If you're all caught up on the Nas vs. Jay-Z beef, perhaps you'd be amused to hear about one in the lovely and dying new-electro scene? I mean, obviously nothing can quite rival the erratic rants and intensities of Nas, but this is a fun one, I swear. Ready? It involves a guy called I/F, or Interr-Ference. We're going to give him a break on the name, half because he's Dutch, and half because that extra R seems trivial in contrast to the name of his partner in The Parallax Corporation, who's called, umm, Intergalactic Gary.

I/F is sort of the nominal godfather of the new-electro scene, for two reasons. The first reason is his terrific late-90s cut "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass", which spiked pretty utilitarian techno with the big, dark early-electro and Italo-disco sound that wound up sweeping the nation (assuming that nation is the Netherlands and a big chunk of Germany). The second reason is his great and equally significant Mixed Up in the Hague disc, a set of seminal first-wave electro pieces including the likes of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk. He is, by any estimation, a major source of the Dutch electro scene's current agenda, which is Big, Dark, Epic, and Pounding: the deep noir-disco of fellow traveler Legowelt, for instance, sometimes seems like it might unexpectedly cross over into hard trance.

The weird beef starts in because I/F is pretty vocal in his disdain for, from what I can tell, pretty much everything, from the Dutch public to all of the electro he's credited for having spawned. In fact, the press-ready hook for Cocadisco is a big sneering swipe of a track called "Your Image", which goes on and on about "electrocash." (Sample lyrics: "Exploiting music for the sake of your fame! Your fashion vision completely misses the point! No respect for music at all!") It's easy to assume this swipe is directed as much at people like DJ Hell and the International DJ Gigolos-- who've injected star personas and cocaine/limousine antics into the whole electro project-- as it is at technical "electroclash" term-coiner Larry Tee, whose Brooklyn scene one Vice reader recently described as having turned into "a homosexual Star Search." (The problem with this criticism is that a homosexual Star Search sounds fantastic to me, whereas the bulk of Brooklyn electro does not.)

So what exactly, one might ask, is I/F's alternative proposal? In the case of The Parallax Corporation, it's to keep electro strictly pounding and strictly aimed at the dancefloor massive: Cocadisco, as the name sort of implies, is a big utilitarian techno set that stomps along with great dedication to traditional club tropes. Within that milieu it's mostly quite effective: it starts off with the obligatory "taking you on a journey"-type dialog sample, then kicks immediately into the pretty daunting "Lift Off", whose revolving bass grind is like a rollercoaster that keeps climbing until you're a little scared of the upcoming drop-- FC/Kahuna's "Glitterball" suddenly seems a bit weak to me now. No deep-dark synth-building here, just upfront, enjoy-the-ride banging.

And plenty of the tracks on Cocadisco continue to deliver on that front, though nothing really strives for the energy level of "Lift Off"-- "Crocodiles in the Sky", with vocals from usual I/F collaborator Nancy Fortune, immediately drops the tone back to the types of gridlike grooves Felix da Housecat might drop toward the beginning of a set. Vocalists appear on a lot of tracks, actually: Fortune, Kaori Kuwabara, Helga la Blaque, and, on the hard-disco pop detour, "Fear", Guy Tavares. In the end, I/F wanders the slightest bit into more classic-electro territory: "Slowflight Runner" verges into Legowelt's realm, its smooth electro stride underpinning a number of synth workouts, and the organic percussion breaks on the closing "Theme from Pack (Remix)" are actually half of why it wouldn't sound so out-of-place among the vintage selections on the next Mixed Up in the Hague volume.

But forgive me: The whole "electrocash" rant raises the standards on this sort of thing. Would I rather dance to the tracks on Cocadisco than I would to half of the electroclash coming out of the U.S.? Without question. Would I rather dance to them than the stuff coming from International DJ Gigolos? Sometimes, though I don't think the gulf between the two is quite as wide as I/F would like to think it is. Nevertheless, there's something deeply offputting about I/F's sort of prudish traditionalism here: he's delivered a very solid collection of utilitarian, floor-oriented techno-electro-disco, but holding that up as some sort of "about the music" victory seems as pointless as rock fans getting upset about pop stars and drum machines. So, decent work, I/F-- only next time, mouth shut!

-Nitsuh Abebe, January 24th, 2003