Review
Genre and Mood
Dusty Kid’s The Fugue (Extended Version) is techno with a classical ghost in it. The Partae heard eerie synths and a progressive build, and a reviewer of the album in 2009 thought of Dusty Kid as dark and melodic, with this record no exception. Hence the feelings here: eerie and dark.
Song Summary
The Fugue is an homage to Johann Sebastian Bach. Dusty Kid told Magnetic Magazine that he wanted to honour him by using his name as notes, B-A-C-H, as Bach himself did in The Art of Fugue. That first attempt was never finished. In the same period he made a remix for DJ Hell, who did not like it, so he reshaped its melody to fit the BACH idea, and the track came together easily. This extended version runs about ten minutes; his channel takes it from the Moto Perpetuo single of 2009.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through the track minute by minute; the reviews describe its synths, its motion and its build, and the breakdown follows those.
Intro
No source describes how the track opens. Listen for when the melody first appears and whether you can hear four notes in it.
Build-up
The Partae heard a progressive build: the track grows by adding, layer on layer, rather than by switching. textura called it gyroscopic, a word for something that spins and holds its balance as it moves.
Main Section
The synthesizers carry the track. The Partae heard them as eerie; for the album version, Dusty Kid’s own channel lists the instruments he played and recorded live: Minimoog, Korg MS-10, Alesis Andromeda, Roland Jupiter-8 and SH-101, and a Korg Monopoly.
Outro
No source describes the ending. Listen for whether the melody is the last to leave.
Concepts in Focus
In German note names B is B-flat and H is B-natural, so Bach’s name can be played as four notes; he used them in The Art of Fugue. Dusty Kid borrows the idea rather than the form.
An analog synthesizer makes sound with circuits rather than samples, and every instrument on that album-version list is one. Played live, as he says they were, they keep a slight looseness that programmed parts can lack.
The build-up here is the slow kind, the progressive build The Partae heard. An extended mix gives it more room: this version is around three-quarters of a minute longer than the album’s, ten minutes for a DJ to mix into and out of.
Artistic Context
Dusty Kid is Paolo Alberto Lodde, an Italian producer who says he grew up with classical music and came back to Bach at around seventeen. A Raver’s Diary came out on Boxer Recordings in April 2009; it closes with Dusty Kid – Nemur (Walls of Guitars) (Extended Version). In 2020 Isolade reissued it on vinyl for the first time, with remixes, singles and B-sides following digitally.
Impact and Reception
In 2009 the Sound of the weak blog named The Fugue among the tracks that stick in your head, and textura heard it restart the album’s ascent. Listen for four notes, and for how far a rejected remix can travel.
