disco samples.
A master of the loop, Moodymann explores the limits of repetition, throwing snippets of Rhodes keyboards, disconnected vocals, and drum breaks into shifting configurations that build almost imperceptibly. In contrast to other minimalists, though, he also relies on the long arc of improvisation, grafting fluid piano lines over rock-tumbler rhythms on tunes like "Shine" and "People."
"LiveinLA 1998," the album's darkest cut, grinds away with a slow buzz-saw of a bass line as African chants spiral over a tangle of piano chords. Instead of dressing up sophistication in borrowed jazz threads, the track, like the record as a whole, takes the elements of soul and rearranges them into edgy, uncomfortable patterns. While so many house producers begin and end with the concept of "sexy," Moodymann takes a course that's as fraught as the act itself.
