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Jersey devil : Metro Area outsider Morgan Geist scratches an 11-year itch.

John Dugan

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 CST

WAITING ROOM Morgan Geist doesn’t rush the music.
Photo: Jimmy Edgar

“It’s cool to have your stuff coincide with what’s popular at the moment, because that helps you out. But I think you have to be on the crest of the wave or swimming ahead of it furiously,” says Morgan Geist from his new recording studio in Queens. The producer-DJ has already been on the forefront of one movement: He ignited a nu-disco fascination with Metro Area’s self-titled album in 2002. But he’s been content to let trends pass him by in the 11 years since his first solo album. “For years, I wanted to do a record that had classic-rock timbres in it; then people started playing Balearic stuff and slow, weird rock. I thought, Fuck this, I’m not gonna do it,” he says. Geist’s new Double Night Time (Environ), featuring vocals from Junior Boys member Jeremy Greenspan, doesn’t fit with the sound blocks of blog house, but pursues his personal obsessions. We’re the better for it.


Rather than dusty rock LPs, Geist (more characteristically) tapped into obscure ’80s electronic pop: Heaven 17 and the naive experimentation of Japanese group Yellow Magic Orchestra and its side projects like Logic System and Sandy and the Sunsets. “You can hear this real excitement and playfulness where they are really playing the studio and discovering the instruments. I wanted to take that sound and do good songs with it,” he says. Geist stuck to the “sad lyrics and happy music” model of Motown. The result is one of the year’s best records—one in danger of falling between established genres because it’s more pop than dance, but not typical indie fare, either. New-wave disco, perhaps?


Geist still prefers to work with electronic music hardware—vintage stuff—rather than software synths and plug-ins. (Those drum machines and keyboards can be a bitch to collect and maintain.) “It’s fun; I am a nerd. I don’t have any extravagances. I’m either getting good food or I am buying gear,” he says. With dual studios operational, Metro Area hopes to have a new album sometime next year.


Geist also has the mind-set of a perfectionist outsider—a former industrial-music kid from north New Jersey—who’s going against the grain and currently doesn’t worry much about getting tracks to the dance floor. He thinks his album is “too soft” for DJs—though, conveniently, Carl Craig has remixed several tracks sure to make the PA systems shudder around the world.


Even so, he thinks Double Night Time could be seen as a betrayal of dance-floor values—like the moment when Depeche Mode went rock. “A lot of people don’t like the fact that I am doing songy stuff. Some people say it’s too white and indie rock. I’m like, Whatever; dance music is incredibly boring and conservative,” he says before teasing us with the idea of going pure dance on the next album.


Geist and Metro Area’s Darshan Jesrani both maintain hectic DJ schedules from London to Moscow. Together, they’re fantastic. A 2007 set at Lava topped our year-end list, and the duo’s new mix-CD for the high-profile Fabric series is a stunner.


So 2008 must be a banner year for Geist? Not exactly: “At least the profile is up. We are saying we are still alive.”


Double Night Time and Fabric 43: Metro Area are out now.

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