Audio By Carbonatix
Basshead has met many elitists during his travels. (Hell, I am an elitist.) I have argued over the merits of shoegazer-lite quartet Lush with Brit-pop fanatics; I have championed the artistic strengths of old-school trance producers like Future Sound of London to house aficionados; I have wrestled with East Coast beatnuts over the relative worth of twee indie hip-hop heroes like Anticon.
But the seriousness and aesthetic grace of electro-bass producer Larry “Exzakt” McCormick stuns me into silence. He certainly looks the part, and it’s not just because of his penchant for wearing black-rimmed glasses. Indeed his calm yet sturdy bearing makes him appear more like Clark Kent than a garden-variety nerd.
Exzakt is a good guy with a warm demeanor, but he’s cynical enough to suggest that the only reason Basshead has driven up to West Palm Beach to interview him, on an afternoon so plagued by wind and rain that the cars hurtling along the I-95 freeway slow to under 40 miles an hour to navigate their way through the storm without causing an accident, is because he is a name, a semifamous producer. Unfortunately, it’s true. I am here because I heard about him from other people. I have never heard his music before. But as they say, when you want to learn about something — indeed, it often seems as if I’ve spent the past six months deciphering the profundities of electro — you ask for advice from the best.
It’s ironic since Exzakt’s www.exzakt.com involvement in the electro scene has been relatively brief, too. He first discovered the music back in 1996. “I was going [to now-defunct club the Edge] with my friends to listen to alternative music,” he says while we eat dinner at the Roadhouse in nearby Lake Worth. “At 2:00 a.m. they would switch it over to techno. And one time we just stayed and I was hearing all those songs that I remember from the Eighties, like ‘Planet Rock.’ I was amazed that people were making that kind of music again.” This led him on a quest for electro-bass records (“It took me a while to finally figure out what it was,” he remembers), and eventually, a career as a DJ and producer of mix CDs like 2001’s Elektro Breakz Vol. 6. He also started two labels, Exceleration with fellow local DJ/producer Uprock, and his own Monotone U.S.A. Amazingly, his music career has blossomed in the last three years. “I did a lot of stuff in a short period of time. I got fire,” he laughs.
Since 2001 Monotone U.S.A. www.monotoneusa.com has released three records: one with Anthony Rother and Exzakt as Netzwerk Florida (“Earth. Wind. Fire”); an EP of remixes of Exzakt’s “Musik is the Drug”; and Dynamix II’s “Pledge Your Allegiance to Electro Funk.” Two more records by Exzakt and Hyde of Jackyl and Hyde (“I Am the Enemy”) and a solo record by the former (“Internationally Known”) are due in stores before the year is out.
Most of the full-time musician’s income doesn’t come from the label’s small output, though, but a series of live performances that range from DJ gigs to “live PA” sets where he pounds out beats on a battery of computer and analog equipment. Exzakt’s also been devoting increasing amounts of time to managing an online store that began as an outgrowth of Electro Alliance, an online forum initiated a year and a half ago. “The Electro Alliance was basically a concept Anthony Rother and I had to make some kind of basis for communication among all of the electro artists, producers, and fans all over the world,” he says. Many of the postings come from the U.K., Germany, and other parts of the U.S. as well as from Miami DJs like Emil and Merly B. At first it was a money-losing venture that cost Exzakt about $100 a month (for the server). But the record store, which he put online about three months ago, has done so well that he’s thinking of moving his base of operations from One Beat Records, a Lake Worth DJ shop that helps him ship out the vinyl, to an office of his own.
My woeful ignorance of electro-bass leaves me with little to talk about, so I spend the rest of our time together furiously jotting down his recommendations of underground hits like Stem’s “Radiotron” and Wicked Wipe’s “1059.” When I get home that night, I sift through the three records he has given me. But the only copy that actually features his music is the “Earth. Wind. Fire” track, a dramatic fusing of industrial-strength synth sounds and furious acid percussion. In spite of my conversation with Exzakt, his music remains something of a mystery to me.
