Subjekt

Apparently an anonymous alter ego for a well-established house producer who had been making music for in excess of a decade but who could not be named for ‘legal reasons’, Subjekt explores the musical hinterland between the club and the home. The project’s album debut, Direction Creation, shuffled between proper house music and intricate down-tempo tracks, covering ground from dub-house to drifting jazz to bumpy beats to tech-house grooves. In the months prior to the album’s May 2004 release, dance music had frequently been proclaimed (erroneously or otherwise) as a waning cultural and creative force and in this context, records like Direction Correction seemed to be part of the problem. Not totally without charm or a bad album per se, Direction Creation rarely elevated itself above a mass of other quite good dance records (it also gave credence to the argument that fanaticism rather than dilettantism made for more intriguing records). The choice of remixers for the album’s single (Charles Webster and Jimpster re-versioned ‘Come On’ while AtJazz and Gerd re-modelled ‘Be My Chicago’) offered a small clue as to the producer’s identity, but in truth Direction Correction was not really compelling enough to warrant detective work to find its creator’s real appellation (a disinterest born out in the lack of suggestions as to who Subjekt actually was in the dance music press). Like the supposed mastermind behind the recording, Direction Correction was a fairly anonymous debut.