Shango: "Trip To Ikea"

It’s odd what the pressures of retail can do to any man, let alone a veteran house producer like Robin Green. When I was a kid I enjoyed shopping: egg snowball fights, swapping the price tags, getting my brother to throw the heaviest thing he could find over as many aisles as possible. Shango’s revenge is more visceral than that—he doesn’t just fill trolleys with shiny junk and leave them for the flunkies to re-stack. Instead, he’s taken an intimate recount of getting your nuts off in the pine aisle and set it to a tangle of pads, the sum of which snarl like a porn star’s haunches and scissor with freshly freed libido. If you can hear this and walk round a furniture store without the need to shed clothing then you’re obviously a monk or something. Either that or an employee.

The trip begins with a vocodered Barry White’s protestations about his woman’s desire for furnishings, and how she’s offering a trip to the outlet instead of the conventional afternoon delight. That sets up the orgasm sample that all house monsters thrive on, warming you up for the salsa motion that thumps like acid house 1987, when the Swedes first took root here. “We’re still alive / It’s two-for-one on blinds,” hisses a suddenly-conjured backing vixen as Barry’s wife slips him something medicinal, strange sensations in his brain and underpants creating new use for an occasional table. “It wasn’t just coke in that bottle she passed me,” gurgles our man as he moves into an unpardonable rhythm. “Man, this pace is crazy / Oh God, I need this bathroom.” Shango keeps the grooves pounding at an equally paced funk, with Chip & Pin data signals and augmented phone dials mixed into the flow of the story. When you’re doing the Masters & Johnson in a public department and making pallets of timber keel over, that’s when you know it’s safe to buy yourself a lacquered banana-fibre rocking chair. Forget feng shui; this is the most fun you can have with household furniture since a certain Canal+ commercial.