Canadian producer Jacques Greene celebrates the complexities of dance on Dawn Choruson March 7, 2020 at 12:00 pm

Canadian dance producer Jacques Greene (born Philippe Aubin-Dionne) broke out in the early 2010s by twisting R&B vocals into stuttering, waterlogged samples that brought complex shades of sadness to energetic club tracks. He’s since relied less on a sample-based approach, which has opened him up stylistically and helped him arrive at the free-flowing aesthetic of his recent second album, October’s Dawn Chorus (LuckyMe). Greene parlays his grasp of dance’s history into a mishmash of sounds, sometimes within a single song; on “Do It Without You” he blends the spacey affectations of early-2000s UK dubstep with ersatz drum ‘n’ bass percussion. Greene’s nuanced touch on Dawn Chorus foregrounds his tender feelings toward dance music, which he translates into cozy melodies that can be mesmerizing, bittersweet, or thrilling–when a muffled, robotic vocal hook croaks above a twinkling synth melody on “Whenever,” the combination provokes that all those responses at once. v

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