Review
Genre and Mood
Micatone are a Berlin band of jazz musicians, and Plastic Bags & Magazines is the song from their second album that went to the clubs as a 12-inch. Discogs files the album under future jazz and the single under house; the band’s own notes for the album offer “sincere House music”, or “maybe just Jazz”. Groovy and carefree is this page’s reading, after the Jazzzeitung, which in 2003 pictured listeners dancing to the new single, completely carried away, around their own four walls.
Song Summary
The song is the second of twelve tracks on Is You Is, released by Sonar Kollektiv on 21 April 2003, and it runs five minutes. Discogs credits the whole band with writing it. Lisa Bassenge sings, with Vido Jelashe on backing vocals; Paul Kleber plays double bass, Tim Kroker drums, Sebastian Demmin keyboards and Boris Meinhold guitar and synthesizer, all five also credited with programming. Meinhold and Stefan Rogall produced and mixed it. The sources do not describe the lyric, and this page does not guess at it.
Musical Breakdown
No published review walks through the song, so this breakdown names only what the sources do.
Intro
Listen for how the band sets up the groove before the voice comes in, and which instrument carries it.
Main Section
The album’s notes promise real voices, a powerful double bass and real instruments that let calculating machines assist them. Listen for that mix here: what sounds played, what sounds programmed, and where the backing vocal joins the lead.
Outro
Listen for how the album version ends, then compare the longer club versions.
Concepts in Focus
A song can travel as an alternate version. A few weeks before the album, on 31 March 2003, Sonar Kollektiv released Plastic Bags & Magazines as a 12-inch with a Club Edit of 5:25 and a Dark Mix of 7:03 on side B for DJs.
Side A belonged to a remix: Tiefschwarz reworked the song at Studio Stehende Welle in Stuttgart into a version of 7:17, which they also put on their mix album Misch Masch in 2004. Hear Tiefschwarz on the other side of the desk in MAMA, Tiefschwarz, Solomun – Corporate Butcher - Solomun Remix.
Artistic Context
Micatone was founded in Berlin in 1999; its name joins the Italian slang word “mica” with the German “Ton”. The Jazzzeitung traced the idea to 1998, when Meinhold tested live jazz combined with dance floor production at a farewell party for the old Tempodrom, and called the band the well-guarded lapdog of the Berlin boutique Jazzanova. Is You Is was made over a year in two home studios, with the vocals recorded in Meinhold’s broom cupboard, and in the middle of a recession in the record industry its first pressing sold out within weeks.
Impact and Reception
The Jazzzeitung measured the album’s standing by Gilles Peterson, who licensed a track for his new compilation; Discogs lists Sweet Child on his Broken Folk Funk Latin Soul of 2003. Plastic Bags & Magazines travelled: MusicBrainz finds it on lounge and club compilations named for Milan, Ibiza and Bondi Beach. Start with the album version, then put on the Tiefschwarz remix and hear the same song turned toward the club.
