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METRO AREA :: DANCE MUSIC REVAMPED
The dance district
Published in PRESS Magazine October 2003
Anyone who was young once, at least since the late 1970s, has surely had their own experience of Disco music. With its intense energy, up-tempo and banging-bass-drum sounds, bodies effortlessly move to the beat of disco music in perpetual motion.
A genre of dance music that has been a major influence on popular dance culture since the late 1970s with its soul-based vocals, compulsive bass lines, and thumping beats, disco music evolved into a pop sensation. However, the "processed" or "artificial" sounds of dance music also turned out to be one of the biggest source of disputes between critics and the public. Whereas live instrumentation were regarded as "pure" and rock music was supposedly accompanied by "spontaneous" acts of creation, disco music and its like were considered as studio-centered products of faceless producers lacking in substance and depth whose its mainstream appeal unfortunately faded in the early 1980s. Alive as it is, though, music continuously evolves. Thus, eventually, in an effort to strip dance music back to simple bass lines and a heavy drumbeat, House Music was born. Using the synthesizer sounds and treated vocal lines to add interest, Disco-based electronic dance music that first appeared in New York and Chicago in the early 1980s, using new technology, including samplers and synthesizers. The evident debt of house music to disco led to a revival in the 1990s, though the various genres of electronic-based dance music that disco birthed, was based on the same reaction that people had with mother disco: it was too artificial, too amateur.
Enter Metro Area.
In an age where stagnant, loop-based hits are killing the art of dance music, Metro Area fuses elements of disco, house and techno, providing listeners with emotional, unpredictable, and melodic rum-shaking house music that continuously earn them more and more fans in the dance community. Recently the cause of buzz on two DJ-producers known collectively as Metro Area, the past four years have seen the Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani release a series of four 12" dance records as Metro Area that boasts of quality and innovation.
Veteran New York based producers Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani hooked up through the internet mailing lists in the mid-90s, and since then, both producers had been active on their own. The Jersey-born Geist met Jesrani, who's from Poughkeepsie, New York during college where both were involved with campus radio stations and dance shows, which played a big part in the duo's past.
Born in Wayne, New Jersey, Morgan Geist is an avid music enthusiast since he was a child. While growing up in the 70s and 80s, Geist's exposure to his older brother and older sister's record collections, combined with the more daring pop music of those times helped foster his desire to create music. His initial exposure to dance music however was limited to the odd track like Kevin Saunderson's "Big Fun" and "Good Life." It was not until he attended Ohio's Oberlin College that Geist eventually found his way to techno, as he drove three hours to a small, club in the middle of nowhere to hear Detroit DJs Derrick May and Juan Atkins. In 1995, while he continued his studies in Oberlin College, Geist founded his own label, Environ for the typical reasons - independence, satisfaction, self-fulfilllment. A perpetual goal, he wanted it to improve over time, take different courses but always possess a high quality standard. Later on, he produced a series of acclaimed releases, including The Driving Memoirs, released on Clear in 1997, which were influenced by Detroit and U.K.-based techno.
Darshan Jesrani, on the other hand, hopped around from strumming air guitar to breakdancing until eventually getting involved with clubbing during late adolescence. He got into production with Manish Sehgal as Essa 3 and Acronym City, and released tracks on SubFreq and Penetrate during the mid-'90s.
Sharing similar music influences, the same music philosophy, and the duo's love of the old moods of R&B, disco and boogie, Geist and Jesrani decided to collaborate in bringing back older songs and classics, not in a nostalgic sense at all, but to try to make something that sounds at least different, if not brand new. While the working as a duet may seem hard and complicated, Geist and Jesrani manage to work around their different work rates and styles. By putting their two personalities into play, incredible fusion of sounds come out of the differences. The duo either starts a track together or one person will come up with a track "skeleton" and which they will finish it together.
It was only after a year's worth of late night sessions in New Jersey and Manhattan that Geist and Jesrani surfaced in a collaborative sense. After a one-off as Sage, the duo burst onto the scene in 1999 with their first Metro Area 12", featuring "Atmosphrique", the cult smash underground hit with it's Kraftwerk-esque hook, under their own Environ label to the surprise and enjoyment of dance music heads everywhere.
Combining the musical acumen of Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, Metro Area have been pedaling their desperately cool blend of disco, electronica and house since they released their debut album. Whoever said disco is dead didn't foresee Geist and Jesrani coming some 30 years later to revamp the sound that made the '70s swing. Part of a micro-genre of dance music, Metro Area begins their musical references around 1977, as they combine heavy doses of disco, dollops of funk, a dash of new wave and synth-pop, and then remove just about everything but each track's most essential elements. Bringing back the soulful experimentation of early club classics while paying tribute to the bygone glory days of '70s and '80s boogie, old-school R&B, disco, and house, Metro Area combines live sounds with analogue electronics, the more cutting edge sounds of original Detroit techno, abstract Chicago and New York and New Jersey deep house, innovative house and techno backed with a wicked DFA remix as the mood and minimalism of more recent dance music forms simultaneously creep into the mix.
Skillfully avoiding any strict sense of stylistic pigeonhole, Metro Area came up with their unique blend of the synthetic (drum programming, synthesizers) and the organic (a string quartet and a battery of other guest musicians), with equal passion for both early Detroit techno and Harlem-birthed underground disco, all the while keeping this timeless melting pot fresh with a modern edge.
Sounding like a memory of a distant, idealized disco, Metro Area's Geist and Jesrani has proven time and again that when it comes to music, the best types of gravediggers are the ones who are more interested in dusting those bones off and making them groove, rather than putting them together in interestingly chin-scratching postmodern millennial ways. And while technology, to others, has made music less dynamic, and some musicians lazier, Metro Area's know-how and skillful use of it, coupled with their respect for it enhanced their productions.
Since their debut album in 1999, Metro Area has released a string of highly sought-after and limited 12-inch singles on their own Environ label as they continue to stun the connoisseurs of deep dance music with each of their limited-edition releases on the Environ record label. Ironically at first, Geist and Jesrani's work together wasn't intended to result in a full album, though it eventually became obvious that while the duo was loosely influenced by a lot of stuff, it all fit together. Quietly having released three albums over the past few years on Geist's Environ Records, the discs are a forum for the duo's shared love of old R&B, disco and techno, and they've struck a chord worldwide. Moving through 2001, an additional trio of three-song 12" releases -- numbered simply in succession, Chicago-style (Metro Area 2, Metro Area 3, Metro Area 4), -- gradually caught fire in the dance community, appealing to both old and new listeners alike. All released on Environ, these small-scale pressings sold out in short time and didn't become collector's items based on scarcity alone.
As of October 2002, however, for the first time in three years since Metro Area's stunning debut EP, following the rapturous welcome given to their rare and much sought after twelve inches, techno-musicians and producers Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani have finally released their first full-length album, simply called, Metro Area, where the various releases are compiled and molded into a fantastic silver, circular album shape. Released around the world by their own label, Environ except for Europe/UK/Ireland, which will be handled by Virgin/Source under license, Metro Area is one of the most refreshing, charming and down right electro-funking albums to have graced 2002 as new edits are compiled off their first groundbreaking 12-inch and their three equally-astounding subsequent ones (spanning 1999-2001) with the addition of four eagerly awaited new songs. Taking six tracks from four 12" releases that left immediate impressions on the dance underground, Geist and Jesrani edit them as needed, and weave them into four new productions for a painstakingly sequenced album that flows constantly and smoothly with colorful, melodic, and deep feeling and simplistic yet full-sounding grooves.
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Over the next two years, the fine collaboration
between techno musicians Geist and Jesrani led to a release of a string of four
groundbreaking, highly sought-after and limited 12-inch singles from Environ
label, all of which immediately became much sought-after collector items and
always managed to find respect and approval from many of the daddies in clubland.
Since then, the duo was immediately pounced upon by DJs around the world and the
two men responsible were catapulted to almost iconic status around the world of
House and Dance.