A Housecat Divided

If it’s Monday morning it must be Paris. Or Berlin. Or is it Chicago? Felix Da Housecat doesn’t sound sure. No, wait… it’s Paris. Felix knows where he is. However, he doesn’t know where his luggage is. Such are the humdrum details of the life of the glitz-chasing international DJ superstar/playboy.

Since the release of his genre-creating 2001 album Kittenz And Thee Glitz, Felix Stallings’ life has changed immeasurably. A producer since growing up in Chicago in the late ‘80s (he made ‘Phantasy Girl’ with Marshall Jefferson in his teens), he rolled out a slew of records over a 10-year period with a reasonable amount of success. A few lucky beggars got a glimpse of what was to come with the frustratingly limited 1999 mini-LP release I Know Electrickboy – label problems with FFRR meant it never got a full release.
But Kittenz… surpassed everyone’s expectations – connecting disparate scenes, producers, DJs and clubs from Chicago to New York to Berlin to London. It brought together electro, house, techno and synthpop and welded it to DJ Hell’s ‘DJ as international gigolo’ manifesto. The result? Glamour, glitz, fashion, fun… and two years of silly haircuts, arpeggiated basslines and 80s revisionism from a slew of imitators. Not a bad thing in some cases, but the amount of carbon copycat DJs, producers and fakers that took “inspiration” from it are close to killing whatever the hell it was that was created.
The last three years have taken their toll on the clearly exhausted Felix too. He describes it as “three years of non-stop partying”.
“The album just took on a life of its own – and threw me into the whole ‘glitz’ lifestyle,” he giggles sheepishly. “It became – and has become – my life, you know? Partying, no sleep, playing around the world…”
Nice work if you can get it. But are things finally getting on top of you Felix? I mean, how long can one man keep partying for?
“Well, that’s sort of what the new record is about,” he offers.
Devin Dazzle And The Neon Fever is the long-awaited new opus – and far from being another one-dimensional paean to excess, it is actually – according to the author – the vaguely autobiographical tale of the battle for Felix Stallings.
“Devin Dazzle in a way represents me,” he yawns, “a kind of a laidback, spiritual guy. But when he sees the Neon Fever and the neon lights, he’s drawn to it, he can’t stop himself. The Neon Fever character is all about vanity, glam and the fast life… and on this album, I play the two of them off each other.”
Whatever about the meaning behind the album, it certainly sounds quite different from its predecessor. It’s the sound of Felix leaving the dancefloor behind – concentrating instead on the after-show at a suitably hip, druggy, scuzzy party or the lonely moments in the hotel when it’s all over.
It’s a bizarre mix – punk funk beats, angular guitars and pretty but vacant vocals collide with warmer introspective ’80s-inspired synth-pop. Where the last record looked to Europe for its inspiration, the focus of Devin Dazzle… is closer to home.
“I think this record is more American,” he agrees. “I wanted this to be more live – so we played most of the stuff on the record ourselves. I got bored of a lot of the arpeggiated stuff and electroclash or whatever that’s been made since Thee Glitz… and wanted to move away from it. All my life I’ve wanted to try new stuff, not do something I’ve done before. The only way I could do that is to have live musicians, lose the instrumental stuff and have everything song-based.
“It’s an album about having fun. It’s cheeky and nonsense at times and while there are spiritual songs on it, there’s more ‘worldly’ songs on the record than spiritual ones, but that’s just how the world is. People don’t want to hear about the spiritual side of life – they just want to watch trash TV.”

Devin Dazzle And The Neon Fever is out on Emperor Norton on May 22