Dave Aju

• Genre: Electronica/Dance

About

If you have the uncanny feeling you've heard Dave Aju's name before, just reverse its inner consonants. Less cleverly, the San Francisco musician—real name Marc Barritte—enjoyed a rising underground profile throughout the latter half of the '00s, thanks to his sensual, unconventional take on house and techno. A member of San Francisco's fertile experimental-techno community of the late '90s and early '00s, he made his presence official with 2004's Die and Live Wrecked for Sutekh's Context label. As the pun-loving title might suggest, the record was composed entirely from samples of live albums; it used crowd noise and room tone to find new sounds for a minimal-techno template. Most of his work, though, has appeared on Paris' Circus Company label, home to artists like Ark, Noze and Sety, and known for an endearingly clunky, drunkenly kinetic take on house music. In 2008, Dave Aju took on a new conceptual challenge with Open Wide, which relied exclusively on samples of the voice, mouth and teeth to render a set of slow, nuanced deep house and electro-funk.

- Philip Sherburne