PLUS MOVE Welcome to 2099
After years of pounding at the backstage door, itÂ’s pretty much official: dance music is the new punk rock. CBGBs is no more, and guitars are swiftly being eclipsed by laptops, but the DIY aesthetic is alive and well. So itÂ’s only fitting that the future of American dance music should emerge in the form of two New England Art Institute grads, Josh Shifrin and Paul Mihailoff, who left behind their punk rock and hip-hop pasts to form Plus Move, an electronic act obsessed with the future. And for good reason – theyÂ’ve been there.
“It’s kind of weird how we got into this,” Mihailoff admits, recalling a time back in Boston before they learned the art of time travel. Both he and Shifrin were playing in rock bands, with their only common thread was a shared interest in Radiohead. “I was actually into producing hip-hop beats when we first met, and I threw Daft Punk in the same category as the bland, repetitive, four-on-the-floor stuff that I couldn’t get into. But once I understood the energy behind it, I started listening to all the other French producers.”
Plus Move got everyone’s attention when they leaked their bootleg remix of Justice’s funk-squelch anthem “D.A.N.C.E” to some of their favorite music blogs back in the summer of 2007. “We first heard the song as a radio rip,” Shifrin recalls. “It wasn’t even the full song or the final version, but we fell in love with it and immediately chopped the shit out of the track to get rid of the radio noise, re-worked it completely and sent it back out to every blog that we liked. Before we knew it, we were getting emails from people all over the world.”
One of those emails got their attention more than the other messages from crazed fans. It was an anonymous invitation to a meeting in a basement underneath M.I.T., just minutes from the Plus Move studio. Shifrin and Mihailoff are reluctant to reveal specifics, but the story goes that they were introduced to someone they refer to cryptically as “Sphinx.” When asked if “Sphinx” is the mythical being described in Egyptian and Greek mythology, Plus Move boldly puts forth that Sphinx “has taken many different forms throughout time.”
The next part of the story may be even less credible, yet the recordings that make up the “2099” EP are presented for your consideration. Plus Move claim to have traveled through time with Sphinx to the year 2099, where together they defeated the evil ruler BOSS. In the ensuing days spent in 2099, Plus Move and Sphinx recorded these songs and brought them back to the present day as documented proof of their travels.
The cool heads at Expansion Team Records, for whom the duo had previously remixed a Ready Fire Aim track, immediately took notice of the change in Shifrin and Mihailoff’s disposition. The “2099” recordings shifted and morphed with more unpredictable dynamics than a multi-car pileup, equal parts apocalypse and apotheosis in the mix. Label boss and fellow futurist Alex Moulton lent his ear to the music, helping co-produce the songs to make them understandable to early-21st century ears.
Plus Move recently relocated to Austin, Texas, a move necessitated by the need for physical space to assemble their next secret project. The duo are reportedly building a structure they believe is a time machine that allows for hundreds (if not thousands) of fans to join them on their subsequent journeys to the future. HowÂ’s that for DIY?
2099 is out now digitally on Expansion Team Records.
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