Techno Recluse
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At his most bizarre, Green Velvet is techno’s answer to hip-hop’s Dr. Octagon: anything but real. The beats on the first Green Velvet full-length, Constant Chaos (on the Belgian Music Man label), come in reliably relentless sets of four, but his austere mix of robotic rhythms, analog synth squelches, and occasionally hallucinatory lyrics sounds like nothing else out there. For instance, on “Abduction,” one of two tracks for which he improvised the lyrics in the studio, he describes an encounter with some little green men: “All of a sudden, I think, I guess, they saw me lookin’ at them, and if I weren’t looking at them, I guess they wouldn’t have saw me looking at them, you know, so I should’ve been doing something else like watching TV so that I wouldn’t have had to go through the things that I had to go through.”
Figuring he could always return to Berkeley if music didn’t pan out, he moved back to Chicago, where he’d spent his teenage years listening to house pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle. In 1992 he scored a massive house hit with “Percolator.” His skillful production on his own work made him a popular collaborator, and later that year he recorded a song, “Brighter Days,” with a local diva named Dajae. He used it to launch a record label, Cajual Records, and the tune became a smash hit, peaking at number two on the Billboard dance chart. The single not only gave Cajual instant cred but put Chicago back in the house spotlight, which had been diverted by artists in New York, London, and other cities.
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