4 out of 5

Label: Disciples

Produced by: Beau Thomas (mastered by)

I know I’m not alone: Bogdan Raczynski was my next level-up when getting into electronic music.

Back in the day, my scope was pretty damn limited: Aphex Twin on 120 Minutes taught me it was even a thing outside of the Junior Vasquez mixes the clubbers were hyping, and once I allowed myself to explore that world, I was mainly poking at Warp and Rephlex Records, understanding – at a very basic level – groove, and electro, and IDM. By the time I got around to Bogdan in the Rephlex discography, starting with Samurai Math Beats, well, like, clearly this was of the same glitchy ilk as some of RDJ’s wilder stuff, but it was also wholly different: a breathing, organic hiccup of digitalness. I suddenly was aware of a world atop the one Aphex had introduced me too… and also quickly became aware of how difficult that world was to live in. While others could take the Aphex torch and run with it in various directions – arguably what Bogdan was doing as well – the ones who proved the test of time either had their own torches in the first place, or ran somewhere unique with it. But with Bogdan, he was already living so far on the edge, musically, that all you could do was either mimic his style or fall off that edge.

Those classic Bogdan discs were just built different. And, almost necessarily, the artistic period that produced them was short-lived: within a couple years, Bogdan was mashing his drillcore poetry slams with slightly more linear, or club-based structures. Doing it wonderfully, mind you: the albums from this time are classics as well, and I was glad to hear that Raczynski wasn’t just trying to repeat himself ad nauseum.

Dormancy followed, for various potential reasons. (The reality of Bogdan and the information he dribbles out in interviews are hard to piece together into a true “history.”) Then, seemingly – to me – out of the blue, we started to see him kick back into frequently-releasing high gear in the early 2020s, starting with the Disciples-released album, Rave ‘Til You Cry.

I present my all-too-interesting history with Bogdan for two reasons: to suggest that, yes, I had inevitable expectations when listening to this stuff, but also to offer some understanding as to how / why his style shifted even more in the modern day – it’s hard knowing you have those expectations. So those expectations and that shift may account for my cooled opinion on the stuff Bogdan started rolling in 2020, but I was also confused by then, because Rave is really good, and shows a hand-carved path out of the “classic” Bogdan sound and into lesser-explored – exciting! – territory. There are absolutely telltale hooks, and maybe even overly-indulgent ones, but it was like hearing the artist work out their new definition, with releases after that settling on a definition that kind of ignores the words it’s made out of.

Turns out, I was missing part of the narrative, not realizing that Rave is actually a compilation, gathered by Disciples, of Rephlex-era work from Bogdan. Which can mean a range of years, but better explains how this set feels like such a natural progression, released nearly 20 years after the fact. Disciples folks have a big hand in that as well, of course, given that this 18-track set was curated by them, balancing out the nostalgia with the brave new worlds quite effectively, and – since there are some rough edges here – likely sifting through quite a lot that was probably interesting, but not ready for the big time.

Rave ‘Til You Cry is thus very satisfying for longtime Bogdan fans, but if anyone had picked it up without the baggage of history, I imagine it still kicks ass: even if we’ve heard the ranting samples and video game bloops and loping-to-insane-BPM beats remuxed by many nowadays, there’s still an outright playfulness to old school BR that cannot be effectively imitated, and the way that the music will periodically push into explorations of noise, or grime, or groove, mapped to that same insanity, is just wild stuff.

Now, on the other hand, once one’s aware of this compilation concept, telltale signs are there: only a handful of songs feel “complete,” with a good many cutting short, and even beyond that, some tracks sound more like scratch tracks than others – with some coming very close to “just” taking an older BR track / beat and trying to do something new to it. But again, I’d counter that Disciples did put this together with purposefulness to likely give us those old BR beats as a wink-wink nudge-nudge to our favorite records.

After coming to terms with being less taken with Bogdan’s post-this works, I revisited Rave without expectations, and was happy to find that it kicked even more ass than its expectation-passings of before, as I’m kind of released from wondering what’s next, and can appreciate this relic as a glimpse of what that same wonder sounded like, translated into bleeps and bloops from a true originator in the scene.