Just how inventive is dance music supposed to get? This is the question that challenges and inspires the Fort Worth trio known as Shuttle. The interlinked genres of house, techno, electronica, funk, and fusion are the playground of choice for bassist Matt Skates, trumpet and keyboard player Justin Barbee, and drummer, synth player, and laptop captain Scott Ivey. On stage, they create harmonically intricate digital sounds that compel gangly white kids to dance as if Studio 54 had never closed.
The broad label that Skates favors for Shuttle’s trunk-rattling oeuvre is “nü-disco,” which can be roughly translated as: a good-time amalgam of streamlined disco, hip-hop, house, and New Wave tricks practiced by serious-minded musos who weren’t born when many of the original sources were first released.
“Nü-disco is a white idea,” said the 27-year-old bassist and Fort Worth native, “a suburban, middle-class, spastic, nerdy thing that still has soul to it. I grew up in suburbia. I like cool beats, but I can’t dance. Some of the best dancing [that he sees at Shuttle shows] is awful dancing, because the dancer knows he’s being judged, and he doesn’t care. He’s just putting it out there.”
Before high school, Skates played music with his brother Andrew, currently the organ and accordion player for Telegraph Canyon, and learned a variety of instruments. The first bass Skates picked up had belonged to one of the multiple ex-wives of his grandfather Bill Ramsey, an old-timey country singer who played weekends gigs in Fort Worth saloons. Matt and Andrew attended Boswell High School along with future members of The Burning Hotels, Chatterton, Pimpadelic, and Ghostcar. They all had casually jammed together at one point or another.
Skates soon mastered a variety of styles on the electric and upright bass — jazz, country, gypsy, swing — and early on became an in-demand sideman and session player for a variety of local performers, including Ginny Mac, Daniel Katsük, Keith Wingate, and Kristina Morland. “One of my life-long problems is I can’t say no,” said Skates, but his ubiquity on the scene has enabled him to make a modest living on music alone.
Pure, restless creativity has led him through a series of pet projects with friends and collaborators. His most personal musical outlets have included Confusatron and Sleeplab, both with longtime creative partner Scott Ivey. They were suffused with the world music rhythms that Skates absorbed from the Graceland-era Paul Simon of his childhood.
The newly minted Shuttle is a natural evolution that employs the kind of hard, sample-filled, melodically complex dance music that Skates and Ivey have been listening to for a while now, including Brooklyn-based Metro Area and the “space disco” of Norwegian beatmeister Lindstrom. Both are reflected in Shuttle’s eponymous first CD.
For their live shows, Skates, Ivey, and Barbee sync their instruments into digital loops using sequencing software that gives them some improv flexibility within a programmed direction. Skates’ secret weapon is the Kaossilator, a small touch-screen synthesizer Velcro’ed to his bass that allows him to replicate a variety of sounds — piano, guitar, horns, drums — with his instrument. Although Skates insists that Shuttle is trying to eschew jazz inflections, Barbee’s fluid trumpet parts recall Sketches of Spain-era Miles on tunes like “Video Juego” and “Release Affirmation.” The final effect is a surprisingly varied palette of textures and moods, all custom-designed to set derrieres moving on the dance floor.
Shuttle’s provocative, technologically precocious brand of live dance music is, needless to say, a novelty on the Cowtown scene, and that’s not always a good thing. “It’s hard to find other bands that fit comfortably on a bill with us,” Skates said. “But we get the most flak from DJs. I do think it’s important for us to keep up with the newest dance music, but it’s, like, if you’re five minutes too late, then you’re playing crap.”
The trio is recording a full-length CD of original jams that they hope to finish by mid-October — the plan is to have an official release party Halloween night at an as-yet-unconfirmed Fort Worth venue. In the meantime, Shuttle will continue to preview chunks of the new material at area performances. As Fort Worth’s resident nü-disco purveyor, Skates’ goals are modest.
“I want us to develop into a fun live act,” he said. “I don’t want the music to be too jazzy or too ‘heady.’ If all we do with Shuttle is turn people on to some great new music they’ve never heard before, then we’re happy.”
