Mirwais: Production : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Is France the new Sweden? For years, the French were universally mocked for making the planet's sorriest excuse for rock & roll. But today, Gallic beat doctors like Air, Daft Punk and Rinocerose are churning out excellent techno records. Now meet the country's latest studio whiz, Mirwais Ahmadzai. Production, first released in France last year, is uncommonly sexy fluff, an electric light orchestra of telephone-line bleeps, Seventies synths, acoustic guitars, boom-gasmic disco beats and enough Franco-American cheese to choke Chef Boyardee.

You probably hadn't heard of Mirwais until he hooked up with Madonna to help produce Music, her catchiest and rockingest album since Like a Prayer, if not Like a Virgin. Madonna has always had excellent taste in collaborators, but that's never been any reason to buy her sidemen's records. The Swiss-born son of Italian-Afghan parents, Mirwais is a different breed of superstar DJ - at thirty-nine, older and shrewder than the average techno newbie, with a veteran professional's ear for pacing and structure. He played guitar in the old French synth-pop group Taxi Girl, and he's been around enough to know how to spice up the sleek beats with witty sonic flourishes.

On Production, the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar turns out to be a sample, stopping and starting with the punch of a button; human voices are put through electronic filters, becoming more painfully emotive in the process. The music flows smoothly enough to get heavy rotation in upscale shoe stores and coffee shops, but it freaks nasty when you listen up close. "Disco Science," the 1999 single that first caught Madonna's ear, kicks off the album with a bang, pinching the deranged ooga-ooga chant from the Breeders' "Cannonball."

Mirwais piles on the quick-change special effects: the symphonic bombast of "Never Young Again," the hysterical drum-machine solo "Definitive Beat," the heavy-breathing atmosphere of "V.I. (The Last Words She Said Before Leaving)," Mirwais' adaptation of Serge Gainsbourg's "Cargo Culte." This is technopop in the early-Eighties sense of the term: Everything's light and zippy, nothing drones on long enough to get boring. Mirwais also knows how silly it all sounds; he isn't irked if you want to giggle while you dance.

"Naive Song" features the producer himself chanting, "Unhappy girl, unhappy boy . . . /Living in a happy world" over a boogie-nights bass line and Hot Butter keyboards. The words come more or less directly from Wallace Stevens' greatest poem, "The Auroras of Autumn," but Mirwais could have just as easily swiped them from Ace of Base. One of the most lovable things about him is that neither source is out of the question. Cerebral, meticulous and frivolous, Production is a disco-science celebration of pop trash that most electronica gurus would be too spiritually elevated to deliver. Mirwais' knack for song puts him in another league altogether. Be afraid, Max Martin, be very afraid. (RS 866)

ROB SHEFFIELD