“Make it New,” Ezra Pound’s modernist call-to-arms, turns 90 this year. Producer and composer Danny L Harle still believes in the crux of the project.
Harle’s story is made up of the kind of groupings and vanguards beloved by modernist-inclined histories. He was a key part of PC Music, an influential thing (label/art collective/aesthetic sensibility/lightning rod for the “Wot, No Guitars?” wing of the UK music press) that can now be happily chewed over in the past tense, after the label announced their closure following last year’s 10th anniversary. As Rachel Aroesti noted at the time, in the New Boring era of balladic pop, PC Music was one of few grand narratives this century worthy of comparison with garage, two-tone or punk of before. But, despite the brash, in-your-face aesthetics beloved by the label, its impact on pop’s middleground has been more entryist in character, infiltrating the mainstream until the whole is materially different. That Dua Lipa’s next album will be “a psychedelic-pop-infused tribute to UK rave culture” could only happen in a post-PC world.
Perhaps PC Music’s most wide-reaching impact has been as a sensibility. As with many PC adjacents, Harle’s music is irony-lite, even when it’s being decidedly wacky. On “Harlecore,” a 2021 gesamtkunstalbum where Harle turned his Harlecore night into a fantastical nonstop hard-dance club populated by performers like MC Boing and DJ Ocean, listeners with even a cursory knowledge of happy hardcore would find it relatively easy to hear distance as tunes like “Car Song” (“We are driving in a car, car, car, car, car / Playing music in a car, car, car, car, car”) race past. But you hear that distance as a remove rather than anything pertaining to irony: a product of nerd and headphone cultures in tandem, in which creators can get closer to a musical essence from further away. Like using a telescope to look down a microscope, you lose the lateral view—of subgenres as hyper-local responses to shared material circumstances, for example—and gain an ultra-detailed, dedicated look at an underappreciated music form.
Despite being involved in some of today’s biggest pop acts—Harle has worked with Caroline Polachek on her past two albums, has co-produced the latest two Dua Lipa singles, and lists work with Carly Rae Jepsen, pinkpantheress and Rina Sawayama among his production credits—he remains a slightly mysterious figure, with tastes that are eclectic to the point of iconoclasm. Even by the standards of performers with musical parents, the music he was exposed to growing up was diverse; there’s more than a hint of his father, the preeminent British saxophonist John Harle, in Danny L’s 57-hour “HUGE PLAYLIST” which, in amongst the tranche of pop, also finds time for Sciarrino, Lachenmann, Birtwistle, Adès, Berio, and Abrahamsen. Later, he sends me some scores from his student days. (He was a music undergrad at Goldsmiths, and did a postgrad degree in composition at the Guildhall School of Music afterwards; you can find music from that time deep in his SoundCloud.) By his own admission, the scores are “nuts”: a noisy, technique-heavy string quartet, and a helter-skelter piece for electric guitar, drum kit and “SNES playing ‘Street Fighter II: Turbo Edition’”.
We speak for 40 minutes on the day that the Harle-produced Olly Alexander track—and UK Eurovision entry—“Dizzy” drops. Later that day, I spot him at a string ensemble gig featuring music by Richard Strauss and Claude Vivier. Though he grew out of some of the attitudes surrounding classical music, intense feeling towards the form still makes up a crucial part of the Harle lore.
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