Slater's music is like they say of weather in New England: if you don't like how it is right now, wait a minute. So it's really hard to talk about a "Slater sound" or any of that. It would take a book. (Oh, the multi-talented Slater has 2 of those on the way.) Thousands of hot, wet asses have been rimmed, opened, entered, and reddened on center stage against Slater's rhythmical backdrops. His characteristic presence becomes more familiar with repeated listening, but his moods, sounds, melodies, are all over the map. Spacey, nasty, dancy, driving, he'll take you to your local auto garage after hours, the sex club dungeon in mid-punishment, or to an exotic land during a desert wind storm ("Djinn" off Deeper or the Passport to Paradise soundtrack).
Sometimes the music will suggest two (or more) environments at the same time, or will pile two moods on top of each other, like lovers who are one in sex but who let off two (or more) different sets of emotional steam as they fuck. Sometimes you'll hear subtle sonic anomalies like a telephone ringing, or incidental guitar that dribbles out of tune, or bits that sound like they're from other songs...
That said, Slater offers a few consistencies we can count on. For one thing, hundreds of porn star studs over the years wouldn't be coming larger than life without his solid rhythmical anchor, usually one simple, dominant cadence, onto which endless counter ideas can pig pile like butt-fucking brawnies at the best orgy. As for melody -- generally short and sweet. Slater's bite-sized musical ideas tend to adorn the soundscape like hot nipples on a good pair of pecs -- pointed and alluring. One other promise this music seems to make is that it will never overpower. While the music often drives forward, say "When in Rome" off the Deeper CD, there's always plenty of sonic space (no hard industrial guitars or mega drum kit) for dicks to drive in. That's why whatever Slater's music does, he's the man many a slappy customer has trusted his rocks to, porn flick after porn flick.
Left to my own devices, I get all kinds of nasty ideas when I listen to Slater's tracks. Diversity. Ahh. It has such a fragrance.
Take the way the moods lay out on The Stations of the Cross, for example. "The Red and the Black" [see our upcoming interview with Slater] has a good thumper beat that you can set up a hardy whipping rhythm to. Or not. It can also get you hot and excited enough for good back door sessions. But you'll have to be a ten-minute man or have your player set to shuffle because "The Red and the Black" is followed by "Mark of Man," an airy, spacey thing I'd want to lick ballsac to. Or maybe some light broom closest torture.
The piece yanks you in and out of more nasty moods, including a metallic guitar buzz, which may be fun to improvise to -- especially when you have someone tied up, blindfolded and twitching to know what's going to happen next. Somewhere in the last quarter of the song it sets up a pregnant moment that smells of empty, fog-filled train station, and then breaks into a midtone guitar piece over a camel trot beat.
Another of my favorite CDs for mixing up the moods is Unrepentant . Right off the line, your man is planning to go for the jiz if he spins "Greed" on your love session. Its hip-hoppy shuffle ushers in sounds of the sawtooth persuasion (harkening to earlier works like the songs on Submission ) in pleasing, busy riffs that come and go. When the more busy stuff goes, what comes in is something with a sense of stealth -- a low sustained organ-type wall, striated by a steady beat, some spacey diddles dotting it like graffiti, the odd high-end irritant, just to spike the red zone and keep the testosterone dripping.
Not too nasty, yet no-way lovey dovey, this music just gets it out there. Early on, you want to throw your ass around and slam your head at the same time -- in a easy way. Towards the ¾ mark, there's this bass plopping all over the landscape, that gets you angsty and broody at once. If you're a topman running some plays, you can be mysterious, threatening, or dominant, running invasive hands over his body and let him know what you could do, might do, are about to do.
Then more mix-up from "Dreams." It starts out with Indian tabla, moves into cosmic sitar background layer, drifts into a melodic number sounding like mid-eastern violin. Through it there's this persistent rat-a-tat slap that's, well, perfectly suitable for electro shock. Get out the cop costume and taser -- this is your tune.
The title song from Unrepentant is decidedly upbeat, bright even, as one who is unrepentant and having a damned good time about it -- check the hint of celebratory chimes/bells in the background. That gives you the idea of the mood fuck you get with a single Slater CD.
I personally love when Slater fucks with the genres. On Unrepentant's disc 2, "Mr. Peepers" starts out with an industrial feel layered over a wide-open jazz framework. With this music in the play room, you'd be receiving a good blow job on the one hand and giving out a good twist, bite, or clamp to your boy's raw nipples on the other. As the sounds grow more percussive they take you to the back alley.
As with great sex, the music provides a nice feel-good groove while avoiding habituation (boredom). In porn terms, you're watching the butt-fuck from below the stud's scrotum, then cut to somewhere over the other guy's belly, watching your butt man get a blow job. I suspect this is part of why Slater works so well with porn. His music follows the path of a constantly rising hard on.
Slater says he has to feel juiced by the music himself, and he also says that Unrepentant's first disc sort of fell out of him in one master session [see interview]. This has to mean there's just a certain instinct about it, about the way turn-on, arousal and body rhythms all work together -- and Slater's got predatory instinct.
He's also having musical fun with this stuff. Just when you're feeling all sure of the sounds, something's going to hit you -- something out-of-tune or out of place. Like this plucky sound -- somewhere between banjo and harpsichord -- that pops into "Mr. Peepers." A brief interlude…comes in -- put condom on here -- goes away. This interlude cuts in a lot over the 21 minute piece -- you're going through a lot of condoms!
Slater aims deep on us. There's this incontinent two-note riff with warped intonation that keeps coming back up in "Unrepentant." You can be fucking away to this track, get hit with this sort of unconscious split second of surprise or wonder, and then go back to crackling the J-lube. You'll be all refreshed -- and not even know why. Elsewhere, when hissy high-end percussion shifts to a deeper, more guttural percussion, you can feel a release of tension, and almost a shift of focus to a different part of the body.
No, the average Jack-off Joe is not going to be noting all this, or even caring, as he jerks or fucks his way through the music, but it's almost guaranteed that his body and chemistry, even the course of his fuck path, will subtly register, maybe even be guided by Slater's manipulations. Whatever he does in bed, Slater's a mental top man. But at least it's nice to know that when Slater's doing the porn music, you're fuck-trip is in the hands of a master.
I can't go away without mentioning that in the soundtrack for Passport to Paradise, Slater really outdoes himself [see what Slater has to say about it in his interview]. My esteemed colleagues will probably tell you all about it in the Passport review. But when Slater inhabits a particular instrument -- acoustic guitar in the case of Passport or the sax on the very hot "Mingus in Lust" from Submission, he creates something exquisite. The music rises above texture and mood, comes out of the background and becomes its own beast in lust. Grrrowl.
You can order Slater's "music to fuck by" through Raging Stallion Studios or purchase it direct from JD's web site: [extern url='http://www.jdslater.com' target='_blank' text='www.jdslater.com']