A protégé of DJ Sprinkles, Long is well-versed in the political import of deep house, using vocal samples to add narrative as well as melodic texture. Just as Sprinkles used documentary voice recordings to tell the melancholic story of house and its queer origins on 2009’s Midtown 120 Blues, Long continues to explore the radical potential of the dancefloor and its possible expansion into wider society on his second LP, Long Trax 2. If the dancefloor is now regarded as a ‘safe space’, he posits, why can’t our society be also?
Yet, in Long Trax 2 he merely finds the stasis of acceptance, the repetition of norms rather than the urgency of subversion. The critic Ian MacDonald claimed that minimalist music is the “passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass production and The Bomb.” In Long Trax 2, though, Long uses this minimalism to critique our passivity.
Opener ‘Nothing’s Changed’ is almost tongue-in-cheek in its 11-minute exposition of a single chord sequence. But then beneath the oneiric synths and precise drum programming, we hear the voice of an uncharacteristically pessimistic Barack Obama: “I’m a very angry man,” he says. “Understanding has to be earned / It has to be worked for / There are sacrifices involved.” And then: “Nothing’s changed”. Here lies the thematic core of the record, buried in the danceable grid-structure of the production; it takes concentration to not be lulled into the passivity MacDonald speaks of and to miss it entirely.
This subtlety of sampling continues on the other five tracks, in the muffled melancholy of ‘The Struggles, The Difficulties’, in the critique of ‘That’s The Way It Goes’, in ambient closer ‘We Tend To Forget’. While each of these tracks runs together almost seamlessly, the record is almost in danger of becoming a background presence. But there is a refreshing honesty to this consistency, prioritising texture and narrative over conventional structure or dancefloor impact. Long invites us to tune in and be moved, or to drop out and continue on as ever.
