Jochem Paap’s sleek G Spot hums with a motor built to last through the next millennium. Composed during several months of recovery from life-threatening glandular fever, it’s a deeply thoughtful album pumping with industrial-strength muscle. And while Speedy J‘s Public Energy No. 1 received more recognition because of its glitchy innovations, in retrospect G Spot is his most stirring work: ‘Ping Pong,’ ‘The Oil Zone’ and ‘G Spot’ are the finest entrancers techno has ever had to offer.
Partly inspired by Paap’s long stay in the Canary Islands off the western coast of Africa in the Atlantic, where he spent some of his time as an invalid, G Spot is in many ways a high contrast sonic world, filled with both lush atmospheres and intense stormy beats, balanced out by immersive, sensual subs. The sexual connotations of the album title and its title song are apt. For they speak of Paap’s feverish near-death rapture and physical-spiritual adventure into the outer reaches of life — finding a sweet spot.
That starkness came from an almost supernatural sensitivity to sound, an intense tactile sense of technology’s creative potential, and the hard slate resurrection of his hometown. Paap grew up in the busy port city of Rotterdam, Holland; as a precocious hip hop DJ with lightning fast skills, he earned the name “Speedy J” early on in his DJ career; and in the 1990s he discovered techno and never looked back, first signing onto Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label and then England’s Warp Records.
“I had a couple of friends who ran a radio station just outside of Rotterdam, and they were calling labels all over the world,” he later recounted to Resident Advisor in 2010. “They were speaking to people from Transmat, KMS and Underground Resistance to get promos. The reactions they got were always like, ‘Hey man, people from Holland actually listen to our records!’ They were really freaked out by it.”
Those same freaked out people also championed Paap’s first recordings. After Hawtin released his underground smash ‘Pullover’ — a blinding blade of pure rave energy — Speedy J became synonymous with the leading edge of European techno. Yet his warehouse phantasms soon gave way to cooler reveries. His first album, 1993’s Ginger, part of Warp’s famous Artificial Intellgence series, displayed a knack for spacious grooves screwed tightly to dramatic switches in tone and design, simultaneously compressed and elastic.
That wild and wide range of sonic adventurism was based in a few unique aspects of Paap’s psyche. One was the strange environment of Rotterdam, a city that had been bombed to rubble during World War II. His hometown was then resurrected in stark and modernist forms. It would later gain the moniker “Little New York” as its highly stylized urban architecture gained fame; one of its most famous landmarks is a “metropolitan” forest of slanted cube houses — Speedy J’s abode in the ‘90s.*
“Just behind the car park is a little enclave of cube-shaped houses pushed up into the sky on thick concrete blocks,” wrote Christopher Dawes for Muzik magazine in 1997, drawing keen press attention to the Netherlands after G Spot’s underground success reminded the world that there was much more to Dutch techno than hardcore gabba. “The entire floor of Jochem Paap’s home is given over to the recording studio where he turns into Speedy J, purveyor of some of the most innovative electronic sounds around.” And as if static crackled in his high cube, so gathered the lightning.
“The environment is one of the major factors in the way you look at things, so I’m sure that affects my sound,” Paap told Dawes — though he wasn’t terribly interested in self-analyzing; always more game for aestheticism, from Brian Eno to crop circles. “I’m not too clear in what way, but I know that my music would be totally different if I lived on an island in the Pacific rather than a cube in the sky.”
Another key aspect of Speedy J was his hyper-visual sound, the way his music seemed to sculpt shapes and objects out of thin air, animated by his intuitive almost physical touch. Every sound on G Spot feels — feels — as if it was made out of some deeply industrial process, but through the hands of an artist — welding, smelting, cooling and sandblasting sonic artifacts that repeat out into the golden horizon.
“I work from graphic ideas,” he told MONDO Magazine in 1997, sounding more like a Dutch master painter than a musician — a sentiment he would repeat again in other stories, including in that interview with Dawes. “I don’t work from music. I don’t get melodies or tunes in my head. If I hear a sound, I don’t remember it from the way it sounds, but by the way it looks.”
He came at it in a slightly different way for Electronic Music’s Paul Clark: “If I hear something I remember it by the way it looks, but also when I have an idea it's a graphic idea, it's like a structure or a texture, a shape or a color or something like that, and I translate that into audio. I actually come much closer, when I translate it into audio than I do when I present it as a visual thing.”
Third, on full display in G Spot was also Paap’s mastery of sound, his studio prowess a reflection of several years hooking electronic machines straight into his creative nerve center, transforming his cube into a mental amplifier. From the beginning, whether it was his DJ scratching skills, his restrained work on Ginger — as in “gingerly,” and a spice that calls back to the great Dutch spice trade with India — or his searing mentalism on A Shocking Hobby and Loudboxer, he commands the machine.
“I use anything that produces sound and then I start treating it using tons of different methods…especially things like modular synths and effects gear really help me to get the sound the way I want it,” he explained to Clark in detail. “My studio is set up as a big network, everything runs to a big patch-bay so my whole studio is set up as a modular synth so anything I want to do I can do in an instant.”
His second album G Spot took those instincts to the next level while remaining wired to the dance floor. Healing from viral inflammation on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, his restless imagination blazed in a primordial darkness — opener ‘The Fun Equations’ strides through a desolate landscape, firing rockets into the brooding night as closer ‘Grogono’ quells the heat with homesick waves under a neon sunset.
In between is a sky-world seething with strange airs and glittering flashes of psychedelic lightning. It is both of the Earth and not of the Earth. ‘Fill 25’ drifts in a dream before ‘Lanzarote’ drifts in a delirium, bridging sleep with the spirit world, its plaintive piano telling us of a gratitude for life and living on the wave tips of time. You can easily picture Paap looking out from Lanzarote’s red volcanic dunes onto the aqua blue bays and waters off Africa and the coast of the Western Sahara.
‘Extruma’ gently swings to acoustic drums and sparkles of synth dust, its groove building slowly, slowly, with an uplifting set of melodic shifts, like breezes and winds from a desert planet. Hyper cubes and astral planes, ‘Treatments’ bangs the drums somewhere between Bobby Bird’s Higher Intelligence Agency and Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman, its electro rhythms twisting to its TB-303 acid turns, its metallic taps ricocheting from the high moon to the low sun. ‘Fill 17’ glides like a hawk into the whirling sandstorm, blown from the wide desert to the great ocean.
But it’s a trio of invincible tracks that marks G Spot as a landmark. Trance classic ‘Ping Pong’ slings to an inventive interplay between wide-as-sky bass and what sounds like a plastic ball whirring back and forth in an air tube, hovering in sweet delirium. ‘The Oil Zone’ slinks with craning industrial beats and rising gas clouds that call to mind a self-replicating robot factory on Mars. And the titanic title track ‘G Spot’ races like a jet G-force dogfight high in the sky, its electric storm of sparkling explosions ramming the neurons and rippling across reality deep, deep down into the core.
As Mixmag’s Nick Jones observed before G Spot hit the street, it was an L.P. of “opening doorways and brave new worlds.” “I’m just not satisfied if I make a record that people can dance to,” he told Jones. “I want to do more. There’s so much more to discover, so many possibilities.” No doubt he did just that. It’s why when trying to find an analog in 2001 for Polar’s glistening dark drum ‘n’ bass album, the propulsive Still Moving, XLR8R magazine went back to G Spot as its best comparison — its ‘Bipolar Suns’ echoing the moody grooves of ‘The Oil Zone’ and ‘G Spot.’
Which brings us back to ‘Ping Pong.’ It’s perhaps the most infectious tribal-trance groover of all time. It’s soft yet huge, hypnotic yet alert, leaning in and getting down, pumping and floating, the spirit-sound of the raver; it’s feel-good and thrilling, the irrefutable freedom of feeling — of connecting with the rhythm inside and out — images of dancers under a full moon or in a warehouse pushing in unison. It’s a catalyzer, the party starter, while ‘G Spot’ takes it higher.**
Winks aside, the sexual connotations of Speedy J’s tour de force fits in one very important sense. It’s a sci-fi trip that consistently widens the eyes and sends shivers up and down the spine. But just as much as it taps into the senses, G Spot works the mind. It’s a devastating mix. Decades later, it still gleams as the state-of-the-art and ever reigns as one of techno’s greatest trips.
Track Listing:
1. The Fun Equations
2. Ping Pong
3. Fill 25
4. Lanzarote
5. Extruma
6. The Oil Zone
7. Treatments
8. Fill 17
9. G Spot
10. Grogono
11. Symmetry***
*In 1995, when G Spot was coming out, Paap was not fully established in his cube house. He was actually still moving in as the album neared its release in late March of that year. That said, the cube represents where he was going and his transformation as he made G Spot. He was floating up, up, up, and getting ready for more and more intense sounds. The important detail is less the cube house and more Rotterdam.
In 1997, his third album, Public Energy No. 1, was the first full album recorded in his castle cube, representing a marked push into both ambient and flanged breakbeat territory. From the sound of cicadas to pummeling beats to cicadas again, it was extreme in its contrasts of calm and storm. Hailed as a major leap forward, it is perhaps the most acclaimed Speedy J album in its own time.
Strangely, Public Energy No. 1 receives less attention decades on. While critics celebrated Speedy J’s willingness to break barriers into more unsettling sounds, it seems to me that there was also a momentary boredom with the stylistic headspace of G Spot, which exhibited the more well-trodden trappings of ambient and trance at the time. Nevertheless, it was a work nonpareil in this regard, and over time G Spot’s timeless power and beauty has only grown clearer with time.
**In the Canada release of G Spot, an excellent companion Live CD — titled “!ive” — creaks and clatters, a hulking dream machine of pure techno-trance bravado. It was also released separately by Plus 8, Sven Väth’s Harthouse and Paap’s own Beam Me Up! record label.
***’Symmetry’ is a bonus song on the Japanese edition of G Spot. It was also Speedy J’s entry to Warp’s Artificial Intelligence II compilation. I’ve included here for those looking for a complete picture of this period. It’s a solid ambient track, that’s worth tracking down.