Sometimes the biggest mysteries are quite simply those right in front of you. I say this because I’m staring at a copy of François Kevorkian and Goh Hotoda’s impressive collaboration as The Sync, Beat The System, and I haven’t the foggiest clue where to begin.
What I (and many others) should know is just how much history both François and Goh carry behind them. The former, like fellow luminaries Arthur Baker, John “Jellybean” Benitez, and Larry Levan, is a living dance music legend and innovator–working with and remixing music for artists ranging from the once-obscure Arthur Russell to global names like Mick Jagger, Whitney Houston, and U2. The latter, a gifted audio engineer, transitioned from recording jazz greats such as Ramsey Lewis to helping sculpt early, totemic Chicago house productions and remixes, work that would eventually lead him to collaborate with equally towering figures like Madonna, Chaka Khan, Prince, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
What François and Goh shared was that they made their names as in-demand studio creators–immigrants helping to build up contemporary American dance and urban music. As a DJ, French-born François Kevorkian intimately experienced dance music’s transition from band-based performance to the domain of the producer, trading his acoustic drum kit for samplers and groove boxes while creating club tracks for places like Studio 54 in his adopted New York City. As an engineer, Japanese-born Goh followed his artistic family to Washington, D.C., eventually settling in New York City to pursue a way to fade-in all his impressive dance-music production knowledge into the larger pop and R&B world. In hindsight, it feels only natural that their parallel paths would eventually intertwine.
It was after their work together on Depeche Mode’s Violator that François and Goh appear to have begun experimenting with the idea of striking out on their own as a group. In the early ’90s, after years of hectic remixing and studio work, François found himself away from NYC, reintroducing himself to his first love: DJing. Perhaps inspired by his wife, Japanese visual artist Tomoko Kevorkian, he entertained offers to restart his DJ career in her native Japan, moving there temporarily from New York City. And while in Japan, fate had it that Polystar Records would reach out to finance that other idea Goh left germinating with François.
Somehow, in 1993–the year the album was conceived and released–it all came together across various home studios in New York City and London. The result was a group they’d dub The Sync, rounded out with contributors like keyboardist Philippe Saisse, ex-Konk saxophonist Dana Vlcek, bassist Akio Akashi, and vocalist Dee Fredrix. Seemingly positioning themselves as a throwback to an earlier, band-oriented dance era, The Sync explored the cutting edge of alternative dance music.
Songs like the title track, “Beat The System,” slot neatly into the burgeoning ’90s electronica movement. Others, like “Ride and Rim,” tip their hats toward future jazz. Yet as tight as the group sounds throughout, it’s in François’s hands that tracks like “One To One” achieve the iconic sprawl and groove that allow them to fit so effortlessly on the dancefloor.
In hindsight, it’s a shame that such a singular work from such well-known figures seemed destined to fall through the cracks of music history. Released and distributed solely on CD in Japan, it appears that outside of a handful of dance-oriented record shops, precious few listeners ever turned the album over to realize whose original music they were holding. The presence of Osamu Sato’s equally evocative album design only deepened the mystery.
As for the music itself, tracks like “Astor Magic” (which would later appear on Osamu Sato’s equally beguiling Compu Movie VHS) capture The Sync’s unique spirit on digital tape, offering cavernous, dub-styled ambient grooves unlike much else François and Goh had done before. Harkening back to another totemic Kevorkian production–Jah Wobble, Holger Czukay, and The Edge’s Snake Charmer EP–much of Beat The System, especially on tracks like these and the fourth world-esque “O.T.,” feels like an update of those freeform ideas for a younger generation.
Songs like the atmospheric “Falling” channel emerging ideas from trip-hop and downtempo scenes, while others, such as the cosmic “Madame Laurie,” lean closer to the more outre inspirations that fueled earlier dance movements. Wherever you drop the needle on Beat The System, the music sounds genuinely unique–yet clearly part of a larger spirit circulating in the air at the time. Consider what separates the burbling minimal techno of “Atom Smasher” from the emotionally weighty, floating environmental closer “Bell Grove”: it’s the small decisions, the additions and omissions, the edits, that ultimately define the boundaries of the music we make.
In the end, what feels like a true labor of love–befitting the celebration of the birth of Tomoko’s baby boy, as mentioned in the liner notes–seemed fated to linger only briefly, obscured, hidden among Japan’s immense but slowly-fading CD racks. Now more than ever, this borderless music deserves to travel beyond them.