We don’t have to dig deep for this one as we highlight one of Norway’s most exciting label conglomerate, Sex Tags for this week’s Cut with Filter Musikk
Sex Tags is a living art project. It constitutes two brothers and an extensive community of DJs, producers and music enthusiasts stretching from Moss to Berlin. Since its inception it’s cultivated a cult-like following, attracting kindred spirits to their unconventional approach. Many have tried to replicate the appeal of Sex Tags and its many subsidiaries, but there can be only one Sex Tags.
It’s in the artwork that adorn the records, the dedication to the vinyl format, events, and a DIY attitude. They’ll do everything from screen printing posters to hand-delivering records in person to their favourite record store including Filter Musikk. It’s in their almost obsessive dedication to the music from releasing the most obscure artists and friends to the records label heads DJ Fett Burger and DJ Sotofett play.
DJ Fett Burger and DJ Sotofett are real-life brothers and keen music obsessives. Their tastes are broad and inclusive with everything from Dub to Techno making up their expansive record collections. They thrive between the boundaries of genres, and the label excels when the artists find their sound within a fusion of disparate styles.
Their records are often only available in the vinyl format and in limited runs. They never pander to any trend and even at times when they are the trend, they avoided exploiting their own success, remaining rooted in their underground pursuits. Never able to pigeonhole their music, but certainly idiosyncratic, Sex Tags in all its various iterations still evokes something unique.
The records from Sex Tags are mostly focussed on the dance floor, but never aimed at the big room, and it’s usually the secret record that will make discerning heads turn. From Skatebård’s Congo to Sotofett’s Current 82 there are some classics in the annals of the extended Sex Tags family and with every new record, there’s the potential of becoming a future classic.
Today, they are still going strong, and have become an institution in their own right. We pay tribute to Sex Tags today with some of the more recent releases from the label and its various subsidiaries and artists through another cut with Filter Musikk.
*We usually add tracks from the records, but Sex Tags very rarely share their music digitally, so you’ll just have to go to Filter to listen to these future classics.
DJ Sotofett – Did You Love Me? (12″)
Away from Sex Tags, Fett Burger and Sotofett run their own labels, and Wania is the latter’s personal outlet for anything that doesn’t quite fit elsewhere. Did You Love Me? has been a secret weapon at Sotofett and LNS’ combined record bag this season. Its sensational string arrangement, wispy vocals and jingling break-beat evokes early House music, with an electrifying intensity designed for today’s dance floor.
It’s a definitive contrast with whatever is happening on the B-Side as Sotofett ventures into his familiar Dub sonic signature for two tracks, delivering a calming tonic to the high-energy of the A-side. On Dub You Loved Me it seems a lost echo from the flipside attached itself to the purposefully slow arrangement. Across the whole record, however, texture remains constant, an airy quality clinging to the arrangements, infusing the atmosphere with a cloudy hue.
DJ Fett Burger & DJ Grillo Wiener – Disco Fem / Disco Sex (12″)
This is a DJ Fett Burger future classic. Alongside his long-time collaborator, DJ Grillo Wiener, he takes up the mantle for Disco in this two track thriller. Away from the sheen and the gleam of the genre, Fett Burger and Grillo opt for a grittier approach to the genre. Like a 70’s Scorsese film, things are messy but you can’t look away.
Fluttering bongos and congas coerce some familiar samples into uncharted territories, with a couple of boisterous dance floor cuts. It’s Disco for the unhinged, a calamitous collision between turbulent percussion and indestructible melodies.
Warodjah feat. Zouratié Koné – Zou’s Journey (12″)
The versatility and the scope of the Sex Tags crew’s musical indulgences are so vast it’s never a surprise. You can find Fett Burger, Sotofett or the Sex Tags logo covering everything from blissed-out ambient tracks to gnawing acid and even as far afield as post-rock balearic, there is very little they’ll leave untouched.
It’s no surprise then to find Fett Burger on remix duties for this afro-beat release travelling from the west coast of Africa to Rome. Like Fela Kuti and Cerrone meeting over a drum machine, the Digitalized Planet B (a Sex Tags subsidiary) release finds Italian duo Warodjah collaborating with Burkina Faso artist Zouratié Koné on Zou’s Journey.
The stoic repetition of a drum machine corals the lucid sounds of a kora and swinging bass guitar, while Koné’s vocals uphold the Griot’s tradition of narrative through song. In DJ Fett Burger’s rendition there’s more emphasis on the percussion for its functional demand from the dance floor, but those dreamy elements remain rooted in the background echoing through the track.
The remix is a revenant burner of the original, keeping those essential elements that appeal in the original for the repurpose. While certainly not a departure for the Sex Tags conglomerate, it leans to something other than the sole pursuit of the dance floor on the original.
DJ Sotofett – WANIA mk1 (2×12″)
It’s album time for DJ Sotofett again. The artist is nothing short of prolific, with a discography almost hitting the triple digits and a fair few of them constituting albums. He hasn’t taken on the long player format in a few years, until this new one on Wania.
It’s a scorcher of a record, with regular collaborators Zarate Fix, LNS and LA.2000 making appearances, as Sotofett turns back the clock on Techno, to a point where melody and atmosphere take centre stage.
Elements of acid, dub, electro and ambient all congregate on this record, but never falling into familiar tropes. Dub elements are counterpointed with malicious kick drums while acid lines strive for melodic purpose.
As is always the case with the Sotofett sonic disposition, elements are thrown in the air and asked to fall where they may, offering some human intervention to the strict patterns of the machines. Nothing as rudimentary or reductive as a singular genre comes to fore as Sotofett combines techniques carried over from his vast armoury of musical tools.