DJ ROSWELL “Slush Country” (self-released)



“This album would literally literally literally not exist were it not for the various pieces of music I have sampled during the production of it.  For real, I made maybe 4% of the music you hear on here.  Keep that in mind.”

“Computer with candles lit on the monitor.”

“Special miniphone mobile page style 4 you’re nokia device.”

--DJ Roswell

DJ Roswell is rustic techno.  DJ Roswell is willful suspension of disbelief – “none of this is real.”  Being rustic techno means you sound like equipment.  You sound like production, you sound like computers, and you embrace that.  I’m thinking: DJ music is technological.  It shows off the capacity of equipment.  It often idealizes some fleeting notion of what is “state-of-the-art,” but when you showcase the sound of expensive machines, it always sounds quaint after a while.  Rustic techno knows about Radio Shack.  Rustic techno knows about Jurassic Park.  It believes in the obsolescence of today’s technological future.  In the same way that the quest for maximum aggression in metal or rap can so easily sound like its own parody, “Slush Country” is part nostalgia, part adult contemporary.


I don’t know.  The cassette is pretty good.  It strikes me as an earnest creative expression.  This broad land is a wilderness, and DJ Roswell is out there in it.  West Virginia.  Good packaging, good color scheme, pixelated computer font.  He makes recycled tapes and has a lot of albums on bandcamp going back to the mid-90s.  Hands up.

-- Kevin Oliver