Maurice Fulton

Maurice Fulton's name is one of those unexpected recurrences in dance music, I mean still knowing almost nothing about him he never seemed to merit mention along with Frankie Knuckles/Bones/Whoever nor in the Detroit pack of May, Carter, Atkins, and of course the master Craig or early euro-stirrers like Kirk Degiorgio and others. But none of that really matters, much like early hip-hop or the days of disco, house music wasn't created with the intention of lasting, crates of 12"s siphoned off the press with none of rock's bravado of "making it" either financially or into history. It was still somewhat naive. Fulton went a different route than many of his contemporaries. His work appeared on left leaning house label Warp records right alongside deep house classics . His music is more complex than Craig's or Knuckles, breezing through an mp3 can present you with 4 very different compositions in on track, yet on listen your only aware of one central conversation holding the entire thing together. Feel The Same starts out with a distorted sub-harmony that eventual stutters into a slap-bass work out builds up into some fine eighties-disco juxtaposed to movie minimalism using the sub-harmony to hold all this together. It's better than it sounds when it happens, Maurice has consciously mixed 3 very different textures and they become counterpoints in a very odd way, as if he's planned this confusion from the start. It's arty disco at heart. Caressingly sincere yet catatonicized by mechna-funk, Fulton is frustrating because he won't just be one thing. He's not gonna be Autechere or for that matter Model 500 (think Psychosomatic), but he's gonna play with their sound, he's gonna distort things so their no longer pleasant, but he won't give us the satisfaction of taking it to it's breaking point, of brutalizing sound, of giving up on music. He avoids catharsis and makes a whipping boy of virtuosity. He sits a little left of the middle and like a good host let's all his companions mingle by their own wits. It's a frustrating exercise, but sometimes the results are more than appear to be. ALJ