Mocean Worker- Enter the MoWo - Page 2

This excellent and diverse catalog under family control gives Dorn the rare ability to use a vast number of samples for very little money. It also doesn’t hurt that his current label, Hyena, is also a Joel Dorn project.

Dorn’s first two albums as Mocean Worker, 1998’s Home Movies From The Brain Forest (Conscience) and 1999’s Mixed Emotional Features (Palm Pictures) have been unfairly dubbed drum-and-bass.

Though dark and complex, even then his meticulously produced tracks and use of jazz samples suggested greater depths to his ambitions. What drum-and-bass producer would build a track solely out of Ellington, Strayhorn and Basie samples, as Dorn did on Mixed Emotional Features’ “Counts, Dukes, and Strays?" Whatever else you might say about them, Dorn’s first two albums pointed to a promising career as a maker of interesting and intelligent dance albums.

Which is what made his third album, 2000’s Aural and Hearty, (Palm Pictures) so puzzling. Abandoning the subtlety he had previously displayed, Dorn let his goofy side run wild on big, obvious house-inflected sounds. Although a couple tracks stood out, the album was mostly a series of unsuccessful genre experiments. My best guess at the time was that Dorn was chafing at the limitations of dance and was trying to - as the opening bit on Aural and Hearty had it - “Lighten Up, Francis.” A little while later, when I heard Dorn spin in that New York bar, it became clear that that Dorn not only found orthodox dance music limiting, but boring as well.

It has taken four records for Mocean Worker to figure out how to make Mocean Worker, that slap-happy goodtime asshole who drops “The Banana Splits” in the middle of an acid-house set, play nice with Mocean Worker, devotee of profoundly beautiful, achingly soulful electronic dance music.

On the new Enter the MoWo (2004, Hyena) everything finally comes together. This time Dorn moves smoothly from strength to strength, hopping genres from hot jazz to ambient with total assurance. MoWo features wall to wall funky beats, chewy basslines (sampled and otherwise), dense, aurally complete productions, and guest performances from an all-star cast including Bill Frisell, Donald Byrd, David “Fathead” Newman, and Sex Mob members Briggan Krauss and Steve Bernstein. In equal measures goofy, funky, deep, and beautiful, this is the first truly complete Mocean Worker album.

It has been a while since I have heard such a fun record. Music geeks like me can get off on tracks like “Shamma Lamma Ding Dong,” where Dorn pits a sampled flute performance from the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk against the very alive flute of Franck Gauthier of the French group Rinôçérôse. But non-jazz heads who don’t (or don’t care to) get the joke, can simply enjoy the infectious beat, laid back feel, and punchy interplay between flautists.

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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