Slip ‘n’ Glyde
Getting a cease-and-desist order from a personal-lubricant manufacturer might be a sign that your life has gone horribly wrong. For Astroglyde, it was only a slight inconvenience.
When Astroglide, the lube company, put the kibosh on its stage name, Astroglyde the slippery DJ duo came up with a quick fix. Now known as Astro (Gaby Dershin) & Glyde (James Bem), the combo still sounds slick, and its beat-crazy blend of deep house, twitchy techno and thick tribal thumps still gets clubheads wet.
Now one of Kansas City’s biggest dance-music draws, Astro & Glyde hold down a regular residency at Kabal. After the club scored its 3 a.m. license in April, the native New Yorkers came to town for their first local trip into the wee hours. Since then, every other month, they’ve been making the River Market’s relatively small, two-level venue feel like a world-class discotheque, packed with pretty people rocking their finest fashions. On these nights, Kabal feels like the kind of place where the party never stops and the spinners never sleep. The duo’s sets have a distinctly dirty late-night feel, with grooves that wouldn’t work as music to purchase jeans by — these saucy songs lead people to take clothes off instead of try them on.
Though they stand alone onstage, Astro & Glyde occasionally enlist guest vocalists to add a little humanity to the programmed perfection of their vinyl releases. For example, spoken-word samples from Jimi Hendrix give a psychedelic sheen to “Kinky.” Manhattan rock diva Queen V lends her prickly power to the seductively sleazy “Aimless Dame.” The “punk rock” version of this track provokes pandemonium during live sets. (The original mix convinced superstar DJ John Digweed to sign Astro & Glyde to his label.) The pair also remix material, pushing pulses until they throb with rib-cracking intensity. Early in their career, Astro & Glyde turned heads with a chaotic overhaul of Technotronic’s cheesy “Pump Up the Jam”; more recently, they transformed My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s raunchy “Sex on Wheels” into a choreography-sparking car crash between riffs and rhythms.
When not collaborating with punk princesses or industrial-metal misfits, these globe-trotting groove merchants headline shows in exotic locations. They’ve spun gold in Uruguay, stacked wax in Israel and moved the masses in Monterrey. As a result, they’ve learned to inject international flavor into their flows, sorting through sonic souvenirs from trips to Mexico, Argentina and Spain. They spend most of their stateside stage time at Le Souk in New York, where every Sunday evening they host a showcase that spills into the start of the workweek. Occasionally, they occupy the Big Apple’s truly cavernous clubs, 2,000-plus-seaters where no one sits down.
Kabal is substantially smaller than the other venues on their itinerary, but the intimate setting helps them connect with the crowd. Here, clubbers can keep in constant contact with the energetic DJs, noting the cues before the end of each build-and-release cycle and the signals that precede every seismic shift. People in the audience absorb the booming bass lines, and the funk flows through their veins and becomes a strong stimulant, one that spurs sexed-up, sweat-soaked interaction.
