On the face of it, ‘Romanworld’ looks like a pretty conventional electronic music album. Released in 1996 by UK indie Azuli, it rounds up 12 tracks from New Jersey producer Romanthony, many of which had previously been released, over two CDs or four sides of vinyl. Then again, on the face of it Romanthony himself might seem like a fairly conventional house music artist in the gospel/garage lineage (albeit one with a spectacularly golden voice).
But long experience has shown that the late Anthony Wayne Moore was anything but normal. Romanthony was one of the most sublimely talented producers that house music has ever known. But he was also one of the most enigmatic, the kind of figure who zigged where others zagged, disdained fame and seemed perfectly happy to spend long periods outside of music when his shifting financial fortunes allowed.
For my recent book on Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery’ (an album on which Romanthony features), I spoke to Glasgow Underground founder Kevin McKay, who worked extensively with Moore. He told me that Romanthony ‘was such an obtuse person at times’, refusing to supply records to shops if he felt they hadn’t supported him previously and even going so far as to make his records sound deliberately weak. ‘Why? I don’t know’, McKay said, in a vaguely amused tone. ‘I did ask him. But he would just laugh and not be straight about it.’
This cryptic, almost frustrating, genius was in full force on ‘Romanworld’, an album that contains some of the most beautiful house music ever recorded, as well as a liberal dose of wayward experimentation. Romanthony is best known among dance music fans for collaborating with Daft Punk on ‘Discovery’s ‘One More Time’ and ‘Too Long.’ But the Daft Punk album that ‘Romanworld’ is most reminiscent of is ‘Random Access Memories’ in its desire to utterly indulge the creator’s impulses, however at odds they might be with the usual way of doing things.
Take the title track, which opens the CD version of the album. Rather than kick things off with arresting beats or a thrust of energy, Romanthony starts the album with a 10-minute spoken word piece in which the protagonist takes an elevator down into the bowels of the earth (the ‘Romanworld’ of the title), where he is lectured on Roman mores and human awareness. It’s all good fun, with a goofy and atmosphere setting, until you realize, with the introduction of a solo guitar lick three and a half minutes in, that this is actually the song and you’re just going to have to get used to it. (Particularly on the album’s CD release, where each disc played as a continuous song, with no track markings.) It is a welcome to Romanthony’s world, both literally and figuratively, that smacks of ambitious conceit. Would anyone, at any label, advise Romanthony to start his album like this? Probably not. Would the fans prefer this elongated welcome to a bumping house track? It seems unlikely. But this is what Romanthony wants, so this is what Romanthony gets.
The album doesn’t get much more conventional from thereon in. Track two, ‘Make This Love Right’, may be a fabulously sharp vocal house number (when it eventually gets going), but it is followed by ‘Now You Want Blues’, a noodling guitar, church organ and vocal take on ‘Now You Want Me’, which itself follows (in original form) as track four. ‘Now You Want Blues’ isn’t blues house/blues techno or any other kind of electronic combination you might expect from a Romanthony record: it’s full-on blues, complete with crawling drum rhythm and Romanthony’s voice turned to full yearning despair. You can bet that Azuli, which billed itself as the UK’s longest running house music label until going into liquidation in 2009, released very few records like this in its illustrious career.