Close Bracket. Open Bracket.

Short Circuitry 008

2010-07-12T18:42:00.006+01:00

Keeping it simple and straightforward this month; Short Circuitry’s been swimming through a boundless ocean of heady delights, and inevitably any attempt to whittle it down is going to end up grossly inadequate. Still, top marks have been going to tunes that defiantly refuse to pander to the sheer heat and humidity that’s reduced this wasted copper wiring to little more than a weakly sparking wreck. In particular, regular injections of Rhythm & Sound’s seminal With The Artists CD and the veritable dose of sonic frostbite that is the Moritz Von Oswald Trio’s Vertical Ascent have kept these drums rattling in some form of delicate equilibrium. Just about, anyway. Right, onward…

Digital Mystikz – Return II Space [DMZ]

It’s been said before, and it’ll doubtless be said countless times again in countless slightly offset permutations, but Digital Mystikz’s Mala is dubstep. Or, to qualify that statement further, he operates as the absolute epitome of a genre term that’s fast becoming slightly redundant, buckling under the pressure of its myriad mutations. One step further than that would be to state, quite simply, that his music – more than that of any other producer within this sphere – operates with an absolute purity of vision bordering on the obsessive. And to be fair, why shouldn’t it be so? Along with his fellow Mystikz, Coki and Loefah, he defined a genre, and almost everything that now lands under dubstep’s widening umbrella is in some way indebted to him.

So it’s unsurprising that the arrival of his fullest release yet, many miles down the line from where the DMZ label first began in 2004, is both long awaited and dogged by serious weight of anticipation. As with everything he releases though, quality control is absolute, honed through years of ultra-exclusive dubplate play on some of the world’s finest systems; on a basic level then Return II Space is ‘merely’ another set of all-encompassingly brilliant material to add to a catalogue that hardly suffers for a lack of it. These tracks capture the meditative communion of the FWD sound and expand outward. Viscous sub-bass both binds and separates the congregation, like the stuffy gusts of warm air that fill the space between tube commuters desperate to avoid each other’s gaze. On one hand then, as is so commonly associated with dubstep, his music speaks of urban alienation: the storms of dissonance that gather throughout ‘Mountain Dread March’ evoke the pitch individuality of a dance at Plastic People. But it also offers resolution, locked in the unsteady melody that rises to the surface during the latter’s final minutes, and encoded in the DNA of ‘Livin’ Different’s static positivity.

Well worth the wait then, and knowing the sheer volume of unreleased material Mala continues to sit on, there may well be another six years of anticipation before the next of its kind rears its head. Here’s hoping that’s not the case, but until then there’s enough locked in the furthest reaches of Return II Space to keep things heavy for the foreseeable future.

Various Artists – Workshop 10 [Workshop]

May saw the arrival of the tenth 12” on the Hardwax-affiliated Workshop imprint, home to deep cuts from the likes of Move D and the brilliant Kassem Mosse (more on him later), all unnamed to heighten the label’s chilly mystique. On the A-side two tracks from Lowtec delve into the kind of state your head might be after a night and day on the tiles at Panoramabar, the first chasing smokelike billows of melody that writhe around a steady four-to-the-floor pulse. It’s followed by a song for that evening’s twilight, which meanders in a gorgeous state of exhausted elation, seemingly happy to sit and contemplate the previous night’s excesses. On the flipside, Schweiz Rec brings jazzy explorations to the fore and Ron Deacon weaves fragments of found sound around a house backbone, but it’s really all about the A side on this little beauty.

A pause for thought: there’s something reliably lovely about buying music that’s untitled; it leaves room for it to breathe and absorb the listener’s own interpretation of theme and mood. Admittedly, the crypic or numeric names doled out by many a techno producer aren’t exactly screaming their intent to the world, but leaving something entirely unnamed is a bold and definitive statement at a time when it’s so easy to discover everything at the click of a mouse. Just try Googling ‘Untitled A1’ and see how you do: it ain’t happening.

Gunnar Wendel – '578' (Omar S Mixes) [FXHE]

And so now I’ve gotten to Kassem Mosse, here referred to by his real name, Gunnar Wendel. With an upcoming release on Nonplus, it seems he’s gaining a bit of a buzz – which is just fine with me, as his music’s marvelous, all grainy dubtech and nocturnal melancholy. For his own label FXHE, Detroit don Alex Omar Smith has reimagined one of my favourite techno tracks of the last few years, the spectrally beautiful ‘578’, in two competing forms. For my money the ‘Rude Boy Warm Mix’ is the keeper, leaving the original’s synth patter largely intact and upping the pace, and in doing so crafting a graceful slice of 4am deep house. Still, the slower Berlin mix on the flipside is hardly shabby either, and sees Smith rip the guts out of the track to leave only the tracest elements to spar behind its bewitching central theme. Lovely stuff.

LHF – EP1: Enter In Silence [Keysound]

Keysound boss and blogger of some repute Martin Clark describes London’s LHF collective better than I ever could: “like Sun Ra’s hijacked Rinse FM and is using it to communicate with the heavens”. The sheer wealth of ideas, influences and concepts packed into their debut EP is a little dizzying but thoroughly compelling. With any luck they’ll ‘do a Flying Lotus’ by the time of their album, and craft an entirely convincing and occasionally terrifying psychogeographical tryst round the hidden spaces of Greater London. I’m looking forward to the bit when they encounter a gang of muggers in a dark alley and scare them off with mystical magicks and glowing eyes.

Hyetal – Like Silver/Phoenix [Orca]

Hyetal is the jack in the Bristol deck (no prizes for guessing who takes the role of joker), constantly shapeshifting in his slightly less prominent role but providing some of the city’s most memorable recent releases. ‘Pixel Rainbow Sequence’ was a dazzling blaze of technicolour synthplay, curiously elegiac in tone, and his underrated The Last Time We Spoke 12” was one of my favourite things released last year. With this new 12” the prevailing wind really ought to begin shifting in Hyetal’s direction, as it’s hands down the best thing he’s put his name to yet. The shimmering waves of ‘Like Silver’ are good enough, but ‘Phoenix’ is utterly spectacular, an incandescent blaze of funk infused glory that leaves trails of superheated steam fizzing in its wake. It’s the soundtrack to a psychedelic session beneath the glowing vapours of the Aurora Borealis, and deserves to be played at the end of every rave from now until the end of time. It’s available to listen to in full here – get to know and fall in love.

George Fitzgerald – The Let Down EP [Hotflush]

George Fitzgerald could probably be summed up as the first post-Joy Orbison bass producer to work with the ‘Hyph Mngo’ man’s basic template and expand on it further; his The Let Down EP on Hotflush will doubtless draw many lazy comparisons from those less inclined to focus on the less overt details. Which is a shame really, as this is an even more impressive debut than ‘Hyph Mngo’ was a year ago. ‘The Let Down’ is a convulsing slab of dance energy, driven by a snarling beast of a bassline that prowls beneath the humid synths above, but ‘Weakness’ is what it’s all about. Hinged around a translucent vocal that rears out of the background before receding again, it takes the house/garage/techno/whatevs crossover to dizzying new spaces. They’re both available to peruse at his Soundcloud page.

Joe – Claptrap/Level Crossing [Hessle Audio]
Joe - Untitled/Digest [Apple Pips]

The mundanely named one Joe has finally returned to follow up last year’s blinding ‘Rut’ 12” with not one but two new EPs of material. And both are among the best to have emerged from the post-dubstep set this year. All of these tracks are pretty much entirely percussion, bar the odd patter of found sound and the occasional jazzy bursts of Rhodes that rebound off the traveling clatter of ‘Level Crossing’. And for such new tracks they all sound so lived in, so gritty, packed with miniscule details – the creaking of a door at the beginning of ‘Untitled’, tiny bursts of static hinting at forward motion – that belie the sheer minimalism of their construction. With both these 12”s Joe offers a masterclass in packing as much into music as possible whilst keeping the palette limited to the barest essentials. Just as convincingly innovative as the rest of the Hessle Audio stable then.

FaltyDL – Phrequaflex [Planet Mu]
Ital Tek – ‘Moment In Blue (FaltyDL Remix)’ [Planet Mu]

New York’s favourite (only?) IDM-informed two-step producer returns! And it’s about time, as his releases from last year showed no lack of awesome physical and emotional power. The first of two new EPs on Planet Mu, FaltyDL’s Phrequaflex takes as its starting point the jitterbug garage of his Love Is A Liability album. What’s amazing about this guy is his almost supernatural ability to keep The Funk – and I’m talking serious danceability here – in beats that are indecipherably complex, and packed with minute shifts and slippages that threaten to tear the music apart at any time. This release is no exception. Particular props to the razor sharp ‘Because You’ and the troubled soul of ‘My Friends Will Always Say’ though. On the same label, his remix of Ital Tek’s ‘Moment In Blue’ is a delicious four minutes of deep blue old-skool vibes.

Also rocking the Short Circuitry stereo:

Oriol – Night & Day [Planet Mu]
Planet Mu’s new signing Oriol explores the same wild jazzy house/boogie regions as fellow travelers Floating Points and Onra, but ramps up the Weather Reportage for his debut album. The results sound a little like Floating Points blasting round sunset Miami on a big-ass, fuck off chopper.

Kode9 – DJ Kicks [K7]
In which the Hyperdub boss squashes an accurate representation of his current DJ sets onto an eighty minute CD. Intense.

Roof Light – Kirkwood Gaps [Highpoint Lowlife]
Sadly, Thorsten Sideb0ard is winding down operations at Highpoint Lowlife HQ, but this is a reliably excellent bit of electronic gear from a consistently on-it label. Oceanic ambience, manic post/future-garage beats and spacey hip-hop all feature heavily, and the track titles are something to behold – ‘Marrying Maidens Fair Of Willow’, anyone?

Main photo: ‘Good Morning Hammersmith’, by Nico Hogg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg

Interview: Mount Kimbie [Hotflush]

2010-06-14T19:46:00.008+01:00

Hotflush duo Mount Kimbie's stunning debut Crooks & Lovers is due out next month. It's a truly labyrinthine listen, flitting swiftly through mindstates and abruptly changing mood at seemingly arbitrary points. In advance of its release I caught up with the band's Dominic Maker to chat about its genesis, their influences and how their music comes together, in this interview for Drowned In Sound.

In the few hours since it's been published I've been given some food for thought by several comments, which I'm keen to expand on slightly here. It's largely to do with connection my article has drawn between the loop-heavy sound Mount Kimbie have put together on Crooks & Lovers and the current Wire-approved wave of US 'hypnagogic pop'. While I'm less than overly keen about its use as a genre signifier, it's seems to me that the idea of hypnagogia in music can be quite a useful tool to draw parallels between emergent sounds, despite their obvious differences. Hypnagogia being the bridge between waking and dream, that elusive period of time where the brain begins to draw unconscious associations between older and newer memories, and regularly brings forth inspiration that disappears as soon as the conscious brain attempts to track and record its logic.

During the interview the discussion point was techno: the way that a well-mixed techno set can lull the brain into a similar state of semi-consciousness as the lo-fi, New Age feel of artists like Sun Araw and Oneohtrix Point Never. Once again, it's a case of repetition with modification, and a certain amount of intuitive melodic or rhythmic development that seems to develop in a free-associative, rather than overtly conscious way. Mount Kimbie's sound on Crooks & Lovers is quite heavily loop-based, and follows a similar off-kilter sense of narrative, tapping into a similar middle ground.

The difference between the US crop and an band like Kimbie seems to be one of influence, and how it's channeled. Artists like Sun Araw, The Skaters or Emeralds keep hold of a distinctly American connection to a slacker-ish aesthetic that ties in with the films of someone like Van Sant; quiet, dreamlike US indie movies. Kimbie are part of a different lineage, connected with London and Berlin, and the evolution of the 'hardcore continuum' (itself a contested idea, hence the quotation marks), but mine parallel, sometimes meditative spaces. Of course, this line of thought exempts the obvious other influences that go into their music: Crooks & Lovers has similar ties to hip-hop and soul as James Blake's music, for example. But it might offer a way of extracting and considering one aspect of their sound.

Any comment's welcome, this is largely food for thought and any ideas, links or owt would be appreciated.

10-20 - Isthmus [Highpoint Lowlife]

2010-06-08T22:34:00.005+01:00

There’s a lot of love for the Highpoint Lowlife label round this way – they've been responsible for releasing some of my favourite records of the last twelve months, including TVO's stunning The Starry Wisdom EP and Production Unit's lovely new Ghost Tracks. They’ve can also take credit for putting out 10-20’s unique and strikingly prolific body of work over the past year or so. In the wake of the release of his excellent and continually intriguing self-titled debut – ‘Arcadeagle’ in particular has barely left my stereo since it first arrived here – he has put together no less than four EPs as part of his Landforms series. In an appropriate feat of naming, or an even more impressive feat of suggestive projection, each has perfectly matched its title, from Island’s humid density to the turbid and peculiarly opaque depths of Lake. They’ve worked well as a series, each showcasing a different slant to his sound and pulling away from the comfortably coherent feel of the album to explore stranger, more abstract territories.

So after the chilly soundscaping of Mountain it’s a welcome surprise that the final installment in the series shows 10-20 at his most direct and rhythmically straightforward. Of course, anyone familiar with his previous work will be well aware that even at their most beat-driven his tracks tend towards entropy, gradually peeling away and cracking at the seams to reveal tiny glimpses of the chaos that lies just beneath. Isthmus opens, in pleasingly cyclical fashion, with ‘Halogen’s reprise of the hip-hop influenced beat from Island’s ‘Hallow’, but stripped clean of that track’s tropical melody it’s an altogether more menacing beast. Carried along by a razor-edged synthline, it hints at a darkness that’s never fully explored, leaving a peculiar sense of foreboding as each element fades to nothingness.

The manic industrial percussion and chorus of dissonant bleeps ‘n’ bass that ushers in ‘Athens’ journeys deeper still, before a resolution of sorts is found in closer ‘Zizek’. Submerged in a wash of static crackle it harks back to Lake’s desaturated gloom, once again neatly closing the circle as a reminder that all four EPs work as a whole as well as in segments. Revisiting all four in one listen, it becomes more apparent how well Landforms works as a companion piece to 10-20’s debut effort. Two great albums in a year, each by turns beautiful, beguiling and terrifyingly abrasive: not bad at all.

Short Circuitry 007

2010-06-02T14:27:00.004+01:00

Continuing along with the usual habit of posting the full transcripts of this column, the latest edition of Short Circuitry has just been published on MG. The actual article, complete with photos and videolinks, can be found up here, but here's the unaltered text.

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After another one of those hiatuses – in typical style, a case of life imitating art and hitting the wonky flex – Short Circuitry returns, and it’s hit the magic Bond number. As seems to have been the case an awful lot lately, it’s proving to be a consistently exciting time to be a follower of electronic music. There have been a whole raft of releases in recent weeks setting the bar high for the dancefloor, not to mention a couple of upcoming ones looking to kick down the walls of the mainstream entirely.

I refer of course to the three-headed London-based beast consisting of Mount Kimbie and James Blake. While there was originally a physical connection between the two – Blake played in an earlier live incarnation of the band, alongside the core Kimbie duo of Kai Campos and Dominic Maker – at this point the two have parted ways to focus on their own material. In both cases it’s swiftly paying dividends. A year ago, if you’d told me someone making music as defiantly off-the-wall as Blake’s would be gaining glowing coverage from all corners of the music press, or that the same Mount Kimbie who wrote the spectral lullaby ‘Maybes’ would be remixing Foals, my eyebrow would probably have hit the ceiling. That both have achieved that and more may be testament to a greater open-mindedness amongst ‘indie’ fans than before – or perhaps it’s simply that both are making music that’s too special to stay confined to a narrow spectrum of listeners.

Following on swiftly from my glowing review of Blake’s The Bells Sketch EP in the last Short Circuitry (and I quote: “[The entire EP is] slowed to half-tempo and delicately strung out, as if he’s physically inserted fingers into the music’s core and gently teased apart each fibre. The title track is simply gorgeous, guided by a pair of interlocking vocals buried so deeply that they lose all nominative sense and reach some subconscious level where pure sonics matter more than words”), his new EP on R&S, CMYK, manages the feat of going one better. In fact, I’d probably stretch to saying it’s the finest 12” release of 2010 thus far. Entirely different in tone, its four tracks – though perhaps ‘songs’ would be a more appropriate word – operate at double the tempo, lending a sense of urgency quite opposed to the languid pace of something like ‘Buzzard & Kestrel’.

Where Blake really astonishes, both in his original tracks and his Harmonimix reworks of existing songs, is his ability to take sounds we’ve heard a thousand times before and make them extraordinary. The title track lands at a crossroads between the two: it takes an immediately recognisable sample from Kelis’ ‘Caught Out There’ and flips the context entirely. Shrouding her voice in stringy synth and wordless cries serves to effortlessly subvert the song’s sentiment, exposing the vulnerability and sadness beneath the original’s defiant roar. It’s quite spectacular, surprisingly affecting and quite possibly the best thing he’s written to date. The proviso is only there as closer ‘Postpone’ could quite easily give ‘CMYK’ a run for its money, its delicately harmonised melody running softly beneath delicate wisps of gospel song. In between, ‘Footnotes’ crafts muffled robotic soul out of a striking few elements, and the slow, sensuous groove of ‘I’ll Stay’ nods towards his former bandmates in Mount Kimbie.

For all their similarities in approach – in particular a welcome shift away from genre-isms toward music that encompasses a huge range of influences, from soul and R’n’B through dubstep, garage and Artificial Intelligence-era Warp – there are real differences between Blake’s music and the material that Mount Kimbie have put out this far. At the time it came out the Maybes EP was a real curveball for the Hotflush label, marking the beginning of a period of earthshaking releases, among them Joy Orbison’s ubiquitous ‘Hyph Mngo’ and label head Scuba’s frequently astonishing Triangulation album. ‘Maybes’ itself remains a triumph of understatement, exploiting a shockingly minimal set of elements for maxiumum emotional resonance. It’s the closest a ‘dubstep’ artist has come to writing a lullaby, and explores the cocooning, maternal properties of bass that are so often left by the wayside.

Their debut full-length Crooks & Lovers is out later this month and does a neat job of both encapsulating the ideas contained within their earlier EPs and expanding them further. Over the course of its eleven tracks it becomes obvious that what Mount Kimbie share with Blake is a willingness to throw everything at their music, with a healthy disregard for what it ‘should’ sound like. Both its slightly lopsided, ‘wonky’ feel and its use of vocals are key here, bringing the music’s human properties to the fore in a way that makes their rising popularity among wider circles an understandable phenomenon. So in a slightly odd development, the fizz and pop of ‘Carbonated’ reminds me of Puretone’s ‘Addicted To Bass’ as digital voices chatter about “basslines”, and ‘Mayor’, with its pitchshifted vocals and soft organ backing, thrashes around like the electroshocked cousin of ‘Maybes’.

What James Blake has done with CMYK, and Mount Kimbie have done with Crooks & Lovers, is to take their ostensibly dubstep-related sounds further back towards the genre’s original spirit. The earliest releases from artists like Kode9 and Digital Mystikz in the first half of the noughties were recklessly and restlessly experimental, often cutting out many elements considered crucial to dance music. Several years later, these two newer artists have brought the genre around full-circle, exploring in wide circles around its framework and in doing so making something that is no longer ‘dubstep’ in the traditional sense, but maintains the same essence that made it such a vital force.

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Reviews

Actress – Splazsh [Honest Jon’s]

Darren Cunningham’s second Actress full-length comes first in this list by virtue of being one of the finest albums of 2010 thus far. Cunningham’s music has always successfully managed to tread the fine line between densely impenetrable and moodily evocative, and Splazsh is a further refinement of the sound he began to piece together with his excellent Hazyville debut. Everything here is more fully realised, and further ramps up the sense of skunked-out claustrophobia – ‘Lost’ is the best techno(ish) tune I’ve heard in a long time, oppressively dense until a downpitched female vocal lifts it higher, and ‘Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)’ finds a bleak beauty among rattling percussion. More so even than his earlier music Splazsh feels inhabited by phantoms, from the coldwave darkness of ‘Maze’ to the Radiophonic fuzz of the fantastically titled ‘Supreme Cunnilingus’. The result is an album that’s coherent despite its sheer scale, and a poignant vision of modern British techno/house/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

Late – Losing You EP [Immerse]
Sepalcure – Love Pressure EP [Hotflush]

Ever since Burial reanimated the form with a blast of dusty electricity, I’ve been trying to work out exactly why garage beats have the ability to sound so haunting. I mean, it’s difficult to imagine that tracks like ‘Archangel’ or ‘Near Dark’ would have achieved anywhere near the same hazy, spectral beauty if they’d been powered by four-to-the-floor house beats. After their general resurgence over the last couple of years, both in dancefloor contexts and the sort of spaced out zones that both Immerse Records’ Late and new Hotflush signing Sepalcure operate within, I’ve come to the gradual conclusion that it’s down to their skeletal nature. Stripped of excess flesh and possessed of tiny snags and slippages in rhythm, two-step beats are already ghost forms of rave musics past. Placed alongside tiny snatches of vocal and ambient crackle they constitute a resurrection of sorts, a memory of a memory of a memory seen through the backward telescope of time.

Late’s upcoming double-pack for Immerse Records is undoubtedly in debt to Burial, but also shows a certain dubby, Berlin-inspired spaciousness that aligns it closely with other artists on the label. Lead track ‘Losing You’ offers immediate beauty, but it’s the delicate keyboard figures that drift through ‘Under These Conditions’ and the ultra-percussive burst of ‘Bittersweet’ that hold most water; the latter sounds like a Hessle track drowning beneath a sea of deep blue synth.

Sepalcure’s Love Pressure EP is tougher and more muscular than Late’s vision, but also feels less in thrall to the past, albeit without ever heading towards ‘future garage’ territory. Instead it’s one of those compelling crossover beasts that Hotflush do so well, adding elements of techno, slo-mo house and, on the purple-ish ‘Down’, the new school of psyched-out hip-hop. Scuba’s label has been on an impressive run of form recently, and shows little sign of letting up with upcoming releases from the man himself – the wispy Autonomic d’n’b stylings of ‘Eclipse’ – and George Fitzgerald’s eagerly awaited Weakness 12”. Count Sepalcure in there as well, then.

Sigha – Shake EP [Hotflush Two]

Oh, and another gem from Paul Rose’s stable. Sigha is one of the label’s less well-recognised talents, operating in a grey zone that seems to be quite easily ignored. Which is a damn shame, as his previous releases were seriously underrated gems, especially the Berlin-infused spaces of the Rawww EP. Hopefully the Shake EP should go some way towards righting that balance: the title track’s pulsing house and the broken techno stylings of ‘Shapes’ are both among the best things he’s put to tape, and he throws an entirely different style into the mix with the electric blue ambience of closer ‘Light Swells (In A Distant Space)’.

Kush Arora – Voodoo Sessions EP [Kush Arora Productions]
Hackman – More Than Ever EP [Pattern]

First up: heavy, sped-up soca and dancehall stylings from Kush Arora. This one kinda crept onto the radar rather than screaming its presence be known, but Arora’s Orientalist modal melodies on ‘Humidifier’ are madly addictive, somehow managing to infuse a hyperspeed funky-styled beat with a strangely calming atmosphere. That ability places him alongside Hackman in pushing a slightly jazzy, broken-beat feel onto modern bass music. For what seems like his hundredth release this year (hey, these ears ain’t complaining) Hackman brings out both his most manic – the title track’s wild bounce – and most relaxed material yet: check out the meditative house of ‘Nobody Minds’ for a little evidence of the guy’s versatility. Considering he’s only really emerged in the last year, it looks like there’ll be far exciting material to come from that camp. In both cases, certain quarters are beginning to throw around the buzzword ‘tropical’ – just don’t go there.

Baobinga – Riddim Team EP [Steak House]

Bristolian boy Baobinga heads up the esteemed bassmusicblog, and alongside that undertaking has still found a fair amount of time to throw together some killer tracks in the last couple of years. Most recent is his upcoming 12” for Steak House, which moves further towards the funky/bashment crossover stuff that label heads Monkey Steak have been pushing recently. ‘Wine Up’ and ‘Raggipahop’ are both heavy as hell chunks of digi-dancehall, and Ghislain Poirier’s remix of ‘Criss Like HD’ adds abrasive electro-house synths into the mix to intense effect. Pretty unrelenting stuff, and lacking the same variety of styles as Monkey Steak’s excellent last release for the label, but it’s a heady dancefloor cocktail nonetheless.

Lorn – Nothing Else [Brainfeeder]

As the first full-length album on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label, it seems initially surprising that Lorn is from nowhere near their typical stomping ground of Los Angeles. But then again, after a couple of listens, it becomes obvious that Lorn’s music lacks the playful sense of sleaze, that distinctly LA-ish combination of humidity and hormones that permeates the rest of the collective’s music. Instead Lorn’s view of the world is bleak and aggressive, perhaps more introspective even than the mind-charting expanses of FlyLo’s Cosmogramma opus. It’s by turns beautiful – the mournful violin melodies of ‘Army Of Fear’ send shivers down the spine – and earsplittingly harsh, but never a less than entirely immersive listen. There’s a lot to be unearthed on Nothing Else, even if it takes a few listens to fully absorb its intricacies.

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Also on the Short Circuitry playlist this month…

Emeralds – Does It Look Like I’m Here? [Editions Mego]
Cult US synth-abusers put together their most immediate – and possibly best - album to date, all slow-building drones and epic kosmische workouts.

Ramadanman – Glut/Tempest [Hemlock]
David Kennedy’s new tunes for Hemlock are among the best he’s released, the lead track’s juke-inspired 808 clatter further refining his minimalist aesthetic and the swelling ‘Tempest’ an unexpectedly low-key synth workout.

Guido – Anidea [Punch Drunk]
Bristol’s Guido turns in an excellent album for the reliably great Punch Drunk label, fusing elements of US R’n’B, hip-hop and jazz to a dubstep framework, to electrifying effect.

Hiatus what?

2010-04-29T15:38:00.006+01:00

So this blog has been on a slightly self-enforced hiatus recently, especially in terms of original content. Quite aside from anything else, it's in the build up to the imminent arrival of something larger - stay tuned for updates on that one.

In the interim period, here are some things CB/OB's been feeling of late...

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Guido's quite astounding upcoming Anidea album. Due for release in a couple of weeks on Punch Drunk, it's a vindication of the quality of his earlier releases and then some, effortlessly dragging in elements of jazz, post-Timbaland R'n'B, dubstep, Final Fantasy and more or less everything else. Oh, and a gorgeous vocal turn from Yolanda on a re-energised 'Way U Make Me Feel'.

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Flying Lotus' deeply heady new opus Cosmogramma. Spjazz. Proper mind-trip stuff, this demands a pair of good headphones and comfortable seat to absorb. There's as much for the mind as for the body over the course of its length, as his famous aunt's devotional harp and blasts of moody sax drift through the mix, binding everything together in softly coherent ways.

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Drowned In Bristol - as of this week I've started writing a regular Bristol focus column for Drowned In Sound, aiming to cover bits of the music scene here alongside one-offs, interviews and more specific chats with labels and particular artists. The first one is up now, and covers (amongst other things) Dubkasm, Subloaded, Joker, Addison Groove and Tectonic's first non-dubstep release.

"As I write, my ears are still ringing from a thorough purging at Subloaded & Teachings In Dub at the Trinity Centre on the 16th April. A launch party for Dubkasm’s rather lovely Transform I remix album (more about that one below…), the later portion of the evening was taken up by back-to-back sets from some of the city’s most respected dubstep practitioners. In true MBV style earplugs were handed out on the door, and the volume at the entrance was about as high as you’d usually find right down at the front of most clubs. Physically punishing stuff, and real justification for the description of bass frequencies as carrying ‘weight’ – but particular mention should definitely be made of Guido. His set alongside Headhunter showcased tracks from his excellent upcoming album Anidea, melding a melodic suss ripped straight from R’n’B to truly mindbending slabs of sub-bass. Oh, and in the case of ‘Mad Sax’, cheekily sleazy grooves that thrust with bawdy seventies excess."

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Erykah Badu's delectable follow-up to the raw and surprisingly furious New Amerykah Pt. 1: 4th World War. Subtitled Return Of The Ankh, it sees her turn her gaze inward and examine the chemical rush of love in each and every form. And with beats from Madlib, Dilla and Sa-Ra Creative Partners (amongst others), it sounds glorious as well.

"So where 4^th World War was harsh and overbearingly physical, its follow up drifts through the air like the invisible scent of pheromones. In terms of pure sonics, tracks like ‘Window Seat’ and ’20 Feet Tall’ glide softly where earlier counterparts like ‘Soldier’ exuded a placeless sense of foreboding. Paired with Badu’s heady delivery, early highlight ‘Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long’ is simply gorgeous, riding off a sumptuous soul vocal backline and an ambiguous address, perhaps to her new young un – “I can’t wait to see what you’ll be”. The Madlib-produced ‘Umm Hmm’ hits another peak, assembled into a seamless patchwork quilt of rising chimes and sixties kitsch."

Full review up at Muso's Guide.

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Following on from Erykah in a similar vain, Pursuit Grooves' Fox Trot Mannerisms album for Tectonic showed an entirely different and hitherto unexplored side of the label, one where deep blue nocturnes meet deeply contemplative soul/hip-hop hybrids. Certainly a fair distance from Bristol, given that she's from New York, but there are some real similarities to draw with Bristol in attitude and atmosphere.

"The other aspect Fox Trot Mannerisms shares with its label’s UK counterparts is a sense of the urbane. Although ‘Tweezers’ could almost be described as pastoral, with its fuzz of distant clicks akin to the chirps of nighttime crickets, Pursuit Grooves’ music has a strong affinity with city life. It’s a balmy summer evening’s breeze through suburban streets, or a twilight headphone stroll through a dodgy area of town where the music acts as a barrier to the real world – or, in the case of the dubstep-tinted ‘Start Something’, vividly enhances the surrounding environment."

Full review up at Sonic Router.

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Some lovely slo-mo house/garage crossover gems from Kowton on the Idle Hands imprint. They take quite a while to sink in, crawling past at unnervingly sedate pace, but offer real hypnotic gains.

"In the case of these two tracks from Kowton, what immediately strikes the listener is just how slow they are. We’re used to escalating tempos in nuum music; certain quarters aside, drum ‘n’ bass continues to peak well above the sensible limit, and at the wobbly ends of dubstep some artists are pushing for 150bpm. So it’s a refreshing change to hear a producer slow their music down to a snail’s pace. In this case, these two tracks are a culmination of what Kowton started with his bewitching ‘Stasis (G Mix)’, stretching the beats out to allow ample space for swing and crafting house tracks that flex like garage. ‘Basic Music Knowledge’ does exactly that, brooding darkly over nocturnal pulses of sub-bass and percussion that hesitates just enough to introduce palpable tension. ‘Hunger’ is even better, filled with a sense of twilight yearning appropriate to its title, and so cavernous in depth that it feels far slower than its already soporific pace."

Full review just up at Sonic Router.

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Typically confounding new material from Actress, whose 12"s on Honest Jon's and Nonplus+ find him exploring territories between skunked-out psychedelia and chilly Drexciyan electro.

"Similarly, both of the tracks on his first release for Honest Jon’s wrap themselves tightly around the listener while hinting at wide-open spaces just beyond the music’s confines. It’s a delicate balancing act – ‘Paint, Straw and Bubbles’ is almost impenetrably austere, its hypnotic spiral patterns so abstract that listening feels more like a feat of voyeuristic pleasure than one of physical connection. This distance only serves to enhance its atmosphere of deep-seated unease. ‘Maze (Long Version)’ on the flip offers more immediate gains, as thick bass frequencies and sparse electronic percussion generate a beautifully languid piece of stoned techno that seems far shorter than its six-minute runtime."

Full review up at Sonic Router.

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The final transmission from Torsten Profrock's enigmatic T++ project. It's a real shame to see it end, but he's bowed out on a high with his most fully realised set of tracks yet, bound together with a strong sense of theme thanks to the source material.

"Working with this kind of disintegrating matter couldn’t be more right for T++. His music has always both signified and amplified the processes of decay, deconstructing his influences – techno, jungle, two-step – down to their barest elements before reanimating them with a blast of electricity. His remix of Shackleton’s ‘Death Is Not Final,’ itself a dusty approximation of flesh falling from bones, creaked like the undead: hard and permanent as ancient granite but also fluid, shot through with jittery junglist breaks and irresistible forward momentum. The same is true of Wireless, where he resurrects the musicians who originally recorded these tracks – at this point, who knows whether they’re dead or alive? - and gives each a new and eerily eternal life."

Full review up at Sonic Router.

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Plus new and upcoming material from Greg Gow, Ramadanman, Shackleton and Lorn, LV's new 38 EP (a concept piece based on the oh-so-familiar 38 bus route, no less), classics from Ornette Coleman and Alice Coltrane and, finally, Kyle Hall's rather excellent Hyperdub 12". Over and out, for the time being.

FaltyDL in 2010

2010-04-04T17:14:00.003+01:00

Given that UK speed garage had its roots in New York and the experiments of luminaries like Todd Edwards, it was a pleasingly circular development that NYC-based FaltyDL put together last year’s best garage release in his Love Is A Liability album. Since then, his Bravery EP upped the head quotient, teasing apart his intricate beat programming to allow darkness into gaps in the mix, and his Party 12” for Ramp was a gorgeous piece of slow motion melancholy, almost diametrically opposed to its title.

So it’s good to hear that his recent flurry of one-offs has shown a continued restlessness in approach. His remix of Eprom’s ‘Never’ picks up somewhere near where Bravery’s ‘You Made Me Feel So Right’ left off, all angular rhythms and delicately sliced breakbeats. There’s more than a little Vibert/Squarepusher in his attitude to percussion, which manages to pull off the impressive trick of sounding both loosely sloppy and clinically precise at once. Despite sticking fairly closely to the source material’s sound palette, the effect of each track couldn’t be more different – the original a razor-sharp slice of funky-infused house, FaltyDL’s rephresh a dark and brooding asymmetric groove. His remix of The XX’s ‘Islands’, on the other hand, pares the rhythm back to its barest components, leaving the original vocal untouched over churning bass and interlocking layers of percussive noise.

Most impressive is his latest batch of new material. In my recent Short Circuitry piece for Muso’s Guide, I mentioned Adam Harper (of the rather excellent Rogue’s Foam blog) and his presenting the process of ‘wonkification’ as something separate from any specific genre. Just as new music from genre-defying artists like James Blake and Ikonika goes some way towards vindicating that idea, FaltyDL’s constant rewiring of established dance music forms feels like something very similar. Less recreation than reimagination, on the All In the Place EP, released on Rush Hour, he takes on a greater house influence than before and twists it into his own distinct shapes. And the results are pretty spectacular, the title track in particular offering an abstract but dancefloor-ready journey through melodic house territory that sounds like no-one but FaltyDL. Which has always been one very interesting aspect of his music – despite taking on a range of different styles, his process of writing generates music that sounds uniquely his: deconstructed but energetic, and with a cunning ear for musicality. On rolling garage track ‘St. Mark’s’ his beats display the same magnetic properties that were so obvious on the Bravery EP. Each percussive element constantly attempts to escape from the force field holding it to the others, generating a restless and unstable energy that threatens to collapse at any time. The fact that it never does serves to ratchet the energy almost to breaking point.

Ikonika - Contact, Love, Want, Have [Hyperdub]

2010-03-31T12:24:00.006+01:00

There's a sense of long-awaited resolution that comes with the news that Ikonika's debut album comes out next week, especially after my excitement at the announcement earlier this year. It helps of course that it's frequently brilliant, managing to preserve the lopsided 'what the fuck?'-factor of her early material and marry it with the kind of shimmering synths and broken percussion that's been making the more neon end of funky sound so electric recently.

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Contact, Love, Want, Have is a narrative arc in itself, describing a sonic shift that has mirrored a general trend within dubstep over the last 18 months or so.

And it’s a hugely impressive statement of intent: streamlined without being overly smooth, melodic without being overly sentimental and danceable without ever straying too far towards simplicity. Opener ‘Ikonoklast (Insert Coin)’ is a sketchlike introduction, but its title also gives some clue as to what lies within. Much as it’s become commonplace for people to mention the influence of videogame music on Ikonika and her contemporaries, given an opening gambit like ‘Insert Coin’ it bears repeating. As a child of the Eighties and early Nineties, at times the music contained within these 14 tracks evokes real nostalgia - from the Road Rash-style momentum of ‘They Are All Losing The War’ to upcoming single ‘Idiot’s stupidly addictive and lopsided synth hook.

Above all else though, the crucial aspect of Contact, Love, Want, Have - and the element that should endear it to listeners far beyond its parent genre - is its compositional sophistication. For all the rough‘n’ready edges it displays, underpinning each pleasantly retro sounding synth patch is a keen ear for melodic development and a tangible lightness of touch. It’s there in ‘Idiot’ where each song cycle introduces a new layer of harmony, building to a surprisingly delicate climax. It’s there during the one-two punch of ‘Yoshimitzu’ and ‘Fish’, the former’s gorgeous shuffle beat and choral backing acting as a restrained counterpart to the latter’s escalating urgency. And it’s there in the album’s sequencing, passing through several distinct phases before reaching a concluding quartet of destructively brilliant house tunes. Each offers a slightly different take on funky, as though viewed through a gradually turning kaleidoscope – sedate and thoughtful on ‘Heston’, building incrementally to the blistering rapid-fire drums of ‘Look (Final Boss Stage)’.

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Full review written for Drowned In Sound.

Deep Teknologi - T. Williams EP [Local Action]

2010-03-29T13:27:00.004+01:00

I don't usually post my reviews from Sonic Router up here, but this record is so good it really does bear repeating. The music on Deep Teknologi's upcoming T. Williams EP is some of the most brutally functional and hypnotic funky to have emerged for ages. These ears are already seriously looking forward to whatever they do next.

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As befits a nuum-generated music, funky seems to be undergoing a real creative expansion at the moment. It’s largely due to the magpie-like nature it shares with its closest cousins, reaching outward and grabbing any scrap of particularly shiny detritus to throw into the melting pot; from defiantly acoustic elements - traditional Middle Eastern melodies (Monkey Steak) and ritualistic drum-circle percussion (DVA) – to more typical electronic influences like first-wave Detroit (Roska) and Berlin (Cooly G, xxxy). Typically, the most interesting developments are happening at the bleeding edges, those regions that become increasingly difficult to define but ever harder to resist. The single most exciting aspect of these crossover points is that funky’s basic beat pattern remains an irresistibly danceable weapon, providing an unusually flexible backbone for experimentation. Recent tracks by Cooly G, DVA and this new release by Deep Teknologi’s T.Williams, pushes the sound in strange and often difficult directions, which taken separately from such an addictive dancefloor structure could well lose momentum. The best funky is aimed intensely and inseparably toward both body and mind in equal measure, crucially remaining tied to its origins as club music.

On the new T. Williams EP, Deep Teknologi place themselves firmly within that group of artists pushing the sound in unprecedented new directions. In terms of intent and pure sonics, these three tracks by co-founder T. Williams are probably closest to Cooly G’s recent Dub Organizer material – intrinsically related to house music in its purest form, but infused with London attitude. All share early grime’s sparseness – all synth stabs and trancelike repetition, 'Anthem' could be a cousin of Cooly’s ‘Narst,’ bristling with barely restrained aggression which is never released, simply building over the track’s length and leaving real tension in its wake.

Arriving immediately afterwards, ‘Flooring' makes a b-line for Berlin, underpinned by slowly rotating columns of white noise and static synth before tearing apart to reveal a beating heart hidden within. All three tracks are sparing in the extreme, each containing only what is necessary and nothing more. This could as easily have resulted in a set of decent and merely functional DJ tools, but proves far more effective, highlighting each individual element like a high-powered lens. ‘Afric’ is the best example of this: a simple organ figure pivoting above tightly locked percussion and bass, but brimming with such an excess of energy that it seems a wonder that there isn’t a set of musicians performing it live in front of you. Recalling Miles Davis and mnml (shhh) in equal measure, it’s one of the best dancefloor tunes I’ve heard in a long time, sending the mind out on a Sun Ra-style tangent towards the heart of the solar system.

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Originally published at Sonic Router

Short Circuitry 006

2010-03-28T21:50:00.004+01:00

After a month or so's hiatus, the latest edition of CB.OB's Short Circuitry column has just been published at Muso's Guide, with a focus on the current crop of producers operating in the grey areas once called 'wonky'. Full transcript up here, though lacking added links and videos.

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There’s something inherently reductive about the concept of genre. Ask any musician what they think of the latest term to describe their sound, and the answer will usually be preceded by a wince. It remains largely an academic concern – for many music writers, naming and constraining is a large part of what they do. It provides a rough conceptual map, a basis for understanding the nature of general trends as well as sudden, rapid shifts in sound. Discourse to indulge the inner geek, essentially.

Bass music provides ideal fodder for genre-junkies, with both dubplate culture and ongoing advances in technology ensuring that emergent sounds swiftly ripple outward from their epicentre. But it also poses a problem in terms of definition. UK bass producers are largely magpie-like in nature, grabbing good bits from wherever they can be sourced and creating dubious regions where one neatly defined style begins to bleed into others. As of 2010, the scene roughly centred around dubstep is in a greater state of flux than it’s ever been, pushing outward in as many different directions as you’d care to name. Still, there’s certainly a debate to be had as to whether quibbling over names is really of any consequence – after all, this is dance music – and the answer is typically tough to pin down.

Take late 2008 as a case in point: the irritatingly self-limiting term ‘wonky’ was briefly tossed around, before it was met by disdain and antipathy from the majority of artists it was used to define. Roughly speaking, the title fitted the slouched hip-hop influence and awkward structure, but wonky’s day began and ended with a brief flurry of records around the end of 2008. Admittedly, Zomby’s sketchy Hyperdub EP couldn’t have fitted the druggy genre name better, the viscous bass tar of ‘Kaliko’ and ‘Aquafresh’ offsetting rave nostalgia with an unhealthy dollop of strong cough syrup. Meanwhile, Rustie’s aptly-named ‘Zig-Zag’ swaggered onto the floor with a headful of cheap cider and cheaper amphetamines, and the pitchbent synths of Ikonika’s debut ‘Please’ swung unsteadily before collapsing. But less than a year later, an unprecedented lightness of touch in his later releases had proven Zomby’s contribution to be a relative one-off in that restless producer’s oeuvre, and Ikonika was filling her DJ sets with razor-edged house/garage hybrids.

Still, in spite of any debate over naming conventions, the development of new sounds within that sphere has continued to be hugely exciting to witness. In a post on his excellent Rogue’s Foam blog last June, sometime Wire contributor Adam Harper talked about the process of ‘wonkification’ as separate from any one type of music, and its ‘corrupting relationship to the more conventionalised genres that it sprang from’. The early part of this year has seen a raft of releases from upcoming (and, in some places, established) producers that lend real credibility to this notion. Fundamentally, they never become lost in a fug of self-indulgent experimentation – all of these producers are creating music that bristles with nervous energy, each one wired to the gills with mains electricity.

James Blake’s Harmonimix deconstructions of R’n’B and hip-hop are a particularly good example. Both subvert the original songs’ intent, hinting at something quite different while leaving the core elements of each track largely intact. Released in February on a limited white label, his remix of Lil Wayne’s ubiquitous ‘A Milli’ inverts Wayne’s boisterous swagger by placing his self-aggrandising vocal performance over a music box lullaby of gently trickling melodies. His take on Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills Bills Bills’ is even better, his own dissonant harmonies over the original’s vocal performance turning the sweet ‘n’ sassy into something threatening and monstrous. In this case, Blake’s efforts entirely alter the underlying qualities of each track – Wayne’s sexual energy is neutered, and Destiny’s Child cease to be independent women and succumb to sinister androgyny. But, crucially, both remain fiendishly danceable, providing an entirely different take on dubstep’s darkened club energy.

Blake’s slo-mo soul often sounds like the product of an old-style singer trapped in a computerised body. His debut release for Untold’s Hemlock label last year felt like merely the tip of the iceberg, and a flurry of material this month suggests that was very much the case. As well as the Harmonimix 12”, two releases on Brainmath and Hessle further hone his earlier experiments into languid explorations of tension and emotion. The Bells Sketch EP on Hessle Audio is slowed to half-tempo and delicately strung out, as if he’s physically inserted fingers into the music’s core and gently teased apart each fibre. The title track is simply gorgeous, guided by a pair of interlocking vocals buried so deeply that they lose all nominative sense and reach some subconscious level where pure sonics matter more than words. His Brainmath release, a collaborative 10” with Airhead, operates in a similar space where voices are detuned until they lose all semblance of meaning. All of Blake’s music so far taps into that sweet melancholy that lies at the heart of great soul music, and in doing so reimagines how machines can express emotion. It’s undeniably music of now, but goes far further than almost all of his contemporaries in connecting to a pre-computer past.

Just as Blake’s music thrives off a central contradiction – analogue in tone and nature, but a true product of digital equipment – Ikonika creates tracks that are unashamedly digital, but with a raw and wildly anarchic edge. One of the first producers to begin Hyperdub’s transition from dark and dystopian pressure to wide-open song structures, she is due to release her debut album in April. Contact Love Want Have – a neat title reportedly pieced together with a group of fridge poetry magnets – successfully retains the rough ‘n’ ready feel of her earlier music and fuses it to the kind of house-influenced material she’s playing now. The result is an intriguing and addictive curio, both inextricably tied to ‘UK bass’ (in its loosest sense) and stubbornly individual.

Eschewing the kind of pathological attention to miniscule detail that can mar electronic musicians in a haze of computer programming, her music is direct and punky in attitude. Earlier tracks like the softly churning ‘Millie’ and ‘Sahara Michael’ brim with such an excess of ideas that the unpolished production only serves to enhance their considerable charms. Upcoming single ‘Idiot’ does real justice to the description of her synths as ‘singing’, hinging off a broken funky beat and a stupidly catchy but irregular bleep motif, and the gorgeous shuffle-beat of siren song ‘Yoshimitzu’ moves with all the grace and restraint of a Kurosawa classic. That her blurred melodies are tied to tighter percussion than ever before merely serves to emphasise that contrast, creating a kind of loose impressionism above beats and bass that lock to form a solid groove. Her forthcoming remix of Egyptrixx’s ‘The Only Way Up’ further smoothes out that contradiction to spectacular effect, creating a mini-epic that drowns in a swirling ocean of delay-drenched melody.

Next, a scene veteran: Jamie Teasdale cut his teeth as a member of early dubstep mentalists Vex’d, whose Degenerate album inadvertently spawned a host of aggressive (and increasingly generic) imitators. His later material – first as Jamie Vex’d, and now as Kuedo – took the scorched earth distortion of Vex’d and changed the emphasis, downplaying the harder edge for waterfalls of incandescent shimmer and crashing, arrhythmic bass. One name change later, his Dream Sequence EP on Planet Mu refines this sound to quite dazzling effect. What makes these four tracks so refreshingly addictive is Kuedo’s use of melody as a basic structural element, each one built from huge Lego-like blocks of colour that stack upon one another before suddenly toppling. Opener ‘Starfox’ clinches the prize for Short Circuitry’s favourite track of the year so far, hinging around a fairly simple verse-chorus structure that repeatedly explodes into arcs of electric blue. The other three tracks are no less vibrant, the sketch-like ‘Shutter Light Girl’ lasting for an all-too-short minute, and ‘Joy Construction’ loping along on a strangely voice-like hook. Sterling stuff.

Finally (and this is an end due to space considerations and concern for the reader, rather than a shortage of people to write about – this column could variously have included newish material from Clouds, Om Unit, Blue Daisy, Dorian Concept and FaltyDL, amongst many others), upcoming mutant Illum Sphere. His excellent Long Live The Plan EP has been on heavy rotation for the last couple of months, and out of the four artists covered here he probably reaches closest to the original definition of ‘wonky’. His beats are loose and slightly unquantised, falling just outside of the expected position to leave brief periods of hanging tension, and linking his music closely to US hip-hop producers like J-Dilla, FlyLo and Madlib. Constantly alternating between spacious and densely claustrophobic, tracks like ‘Never Lie Twice’ and ‘Chasing The Midnight Moth’ are sublime exercises in darkened atmosphere, and LA man Samiyam’s remix of ‘Psycho’ directly addresses the latent US-UK link.

As with all the above producers, Illum Sphere’s music is defined by creative use of synths, employing huge swathes of reverb and gauzy melody to carve out vast psychological spaces. Even as the use of wonky as a genre signifier has (thankfully) died, it’s refreshing to find so many artists employing similar tactics of deconstruction to recreate a host of influences from the ground up. In all cases the past is refracted through both the present and the imagined future, with results that are always intriguing and frequently breathtaking.

Addison Groove - Footcrab/Dumbshit [Swamp81]

2010-03-22T18:30:00.002Z

Well, I for one certainly hadn’t been acquainted with juke before this little beast reared its head, and the concept remains pretty alien as it’s nightmarishly difficult to track down any real releases. It’s quite fitting then, given the catch-all nature of ‘dubstep’ at the moment, that the first real exposure a large chunk of the UK will have to juke is via the medium of a Bristol producer. Tony Williams, the man more commonly known as Headhunter, has been on a roll of form lately – since his debut album Nomad there have been collaborations with F, remixes from Modeselektor and a couple of killer limited 12”s on Tempa – but in true shapeshifting fashion, the best thing he’s yet come out with has been released under the Addison Groove pseudonym.

‘Footcrab’ has been doing the rounds for a while, and for all its gonzo charms, it’s quite an unusual track to have achieved its status as a mini-anthem – there’s barely anything there. But then that’s most of the fun - along with ‘Dumbshit’ on the flip, the key lies in its devastating simplicity: both tracks consist merely of the repetitive, syncopated kick of an 808, pounding like a headache under churning subs, wispy melody and a chopped vocal mantra. That’s it. Who said dance music had to be complicated? Along with Ikonika’s forthcoming Contact Love Want Have album, which for all its lush textural elements never reaches beyond drums, bass and a couple of synth melody lines, these tracks pare bass music to the bare essentials, and in doing so work against maximalist notions that good music requires complexity. Electronic music production can reach stupidly macho levels of technological one-upmanship, and in doing so runs the risk of losing the levels of raw energy required for club action. Both ‘Footcrab’ and ‘Dumbshit’ sound as though they could have been pieced together in five minutes – and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

Still, aspects of Williams’ music as Headhunter audibly creep into his Addison Groove guise. Both tracks still retain a smoky Berlin atmosphere, as stoned dub chords drift hazily in the background behind ‘Footcrab’s irresistible vocal chatter and ‘Dumbshit’ maintains a little of the techno-influenced momentum that marks his older dubstep productions. It’s less a matter of hidden depths – what you see (or hear) is very much what you get in this case – and more that the rougher, live-sounding edges disguise how cleverly put together both tracks are. It’ll be interesting to see how separate Williams keeps these two sides of his personality. Even on this debut release the bleeding edges where both cross over are apparent, just as Pearson Sound’s ‘PLSN’ bore more than a little resemblance to similar Ramadanman material. It would be exciting to hear this spontaneity go a little further.

Scuba - Triangulation [Hotflush]

2010-03-19T12:03:00.003Z

Bloc-related extended break over - normal service shall resume from this point onward.

Scuba's long-awaited new album Triangulation is due out on Monday, and it's as compelling as expected from the man who made 'Negative' and 'Aesaunic'. Along with Shackleton's Three EPs and Peverelist's Jarvik Mindstate, it essentially represents the pinnacle of the dubstep/techno interface - binding more obvious traits of the latter to a peculiarly UK-centric sense of nostalgia and warmth.

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"Perhaps as a result of his time spent within Berghain’s monstrous halls, follow up Triangulation displays more immediate dancefloor heft, but also hides greater riches in its rarely explored dark corners. The most notable difference is the further prominence of his home city’s sonic hallmarks. Whilst in 2008 A Mutual Antipathy remained in thrall to London, in 2010 it’s as if Berlin has fully seeped into all the cracks of Scuba’s music, becoming as crucial to its current incarnation as the UK was to its last. A large portion of Triangulation is given over to heaving slabs of pristine dubby techno – this time the closest relatives of tracks like ‘On Deck’ and ‘Tracers’ are local legends like Marcel Dettmann and Shed, as opposed to Digital Mystikz or Loefah. This proves to be a welcome evolutionary development, the oceanic sub-bass of ‘You Got Me’ carving out wide-open spaces for the rest of his music to operate with greater pace and rhythmic consistency than before.

But all of this having been said, it’s the connection to dubstep that continues to define Scuba’s music. If it weren’t for the crackle and hum of London’s ghosts, these tracks would likely remain tied to a teutonic rigidity. Instead they positively effervesce with barely restrained energy and an infectious unwillingness to sit still for more than a few seconds at a time. Like his career-high recent single for Naked Lunch, ‘Negative’, many of Triangulation’s finest moments resurrect and electrify the skeletal shapes of two-step – both the phantom garage of ‘Latch’ and the woodblock beat of ‘Tracers’ rebuild its sexy swing for a new generation. Most startling are his excursions into half-tempo Autonomic drum‘n’bass - the glacial ‘So You Think You’re So Special’ initially comes across as little more than an interlude, but closer listens reveal it to be the human heart beating at the album’s core. At its centre a tantalisingly brief female vocal drifts in space, suspended between cascades of white noise and implied junglist percussion, rising and falling before simply fading away."

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Full review written for Drowned In Sound.

Interview: Pinch

2010-03-09T19:13:00.010Z

It's probably fair to say that most people reading this won't need any introduction to Pinch. Head of the Tectonic label and one of the Bristol scene's figureheads, he can take a large portion of the credit for establishing dubstep as one of the city's major musical forces, through his label and through the Subloaded and Dubloaded nights. It makes sense that the genre's settled with Bristol as something of a spiritual home - the city's rich musical history and famed soundsystem culture works within a similar ethos: all bass, space and restless progression.

He’s curating Bloc’s Subloaded stage for the second year running this weekend, and I caught up with him last month as part of a preview for This Festival Feeling (see the article up here). There was a lot more in the end than just chat about Bloc, and a lot of it fits with similar things discussed on CB/OB, so it seemed appropriate to publish the full thing up here.

This is the second year you’ve been doing Bloc – how did you get involved with them?

I almost can’t quite remember exactly. The Bloc guys got in touch - I think there’d been a preliminary conversation that one of them had had with a friend of a friend about the idea of something along these lines. They basically got in touch and said ‘We’d like to do a Subloaded on the Friday night, pick a line up.’ The budget was proving to be a bit restrictive…

You brought quite a few people from Bristol right?

Yeah, there was definitely a heavy Bristol slant on it, what with Subloaded being a Bristol-based night. But basically they got in touch, we put it together and it just went really well. It was on the Friday, and it was one of the busier rooms throughout the evening. And then they got in touch afterwards and said ‘We’d definitely like to do something again with you this year’, but this time they kind of bumped it up a notch, put it on the Saturday and compared to last year’s budget, the budget’s ten, fifteen times what it was!

Yeah – compared to last year you’ve got some real heavyweights, you’ve got a few of the Berlin guys…

This time they said ‘pick your dream line up’ – and it’s not quite 100% what I would have wanted it to be, but it’s not far off.

That was actually one of my stock festival questions I was going to ask you – what would be your dream festival line-up! You’ve done pretty well – you’ve managed to get over people like Dettmann, Shed…

Rhythm & Sound is probably what I’m most excited about – well, Mark Ernestus. He’s a pretty hard person to coax out.

Well, they both are aren’t they?

Moritz [Von Oswald, Ernestus’ musical partner in Rhythm & Sound] has been a bit more open more recently. I’ve never met Mark, but I’ve met Moritz.

He played here for Venn Festival a few years ago.

I met him then; I met him before that as well. Unfortunately he suffered a stroke, and he’s still doing some things, but his priority is with the band. The timing of his stroke was quite unfortunate for the new project. But yeah, before I ‘discovered’ dubstep, if you like, Rhythm & Sound were about the most perfect thing. I love that sound.

It was the opposite for me actually – dubstep led me on to discover Rhythm & Sound and Basic Channel. I was reading a bit about Ernestus in Wire last month – apparently he does these really dubby sets, where he’ll play a whole song, take it off, and then play the next one from the very start.

That’s the traditional roots soundsystem method, where you would normally play the tune and then the dub straight after. People like Jah Shaka still do that – from the point where the needle hits the rim, right to the end, and then right back again! I’m not 100% sure what Mark will be playing, but I do know that when he DJs he plays a lot of dancehall instrumentals, and Tikiman will obviously be vocalling everything. In all honesty I’m not entirely sure what it’ll be like, but I know that he’s a collector of extraordinarily rare dancehall instrumentals, so I imagine that I won’t have heard something like half to three quarters of what he decides to play on the night!

You must be pretty excited about your line-up in general – as well as getting a lot of the guys from around here that you had last year, you’ve got a whole group of others as well.

Definitely, it’ll be a nice balance. Curating is never quite as easy as you’d hoped, because you’ve got difficulty with timings of things, sometimes people are doubling up on gigs… But I think the transition from set to set should be fluidly musical throughout the night, It’s not often you’ll see Rhythm & Sound and Joker in the same room, but at the same time I think it’ll work! And it’s interesting that you say that you got into Rhythm & Sound through dubstep – for me it was something that set the context for getting into this sort of sound. I’m very much about trying to bring together things that connect the peripheries into a kind of dubstep main room context. I think there’s a lot of room for things - there’s a deep, meditational end, which Rhythm & Sound connect with very directly – but there’s a much more upbeat ravey edge to it, through people like Joker. And then there are people like Martyn and Kode9, who I imagine will somehow ride between the two vibes.

Yeah, both have been playing a lot of the crossover stuff between funky, dubstep, garage, building it up into quite upbeat sets.

Martyn’s been doing that, yeah, and that should blend into what Shed and Dettmann do. To be honest, I am really pleased with the Subloaded lineup for Bloc this year. I do think that there’s always inevitably going to be people bouncing back and forth from room to room, to catch so-and-so, but I like to think that there will be some people who stick around for the majority of the evening, as there will be a bit of a journey vibe. That’s something I really like the idea of. It’s a little bit boring if you go to a rave and you hear the same style of music, within a genre even, from start to finish, non stop banger after banger.

Hearing the same song three or four times in a night by different DJs – it keeps it at a fairly level energy throughout the evening, rather than really progressing anywhere.

Yeah – we’ll see how it pans out, but I feel really positive about the whole thing and really pleased with how it’s worked out.

The whole line-up’s pretty bass heavy this time anyway – that was something I noticed, compared to last year which was quite house and techno oriented, there seems to have been a real influx of bass sounds into Bloc this year. Do you think that reflects the way that things have been going in the last year or so, the crossover between house, techno and dubstep that’s been going on?

I think that was already happening in different ways. In the last year, the funky scene has certainly come to the forefront to a certain degree – and that would be an obvious place for house to come in.

I suppose that’s what I was really referring to, the crossover with funky. With techno it was kind of already there.

Yeah, well you had Villalobos playing Mala and Shackleton years ago. I don’t know - I feel as though there’s always going to be good records that are just good records for the sake of good records. I know that you’ll hear big house tunes in funky sets, but I don’t know how much that happens the other way round. House is a very well established and well-produced genre, and there’s probably an element of snobbery towards the production of some funky stuff. But then there are open-minded people, people who don’t really care about those sorts of presumptions to the same extent. I don’t really know.

But I do think that in the last year there’s been a developing trend, if you like: this idea that at the core of a dubstep set, people like Kode9 and Martyn are quite happy to play what’s known as the ‘wonky’ side of things, and funky, and dubstep. I guess for me it’s interesting that these kind of links only really seem to thrive in the context of dubstep, even though they’re not strictly dubstep sets. That’s definitely something, and I think there’ll probably be more crossover between those kinds of things. It’s interesting, I’m just thinking as we talk about it now - at the weekend I just played Athens and Berlin. In Athens I was playing with Dorian Concept, and in Berlin it was with Slugabed and Blue Daisy. So in the eyes of many promoters it’s already something that can sit and exist in the same room. I guess I generally feel quite positive about that, it’s all about diversifying and progressing with sound. As long as it keeps things interesting…

It’s interesting that the dubstep scene seems to be the entity that has created that sort of binding, that it couldn’t really have existed without dubstep providing a background for it.

I don’t think it’s the case that it couldn’t have existed, but I just think it might not have had a home to thrive in. I think the reason is that dubstep’s always been something that’s scraped at the periphery of different subgenres. A lot of people will have come into the music from their own various angles – some people from techno backgrounds have gotten into it from a certain angle, or people who’ve come into it from garage, grime, drum ‘n’ bass, electronica, dub, roots, dancehall – and obviously anyone who does get in through those roots comes in through a tune that touches on both sides of what they’re interested in. That’s how a lot of people got into it, so for it to then bounce back out that way doesn’t surprise me much, that’s probably why it can do that. It’s something that incorporates various fringe subgenres anyway.

Well, it’s good to see it doing that, as opposed to just stagnating and becoming entirely jump-up, banger-type tunes.

Yeah, I suppose my feelings on that are fairly predictable. It’s complicated, because you could look at dub music and you could ask, ‘What’s really changed in twenty, thirty years? Has there been much change?’ It’s not something that’s really progressed at the same technological lightning speed that it developed at. I guess you could take hip-hop - although there are various trends that change things, it’s not like it’s broken into any new paradigm of thought in the last ten, fifteen years.

Then something like drum ‘n’ bass - again, apart from some of the Autonomic stuff, the last several years in drum ‘n’ bass have been kind of a samey blur, there’s not really been a huge amount of progression. I guess it’s really noticeable in something like drum ‘n’ bass, because it was such a powerfully developmental scene. With dubstep, it’s interesting that people are almost sidestepping the genre a little bit. I think people are a bit less precious about maintaining a thing for the sake of it, and are actually just more interested in good music and the progression of good music. That’s my very badly worded, loose philosophy on that one!

That’s certainly what got me interested in dubstep in the first place. I was too young, or too uninterested, to get into drum ‘n’ bass when it was very progressive, or doing some really interesting or exciting things. I got into dubstep more or less through Burial’s first album, Kode9’s Memories of the Future, Burial’s Untrue and your Underwater Dancehall – and immediately from there you could see that there were people looking to do something that wasn’t ‘just dubstep’, if you know what I mean, not just sticking to a rigid dogma. It never seemed like a scene that was particularly precious about the core of what it was ‘supposed’ to be.

Well, I think circumstances have changed quite a lot in the last five years or so in dubstep, but I still think that at the heart of what I think is the ‘good’ end of it is a basic desire to hear something new, and to be a bit freaked out by it. It’s long been the driving force for a lot of genres. That’s what pushes someone like Kode9, who’s always had a very restless approach to it - in so far as you’ll go and hear him play, then hear him play six months later, and six months later again, and every time it’s like a paradigm shift.

He’s very progressive in his outlook.

Yeah, and that doesn’t always necessarily imply that everything he does is therefore better than the last thing, but I think his drive behind that is maintaining a sense of awe in his presentation of the new.

With Tectonic you always seem to have remained at heart a dubstep label. What you’ve put out has always been what you would call ‘dubstep’. I remember reading in an interview you saying there was a certain kind of aesthetic to the label – certain tunes that were Tectonic tunes, and certain ones that weren’t. Is that something you’re still sticking with, amongst everything shifting around?

Yeah. Of the various headstates that music can put you into, there are different routes into the same headspace, almost… Though it’s funny you should say that, as I’m just about to put out the first non-dubstep release on Tectonic!  

What are you putting out?

It’s a girl from New York called Pursuit Grooves. It’s dubstep-related, but it’s very beaty, groove rhythms, and she sings on it. It’s really nice, really good music, and a little bit different. It’s a tiptoe into the realm of dubstep but actually, as I’m thinking about it, it’s somewhere between hip-hop, funky and broken beat. [Note: It's since been announced that the EP will be entitled Foxtrot Mannerisms, and is due for release on April 5th]

I’m quite hypocritical sometimes, because as much as I’m saying that dubstep’s about progression, there have been certain things held [steady] with Tectonic. But then if you look over the course of our releases you can hear a sense of progression, development and experimentation. But I do think that the thing that ties it all together is something that exists in this certain headspace. It’s pretty difficult to describe, but ultimately it’s the headspace that I most enjoy! Somewhere between… something with a bit of a serious edge - not serious for beard-stroking’s sake, but for impact. Impact rhythms, without getting into tear-out territory. I like it to have impact without necessarily diluting itself in any way.

I imagine you can keep that going at Dubloaded as well – having a midweek night must be good for putting on something that people will want to listen to, rather than just something to go and shock out to on a Saturday night.

Yeah, well Tectonic is at the stage now where we’re doing albums, and there is a different approach to putting together an album. But the rest of the content is 12” singles, and they’re mastered, cut and designed to be heard on a soundsystem. It’s still physical experience music, and that’s where you’ll get the most out of it. But then obviously with albums there’s a little more room to play around.

Are you putting out any new albums on Tectonic any time soon?

Well, the last one was 2562’s Unbalance…

I was at the launch party for that actually.

Yeah, that was a good night. To answer your question, there are a few more things that will be coming out over the course of the year. The Pursuit Grooves thing is actually an EP – six tracks on vinyl, seven as a CD – so that’s somewhere in between. There’s a very big project coming up not too long after that, though I can’t really tell you about it as it’s not entirely sorted! But as well as that, in the pipeline we’re working with an artist called Jack Sparrow, who’s working towards an album for us.

He’s got a 12” [Terminal/Torment] coming out soon right?

It’s dropping this week, yeah.

And it’s about time I got back into the studio and started putting one together. Whether I’ll get it out this year or get it finished next year, I don’t know. I’ve spent the last year on a fairly quiet tip, I didn’t really do a lot - I did a couple of remixes, and that was more or less it really. I spent most of last year abandoning my PC and Fruity Loops, and getting to grips with Logic. I moved to Mac, and two days after I bought the bloody Mac my PC packed it and just wiped itself, took loads of shit out with it as well – a bit annoying. It threw me in at the deep end, and I’ve not gone back to Fruity since then.

How have you found Logic?

A bit slow to start with, a few big hurdles, but I’m really enjoying Logic. I really like it. I can hear a massive improvement in the production levels. It’s just a much easier platform for producing to a higher quality.

I remember someone who used Logic saying to me that he could tell the difference aurally between a track produced on Logic and a track produced on Ableton, Fruity, whatever, through the sound.

Fruity’s a weird one because people don’t tend to use the stock plugins. Logic has really good stock plugins, so that’s what you can hear a lot of the time. The tape delay is the biggest giveaway – once you’ve heard it, then you can hear it in peoples’ tracks. You know it’s there. I’ve just done a remix for this girl Emika, who’s releasing on Ninjatune, so that’ll be out sooner or later. And I’ve started getting together some tracks and I’m really pleased with them, they’re going down well.

Have you been playing them out?

Yeah. A few people have got them, and they’re getting played, so I just need to get back into the studio and make some more!

Just to get back on the whole festival tip for a minute, are there any other things going on at Bloc you’re particularly looking forward to? Are you planning to stick around all weekend?

I’ll be around all weekend. Predictably, I’ll stick my head in for the Friday night FWD vs. Rinse thing, and I’ll try and catch a bit of the Autonomic lot – Instra:mental, Breakage and dBridge. I can honestly say that last year I did a bunch of things from Glastonbury to European festivals, but the best weekend I had was at Bloc. I’m not just saying that for promotional reasons either – I made a point of booking the whole weekend off with my agent, and said ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else, I’ll be at Bloc for the weekend’. It almost doesn’t matter too much, I don’t want to know too much about the lineup. I know it’s Salt ‘N’ Pepa and various people, but I’m just up for the adventure.

And it’s a lot of fun to go to a festival at Butlins.

I really never thought I’d say it, but you’re right.

Are you much of a festival person generally?

Umm… (lengthy pause) no! Though I really enjoyed Glastonbury last year, that was good fun. I stayed for the weekend for that one as well. In the right circumstances and in the right situations it’s really good fun, but I must admit that I’m heavily sold on the luxury of having the amenities you do at Bloc – just being able to have a shower and a cup of tea whenever you want, and you don’t have to worry about queuing for the toilets. If you’re with the right group of people, the weather doesn’t fuck you up and you don’t burn yourself out too heavily on the first day, camping can be good fun. But it’s also quite exhausting.

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Bloc is on this weekend at Butlins in Minehead, and it looks likely to be quite incredible. Pinch's Subloaded stage is on the Saturday night, and features Mark Ernestus & Tikiman, T++ (Live), Pinch b2b Distance, Appleblim b2b Peverelist, Kode9 b2b Martyn, Shed & Marcel Dettmann, Joker, Blazey and Mungo's Hi-Fi.

Dubloaded is happening at the Croft tomorrow, with Pinch himself, Pangaea and Kidkut. See you down the front...

Furesshu - Untitled/1983/Horizons [Project:Squared]

2010-03-06T09:27:00.003Z

After the more overtly dubstep-related vibe of his contributions to the Echodub label, the debut 12” from Bristol-based producer and promoter of the rather excellent Seasonfive night Furesshu moves further down the techno axis. However, unlike previous Project:Squared conspirator Asusu, the A-side’s UK influences are almost totally downplayed in favour of dubby Berlin atmosphere and soft-eged tape hiss. ‘Untitled’ is a hypnotic eleven minutes of echo-drenched post-Basic Channel techno, focusing less on dancefloor immediacy than on slowly unfurling elements. Each individual component gradually finds its place across the track’s length, settling into a peculiar locked groove and exploring every possible permutation before fading.

‘1983’ resurrects the ghosts of garage a little more overtly, an implied flex skating across its surface in a similar manner to some of Sigha’s recent Rawww EP. In its austerity it comes close to some of the most abstract moments from A Made Up Sound’s recent Sun Touch 12”, stripped bare of obvious humanity save tiny vocal inflections that stack above a churning bottom end. ‘Horizons’ is a different creature again, a meandering wash of dystopian half-step that seems to strive for the most minimal possible approach. Consisting of little other than subs, insectoid clicks and a barely perceptible ambient drone that stretches to infinity, it’s relentlessly dark but impressive in depth. It may admittedly be the wrong time of year for Furesshu’s frosty chill, with the closing days of winter gradually fading, but his music remains convincing in its nocturnal gaze.

Airhead & James Blake - Pembroke/Lock In The Lion [Brainmath]

2010-03-05T11:51:00.003Z

Can dubstep take partial responsibility for vitality of James Blake’s music? Pretty hard to say, as his successes to date (in particular his jawdropping remix of Untold’s ‘Stop What You’re Doing’ and the cheeky Harmonimix bootleg of Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills Bills Bills’) are unique enough to suggest that he would probably have still been making gorgeous slo-mo soul even if he’d grown up somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. As it is, we’ve got circumstance to thank for the fact that he’s London-based, and that the sounds of the emergent dubstep scene over the last few years – bass, space, and a headful of weed smoke – have so thoroughly permeated his music.

This Brainmath collaboration with Airhead – only his second ‘proper’ release, believe it or not – takes the smeared synths of his Hemlock debut and mashes them through a run-down analogue filter. Given that the cassette tape is making a comeback amongst hipster circles (God knows why – their romance comes falling back to earth with a bang once you accidentally leave the damn thing too close to something seriously magnetic), the fact that ‘Pembroke’s detuned melodies sound pretty close to your Walkman running out of batteries seems strangely appropriate. What’s even better is that it proves to be entirely a good thing, as sudden bursts of high-pitched vocal harmony offset its woozy stagger to perversely euphoric effect.

Both tracks tap into a little of what Blake’s music has previously only hinted at, that sweetly keening melancholy that lies at the heart of all great soul music. That he manages to generate that same deep emotional resonance with scarely a coherent lyric is all the more impressive – and the fact that both tracks are barely sketches, flickering around the three minute mark before slinking away quietly, suggests there are even better things to come. He’s certainly one of the most intriguing producers to have been adopted by the dubstep crowd, and a little like his sometime bandmates in Mount Kimbie his music offers a tantalising glimpse of that community’s potential for fostering unique one-offs.

Polar Bear - Peepers [Leaf]

2010-03-04T17:54:00.004Z

Seb Rochford’s Polar Bear have always been appealingly resistant to easy pigeonholing. Yes, the most immediately ‘jazz’ of his many projects they may be, but there has always been an awful lot more going on under the surface. Take 2005’s Mercury-nominated Held On The Tips Of Fingers as an example. The first Polar Bear album to feature abstract beatmaker Leafcutter John, his subtle contributions carved out a physical space for the rest of the band to operate within, surrounding drums, sax and bass with a bewildering array of clicks, whistles and swift ultrasonic pulses. If reverb and delay provide a open spatial geography for music to operate within, tracks like ‘Beartown’ and ‘Fluffy (I Want You)’, with its haze of melody and motion, went one further and defined that world in detail.

While their self-titled follow-up expanded these horizons, stretching their sound outward to embrace a widescreen, cinematic approach, fourth album Peepers contracts that space inward to produce a different beast again. It may have something to do with Rochford’s decision to record the album in as close to the live setting as possible, performing mic’d up as a group, but its twelve tracks are the band’s most immediate and intimate yet. It couldn’t be better titled – everything on Peepers is wide-eyed and full of youthful exuberance, possessed of an infectious energy that leaches from the speakers as though the band themselves were playing inside. From the off, the low-slung groove of opener ‘Happy For You’ bursts outward in a whirl of colour, Leafcutter John’s diffuse guitar strums bringing it the closest Polar Bear have ever come to Acoustic Ladyland’s brazen rock energy. And as ever, at times Pete Wareham and Mark Lockhart’s sax conversation comes close to one-upmanship, phases of locked co-operation suddenly dropped for furiously traded one-liners.

Where Peepers really improves on their previous albums though is its fluidity, the band’s many years spent playing together suggesting an effortless ease with one another. The result feels more natural than anything they’ve yet recorded, the improvisation tighter and more intuitive than ever before. The lopsided shuffle of ‘Drunken Pharoah’ pits the arrogant swagger of Rochford’s percussion against threatening stabs from Wareham and Lockhart, generating an aura of coarse unpredictability appropriate to its name. And when they drop the pace during the soft melancholy of album highlight ‘The Love Didn’t Go Anywhere’, instead of aimlessly meandering they bring every detail into sharp relief in turn, as though placed under a slowly shifted lens.

What makes Polar Bear so hard to pin down as simply a jazz band is an elegant willingness to bring outside elements to the table. Both Rochford and Leafcutter John are restlessly inventive in their approach to rhythm, timbre and tempo across Peepers’ length, Rochford as comfortable with smoky 1920s grooves as with the martial stomp of the title track. On ‘A New Morning Will Come’ they experiment in drone, sax generating a backdrop of drifting ambience, and ‘Hope Every Day Is A Happy New Year’ (aside from having one of the best titles I’ve heard for ages) is infused with the delicate thrum of electronics just within earshot. In a RBMA interview with Kevin Martin of King Midas Sound last week, he spoke about how restrictive inbreeding within a sound leads to stagnation; what Polar Bear offer is musical cross-pollination, an open door approach to influences that informs everything they record. That this attitude is so fully explored on Peepers makes it their finest effort yet, a rough-cut gem that reveals different facets of itself from every angle.

Gonjasufi - A Sufi And A Killer [Warp]

2010-03-03T18:09:00.003Z

Sometime FlyLo collaborator and man of mystery Gonjasufi releases his debut album on Warp, A Sufi And A Killer, next week. It's certainly not quite what initial impressions - advance listens to the largely electronic vibes of 'Ancestors' - suggested, switching manically between shrieking Mudhoney-fuzz and thoughtful Banhart desert-folk (and taking stops more or less everywhere else as well). But after several listens its several personalities begin to blur together, painting a picture of a contradictory but deeply intriguing character, and a record that becomes ever easier to get lost in.

"Ecks’ voice is a hugely versatile instrument, every bit as unique and distinctive as that of Bjork or Tom Waits, a dusty and dessicated thing as able to deliver softly lulling croon as mercurial howl. His default mode, if such a thing could be said to exist, is a vaguely unsettling, hoarse croak that falls somewhere between devotional chant and the mumbled nothings of insanity. He first lent the softer, honeyed end of his register to Flying Lotus’ ‘Testament’, elevating its status to the absolute highlight of the excellent Los Angeles album – a role he reprises here on the FlyLo-produced ‘Ancestors’. Cut from much the same cloth, Lotus’s production slouches along on a calmly psychedelic haze of plucked strings as Ecks summons the spirits of his distant past for inspiration and guidance. The overall effect is like the lucid plateau of a long trip, as strange and foreign elements rattling around just outside the limits of conscious perception lend an aura of tense unpredictability to proceedings. It’s a striking early highlight, and a zenith which later songs struggle to reach.

A Sufi And A Killer certainly isn’t the easiest album to fathom. The sheer volume of ideas packed into its hour long runtime is initially daunting, as are the transitions between each of its 19 tracks, which veer wildly from smooth and seamless to jarring. The sudden shift from the folksy stomp of ‘She Gone’ to the fuzzed out garage rock of ‘Suzie Q’ - itself a warped retake of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ – seems to take particular delight in knocking the listener out of any false sense of security. Not that it’s ever particularly easy to become lulled into the kind of hypnotic state the album promises during its greatest moments - ‘Ancestors’, ‘Kobwebz’s slowly snaking guitar line, or the nonsense desert grooves of ‘Kowboyz&Indians’. There’s always another twist waiting just out of earshot.

So perhaps surprisingly, repeated listens reveal startling depth, a concentrated core of spirituality and self-exploration that becomes increasingly evident as the many awkward segues become familiar. Over its entire length, A Sufi And A Killer offers a fascinating glimpse of a character continually in transition, an appropriate creation given the personal contradictions he seems to display during interviews."

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Full review written for Drowned In Sound

Mount Kimbie remix Foals, free download business

2010-03-01T23:29:00.004Z

Title's pretty self-explanatory really. Slow, atmospheric stuff, though I'm not quite sold on the vocal yet. Courtesy of It's Getting Boring By The Sea.

Boo-ya.

Foals - Spanish Sahara (Mount Kimbie Remix) by BoringByTheSea

Mosca - BBQ Mix 01

2010-03-01T17:22:00.005Z

Lots of love for Mosca's skewed house/garage/whateveryouwanttocallitstep hybrids round these parts -- along with the latest generation of producers to take influence from these muddied waters, he's putting out some killer dancefloor material.

So it's a pleasure to say that he's just whipped up a dynamite session for Polish club night BBQ, switching in inimitable style from brand new and unreleased slabs from the likes of Julio Bashmore and Joy Orbison to some far older bits -- Luck & Neat's 'A Little Bit Of Luck', anyone? Frankly, I'm terrified that it's been nearly eleven years since it first came out.

Download // Stream at Mixcloud

Tracklist:

Antonio - Hyperfunk
Julio Bashmore - Batak Groove
Ray Okpara - Brainows (Dub)
Karizma - Darqness
Hoodie Ft. Chico - Dirty Maluku Style
Surgeon - La Real Pt 1
Busy Signal - Bakka Di House
Mosca - Gold Bricks, I See You
Loco Dice - Pimp Jackson Is Talking Now!!!
Breakage Ft Newham Generals - Hard (Martelo 2010 Rethink)
Mosca - Square One VIP
Dj Luck & Mc Neat - Little Bit Of Luck
Levon Vincent - Double Jointed Sex Freak Pt. 3
Tigerstyle - Ishq Nagi (Mosca Edit)
D Malice - Rhythmic
Joy Orbison – So Derobe

Brackles - RBMA Mix

2010-02-28T21:19:00.002Z

Blunted Robots man and terrifyingly proficient DJ Brackles has recorded an hour long session for RBMA. Sticking largely to a slower, house vibe, it's gifted with some inspired selections and fantastic sounding new dubs -- new material from himself and his brother Martin Kemp, along with tracks from Joe, Deadboy and Mr. Majika's huge 'Different Lextrix'.

Tracklist:
Zapp - Computer Love - WEA
The Human League - Do Or Die - Virgin
Zomby - Tarantula - Hyperdub
MJ Cole - Sincere (Jazzanova Remix) - Talkin' Loud
Abacus - Erotic Illusions - Fragile Records
Ralphi Rosario - Bop Track (Re-Do) - Underground Construction
Cooly G - Weekend Fly - Hyperdub
Roska - I Need Love - Rinse
DJ Dom - Sunshowers - Unreleased
Brackles - Blo - Unreleased
Mr Majika - Different Lextrix - Numbers
Martin Kemp - Fix - Blunted Robots
Geiom ft Marita - Sugar.. (Brackles & Shortstuff Mix) - Berkane Sol
MJ Cole - Crazy Love (Todd Edwards Remix) - Talkin' Loud
Steve Gurley and Al Brown - Killin' Me - Allstars
Joe - Perculate - Unreleased
Jam City - Let Me Bang Rmx - Unreleased
Deadboy - If You Want Me (Brackles & Shortstuff Mix) - Numbers
Supra 1 - I Still Believe (Brackles Remix) - Trouble & Bass

Stream and listen, and check Brackles looking like some kind of religious icon, here.

Seb Rochford Mixtape

2010-02-26T00:49:00.004Z

As if it wasn't already enough to have the biggest hair and the most laid back persona in contemporary jazz, Seb Rochford only has to go and prove to the world that he's got the best music taste as well. The fiend.

In advance of the release next week of his main band (maybe? Who really knows anymore) Polar Bear's stunning new album Peepers -- which will be getting a glowing review on these very pages imminently -- he's put a rather excellent mixtape up on Soundcloud for download, pulling together a host of stuff from the expected (Zed-U, Lightning Bolt) to the surprising (Harmonic 313, Cooly G).

...

That's right, Seb Rochford listens to Cooly G.

Seb Rochford (Polar Bear) mixtape by theleaflabel

Photo by Paul Troughton

Efterklang - Magic Chairs [4AD]

2010-02-25T23:54:00.005Z

Chats on Efterklang's new album, which has just come out on 4AD and is the first of theirs that's reached some strange plateau of potential. Their previous records Tripper and Parades were both admirable, but difficult to love -- Magic Chairs barely seems to expend any effort at all in bettering both. Glorious cover artwork as well.

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"Magic Chairs demands attention, but in the least obvious of ways. Instead of reaching out and grabbing the listener by the lapels, positively screaming ‘LOVE ME!’, it soaks in gradually over a number of listens. On first listen, the saccharine, almost-twee melody of ‘I Was Playing Drums’ breezes past in a pleasant rush - the sound of a busker playing a familiar song in a Tube station perhaps, or an instantly recognisable song on a passing car’s radio – and disappears into the background again. It’s only an hour or two later that it becomes obvious it’s well and truly lodged in there, and is stubbornly refusing to leave.

This curiously elusive quality is largely due to the orchestration. Make no mistake, this is one of the most beautifully arranged ‘indie’ albums I’ve heard in a long time, reaching for the heights of Owen Pallett’s recent masterstroke Heartland in subtlety and scope. There’s a delicate sleight of hand at play here that enables each song’s backbone of strings and brass to remain at times almost inaudibly buried in the mix, but to maintain a definitive presence. The hyper-percussive whorl of ‘Raincoats’ sounds sparse on initial inspection but upon closer examination reveals a densely layered core, and when the strings finally reach the fore on the jaunty thrum of ‘Full Moon’ the effect is one of dazzling, glorious release.

Best of all, though, remains ‘Alike’. Testament to Magic Chairs’ transcendent oddness, it initially seemed one of the album’s more unremarkable songs, breezing perfectly pleasantly through ever-so-slightly MOR leanings. But once again it’s the tiny nuances that prove definitive, and as a gradually rising interplay of brass begins to invade the track’s very centre and rip its very structure apart, it heads straight for the sky, dashing streaks of brightly coloured paint over all it touches, like an astral Jackson Pollack. For all my misgivings about Efterklang and that certain snag that just won’t let go, the prevailing wind is getting ever harder to resist."

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Full review up at Middle Boop.

Four Tet (Live on Tunnelvision)

2010-02-24T23:21:00.004Z

A find via Pitchfork TV, as I'm unsure if I ever wrote anything about Kieran Hebden's strikingly beautiful new Four Tet album, There Is Love In You. Anyway, Ray Concepcion gives Hebden's woozy melodics an appropriately soft-edged (and rose-tinted) context, by filming his live performance through a pair of old green 'n' red 3D glasses. None of that fancy Avatar shit here, yeah?

Save Plastic People

2010-02-24T22:28:00.004Z

And on to today's most important news item; due to the Met forcing a review of their license, Plastic People is at risk of closure. Quite aside from my personal feelings, there are a whole host of reasons why this shouldn't be allowed to happen.

Firstly, it offers a club space like no other, either in London or the rest of the UK, in that it takes the emphasis entirely off the dancers and places it firmly on the music being played. Plastic People's darkened room and iconic single light fixture creates a wholly immersive environment within which ravers toy with sensory deprivation, sharply attuning the hearing as sight becomes attenuated. It becomes a vast, living and breathing tank, heightening the physical and emotional properties of sound through the system's purpose built design.

Secondly, its heritage. In creating an environment in which its focus on introspection, musicality and individualism could thrive, in many ways dubstep would not be the creature it is now were it not for PP. The same goes for any number of London-nurtured bass musics, each of which found new ways to express itself and a close-knit community vibe within its walls. Yet it's hardly trading off past glories -- the same feeling remains intact every time I find myself in there, and it continues to nurture FWD>> (at least for the next few weeks). In fact, the very first post on CB/OB was a chat about Untold's set at FWD last summer:

"There’s something to be said for the continued existence and success of a space like FWD>> for the nurturing and airing of new and innovative sounds; detachment from the crowd-pleasing pressures of performing at a Friday or Saturday night rave encourages sets that do not merely skirt round the edges of subtlety and musicality but fully embrace the possibilities that come with a devoted and attentive audience. It’s often said that dulling one sensory input heightens that of all the others, yet I’ve always found the environment inside Plastic People unusual in that its pitch darkness seems not only to attenuate vision but also touch, taste, smell; yet the alienation engendered by almost total sensory deprivation is redeemed by the total immersion in sound such an environment offers. Away from these anchors to reality the experience is pleasurably dissociative, the constant motion of bodies in monochrome only occasionally disturbed by the sudden spark of a lighter held to the ceiling in triumph, everything suddenly lit for a fraction of a second in glorious technicolour before plunging back into darkness."

Purely on a personal level, FWD>> served as the point at which a piqued interest in dubstep via Burial and Kode9's first Hyperdub CDs, and later Pinch's Underwater Dancehall, blossomed into full on obsession. The first track I heard on that system was Pinch's 'Qawwali', instantly transforming the softly meditative track I was used to on headphones into a full body, intensely physical experience. It will be a great shame for London, and for dance music in all its forms, if such a space is consigned to memory.

Plastic People put up their full statement today, it's available to view on the Save Plastic People Facebook group. Join the group and stay tuned for announcements from the newly-formed Friends of Plastic People about how to help -- if this legal process is to be fought and won, it's going to need active support.

RBMA: Bristol chapter

2010-02-24T22:17:00.003Z

On the subject of the Red Bull Music Academy, why let the Big Smoke hog all the fun?

This weekend there are a host of events going on in Bristol that shift the event's ethos to a smaller locale - Metropolis on Cheltenham Road (handily about five minutes from where CBOB calls home). On Saturday 27th they host a day of workshops, lectures and live music from 2:30 - 5:00pm -- blurb stolen from the RBMA's website:

"After a good night’s sleep, Metropolis will again be the host for a session of workshops and performances. The Bug his newest project on Hyperdub, King Midas Sound. Reprazent rhymeslinger Dynamite MC hosts an MC production workshop. Pee Wee Ellis sits down on the couch to talk about life with James Brown. Henry Bainbridge of Dubstudio, mastering engineer for everybody from High Contrast to Ramadanman, runs a vinyl cutting demo. Minotaur Shock will showcase his unique self-developed live performance technique. And Innervisions honcho and 4/4 hypnotist supremo Dixon shares tips and knowledge about succeeding in independent music, joined by local luminaries Ginz and Yolanda of Phantom Limb."

And even bigger, if at all possible, that evening sees them take over Motion with Futureboogie, putting on Theo Parrish, Dixon, Appleblim, Headhunter, King Midas Sound, Peverelist and many more. And it's only six quid.

See you in the skatepark.

Steve Reich talks to RBMA

2010-02-24T21:36:00.002Z

New York composer, musician and pioneering sonic experimentalist Steve Reich gave a lecture to the Red Bull Music Academy last week, taking in his life in music and the outward progression from his earliest experiments with tape loops to fully expansive orchestral pieces [thanks to FACT, once again, for drawing attention to this]. As well as coming across as a disarmingly down to earth individual, he makes some interesting points about the role of machines and electronics in music, taking a modernist stance many miles from the one many classically trained composers, either of then or now, would.

"We live in a time when it’s possible to get ideas for live music from machines, and to get ideas for computer music from live music, that are perfectly valid and will work if you get it right. And that to me is an answer to the people who look at anybody who does electronic music as a bunch of robots."

A fascinating insight into a fascinating musician. The entire full-length video of the lecture can be watched here, along with ones from Roska, Jazzie B, A Guy Called Gerald and more.

Cliffordandcalix - Lost Foundling [Aperture]

2010-02-24T20:40:00.002Z

Digging through an archive of recorded-on-the-fly material and sticking it all together on a disc is far more likely to produce an incoherent mess of half-formed ideas than a lost masterpiece. That Warp luminaries Mark Clifford (he of Seefeel) and Mira Calix have managed to assemble an album that holds together surprisingly well, and from such disjointed source material, is undoubtedly to their credit. Lost Foundling, at its best, touches on something entirely separate from either artist’s solo work. There remains a feeling throughout, however, that Clifford and Calix’s efforts on here pose more questions than they answer.

Strangely though, that’s not entirely a bad thing. It’s easy to debate ad infinitum around what makes music ‘good’, or worthy of praise, and a sense of purpose and narrative thrust tends to feature pretty high up on most peoples’ lists. Yet many of the tracks on Lost Foundling seem to work against the notion that easily definable temporal progression is necessary to give music a purpose. Opener ‘Someone Like Me’ and the ethereal drifts of ‘Beethaven’ and ‘One 2 Far’ seem merely to hang around, content to wallow in a bath of analogue electronics and static interference, broken only by the occasional recognisable melody. Throughout its length there are hints that something spectacular is just around the corner, and the sudden dynamic shifts of ‘Myrie’ and ‘cket’ are suggestive of potential resolution, but for the most part this doesn’t arrive.

When those promised moments of transgression come, and all these elements – harsh electronic feedback, Fennesz-esque ambient meanderings and Calix’s heavily processed vocals – gel to produce something more than the sum of their parts, the effect is remarkable. Digi-soul lullaby ‘Dream Of You’ offers a glimpse of human warmth from behind a wall of noise, as Calix’s simple refrain stacks upon itself in a chunky major key harmony before shifting to darker robotic foreboding. ‘Pull It A Part 1’ is even better, the tension between impossibly busy percussion and soft melody a little reminiscent of the tightly packed, pastoral beatscapes of Highpoint Lowlife artist 10-20.

That this record remains more a curio than a definitive document is not entirely surprising – it was pieced together as a compilation of the duo’s favourite tracks from over five years’ worth of snatched studio time, music laid down in brief snippets of downtime between tours and other work. In that sense it’s impressive that Lost Foundling sounds as coherent as it does – the common thread running through all these tracks suggests that both fell repeatedly into the same headspace each time they met, picking up effortlessly where they left off before. And somehow it pulls together into a coolly meditative whole, not necessarily an easy record to listen to attentively – or, indeed, to fall in love with – but one to float away in. For a little while at least.

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Originally written for Drowned In Sound

The Brown Acid - Bastard Kids [Ikonika Remix]

2010-02-22T22:57:00.002Z

Worth its own post, without a doubt, even with the annoying voice over that repeatedly reminds you that 'this is a preview'. Out on March 1st. Huge.

Kontext - Acid Pasta EP / XI - 000 [Immerse]

2010-02-22T00:24:00.007Z

Bristol's Immerse Records has just made an older EP of Kontext tracks available for free via their site/Twitter. Its title, Acid Pasta, is only slightly less ludicrous than its cover art (and you only need to look above to catch a glimpse of that garish little beauty).

Thankfully, the contents are more in tune with the label's darker aesthetic and Kontext's roundly excellent set of EPs for the label, which culminated in the chilly brilliance of 'Convex Curved Mirror' -- also due to feature on his debut full-length Dissociate, which Immerse are putting out sometime in the near future. While his recent tracks for the label have been exercises in diffuse, broken minimalism, the tracks on Acid Pasta are a little more rhythmically straightforward, his characteristic spaced out austerity welded to propulsive 4/4 kicks. It's worth grabbing for the floor-filling tech-house of 'Toxic Zombies' and the uncharacteristically melodic 'Arctic Spaceship' alone.

Get hold of it here, and be grateful you don't have to look at that cover in full 12" glory.

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In other Immerse news, XI's new 12" for the label, 000/Slippin', has just been released, and it's great. I reviewed it for Sonic Router a while ago; here's a bit of a reproduction.

"Appropriate to the label’s output, which tends towards dark, percussive minimalism, his Immerse 12” further relegates melody to a supporting role, barely making an appearance at all in the sub, voice and drum battle of ‘000.’ 'Slippin' on the flip is another slice of particularly delectable ghostly garage, joining the ranks of an ever-swelling sub-genre that manages to encompass (amongst others) Burial, recent work by Instra:mental and Scuba, and Clubroot’s aquatic ambience. It’s also probably the best – and most dancefloor-ready - of the four tracks here, underpinned by razor-sharp, hard-panned hi-hats and a techy two-step flex.

Regardless of their relative energy levels, the common trait running through all four tracks is a deliciously palpable tension between XI’s complex, spiraling drum patterns and their backdrop of swelling, oceanic ambience – leaving his music suspended in some tranquil vacuum between waking and dream. The overall effect is oddly disconcerting, neither entirely dance-immediate nor calm enough for comfortable headphone listens, but all the better for it."

http://www.myspace.com/xidubs

Highpoint Lowlife - 2010 Mixtape

2010-02-21T15:12:00.005Z

The love for the Highpoint Lowlife label round these parts is hardly well hidden. Almost everything they've released in the last year or so has been of an excellent pedigree, from the nocturnal techno and grainy textures of TVO and 10-20, through blistering rave from Hot City and the softer ambience of Pausal.

The latest EP in 10-20's Landforms series, Mountain, is due to drop any day now (review forthcoming in the next few days), but in the interim period label boss Thorsten Sideb0ard has put together a mix of the label's forthcoming material for 2010. It's available to listen and download from the label's blog and is well worth checking out, including as it does upcoming material from (amongst others) Brassica, Production Unit, 10-20 and Mandelbrot.

The label's never been one for sticking to an easily defined raft of styles, instead choosing to showcase a wide range of material that tends to be united in a slightly different or unusual outlook. The variety of stuff on the mixtape bodes well for this trend continuing well into the next few months.

http://highpointlowlife.com/

Eighteen - On The Fly mix

2010-02-15T21:17:00.005Z

Third CB/OB mix time - my February selection, all chucked together in an even more haphazard and unplanned manner than usual. More 'what u call it' business - Africanised house variations, garage, a grimey as hell opening ten minutes, some brand new bits, some doubles and some far older stuff. I've recently been caning Villalobos' Alcachofa album and Sully's Phonebox EP, so both found their way onto here.

Available to download here.

Tracklist:
Alexander Nut – Anti-Focus Part One [unreleased]
Cosmin TRG – Siberian Poker [Tempa]
Terror Danjah – Acid [Hyperdub]
Untold – Anaconda [Hessle Audio]
Erik XVI – Unionens Sista Dagar (Hot City Remix) [Highpoint Lowlife]
Mosca – Gold Bricks, I See You [Fabric]
Jumping Back Slash – IBITHITI 1 [unreleased]
Martyn – Hear Me (Zomby Remix) [3024]
Hanuman – Bola (Atki2 Remix) [Idle Hands]
DVA – Ganja [Hyperdub]
Cooly G – Him Da Biz [self-released]
Eprom – Never [Surefire]
Cosmin TRG – Love 2 Hide [unreleased]
Sully – Phonebox [Frijsfo]
James Fox – Put It Back (Ramadanman Remix) [Take]
Ricardo Villalobos – Easy Lee [Playhouse]
Mosca – Square One (Roska Remix) [Night Slugs]
Hackman – Funky Tune [unreleased]
Royal T – 1Up (Martin Kemp Remix) [No Hats No Hoods]
Atki2 & Dub Boy – Tigerflower [Idle Hands]
Alex Nut – Wotberry [unreleased]
Greena – Actual Pain [Apple Pips]
Hot City – Setting Me Free [Infrasonics]

Also available to stream at m'DJ page http://www.mixcloud.com/eighteen/on-the-fly-february-2010/

Monday mix - Spatial (FACT Magazine)

2010-02-15T12:38:00.003Z

Nice way to start the week: Infrasonics head honcho Spatial has put together a seriously fine looking mix for FACT magazine, bringing together some of his own, uber-sparse sci-fi garage productions with new aces from Hot City, Xxxy, Ike Release and more.

Geddit here.

Fabriclive 50: Autonomic [Fabric]

2010-02-14T17:49:00.004Z

It's been a fine old start for 2010 for the people at Fabric. Not simply content with hitting the big five-oh in style with mix CDs from Martyn - and now Instra:mental & dBridge - they've also put out a serious early contender for unmixed compilation of the year in Elevator Music. A decent way to spoil aficionados of UK-centric bass music's ongoing evolution then.

Instra:mental & dBridge's Fabriclive 50 mix is worthy of the position it's been given in the series' history. Less a dancefloor oriented artefact than a document of the d'n'b innovations that the Autonomic crowd have been pushing over the last couple of years, it's a reminder that there are still producers of interest working in a medium that seems increasingly hackneyed. Stripping drum 'n' bass back to its bare bones, and subtracting that horrible 'emphasis on dance energy at the expense of pretty much everything else' tendency, it strikes a well-pitched balance between sit-down listenable and jump-around-your-bedroom fun (in the last twenty minutes or so, at least).

I reviewed the record in full for DiS - it's up here.

"The moment Autonomic drifts hazily from the speakers, the first thing you become aware of is just how immaculately programmed it is. Such is the careful dedication with which this mix has been put together that it’s nigh on impossible to pick apart consecutive tracks. In fact at times it’s almost possible to detect the ghostly remnants of a tune that went by three or four tracks hence – the melancholy strains of Loxy & Genotype’s ‘Farah’s Theme’ weaving into the backdrop of D-Bridge’s stunning remix of Scuba’s ‘Tense’, or the tightly interlocked trio of Instra:mental tracks that form an early highlight. Its impressive 31 track length doesn’t allow much time for any individual to take centre stage: Autonomic flows like a night out, a series of short, interconnected but often ambiguous vignettes that together constitute a formidable whole."

http://www.myspace.com/instramentaluk
http://www.myspace.com/exitrecords

Bonobo/Floating Points/Appleblim & Komonazmuk [Ninjatune]

2010-02-14T17:35:00.007Z

For better or worse, I’ve always lumped Bonobo in with the ongoing legions of fluffy, post-club chillout artists who manage to piece together tracks with a wonderful list of contributing influences and absolutely no real substance or originality. It might have been an unfair judgement, as his new single ‘Eyesdown’ is a pretty nice little thing. Yes, it drifts by almost unnoticed on a cloud of downtempo warmth, and it’s got the requisite smooth female vocal, but Andreya Triana’s honeyed tones are the same that graced the astral glide of Flying Lotus’ ‘Tea Leaf Dancers’. The line she treads between passion and aloof detachment, along with an airy two-step bounce, just manages to elevate the original mix above the surrounding hordes.

However, all this having been said, there’s always a risk of being outshone when you draft in some of the most exciting operators around to remix your music. This is certainly one such moment, although perhaps not entirely to Bonobo’s discredit, as it would be tough to better Floating Points’ delectable refix. Applying his stargazing fusion of styles to Triana’s untouched vocal, he wraps her in fast-paced currents of synth that layer up then peel away in a deep house/UK garage hybrid reminiscent of his Planet Mu release ‘J&W Beat’.

Warrior One takes ‘Eyesdown’ into funky/bashment territory, all sliced vocals and perpetual dancefloor motion, but Appleblim & Komonazmuk pull a similar trick to Floating Points in far bettering the original. Sticking to the precedent set with their previous collaborations – stunning reworks of Sideshow’s ‘If Alone’ and Harmonia & Eno’s ‘By The Riverside’ – they stretch the original into a dubbed-out house session a world away from either producer’s solo work. Even if it’s not quite as fascinating or compulsively listenable as either of those remixes, it’s largely to do with the simplicity of the source material, and carries its own charm – a blissful bit of vocal house for a chilly Sunday.

And in a standard 'swap your details for tunes' move, they're giving away Warrior One's remix for free at Bonobo's website - might be worth that little bit of extra spam in your inbox.

Hot City - XLR8R Mix

2010-02-12T08:12:00.004Z

An appropriately upbeat early start to the weekend - Hot City has recorded the latest in XLR8R's ever-essential series of mixes, kicking through an hour of neon-bright post-garage, four-to-the-floor goodness. A good way to begin a Friday.

Download it here.

Scorching tracklist below:

01 Hot City "What Am I Doin"
02 Terrence Parker "Why After All This" (Seventh Sign)
03 Karizma "Neccessarry Maddness" (R2)
04 Justin Martin "Beat That Bird With a Bat (Donk Boys Remix)" (Dirtybird)
05 DJ Zinc "Because" (Bingo)
06 Mike Dehnert "Umlaut2 (Levon Vincent NY Basement Mix)" (Clone)
07 Shams "Watch You Foam at the Mouth and Try to Swim Today" (Vicious Pop)
08 Cubic Zirconia "Josephine (Egyptrixx Remix)" (Don't Cry)
09 Grevious Angel "Move Down Low (VIP Mix)" (Soul Jazz)
10 Hot City "Another Girl"
11 Tolfrey/Ramirez "Bounce To Me (Lauhaus Remix)" (Phonica)
12 DJ Assault "In The Club"
13 Black Box "Ride On Time (Zombie Disco Squad Remix)" (AATW)
14 Jay Robinson & Screama "Down (Original Mix)" (Monkey Beats)
15 The 2 Bears "Be Strong" (Southern Fried)
16 Nochexxx "Sandspur"
17 Jodey Kendrick "Dirt Devil" (Rephlex)
18 Jimmy Edgar "B There" (Hypercolour)
19 SBTRKT "Laika" (Brainmath)
20 Harmonimix "A Milli" (Harmonimix)

Field Music (Measure)

2010-02-10T17:06:00.003Z

I've just reviewed the actually-very-good new album from Field Music, who I've always admired rather than loved, for Middle Boop. It reminds me a lot of Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping, had Kevin Barnes reined in his glut of ideas and actually managed to stay focused long enough to avoid flying off on random tangents. This, of course, is a good thing. Oh, and the album artwork is lovely as well.

"It seems that pop has always been defined by the seemingly irreconcilable tension between its makers’ restless quest for immortality and their music’s fundamentally ephemeral nature. Yet at its basest level pop music aims to freeze-frame a moment in time – a moment when its creators will forever be wrinkle-free and that song means as much as it ever can, or will. The song itself should be the immortal medium, remaining identical long after the people who sired it have slipped off this mortal coil. The very essence of the ‘rock star’ is flawed – if your music really matters it will outlive you, and the fountain of youth will preserve a memory as fleeting as the period when Dorian Gray saw his true reflection in a portrait.

Fatalistic? Sure, but this undeniable truth is what lends those fleeting moments such gravitas. Take Field Music’s closest contemporaries and sometime bandmates, The Futureheads, who in a dizzying twist of luck (or fate) managed to craft a perfect pop album first time round, and since have suffered at the hands of the law of ever-diminishing returns. So in some ways you’d expect the same fate to have befallen the brothers Brewis – they write guitar songs with perfectly executed triple-layer harmonies; Beach Boys, Beatles and post-punk influences present and correct Saah. Undeniably pop musicians in every way then. So why is it that three albums down the line they remain as difficult to fathom as ever – and all the more rewarding for it?"

Review up here.

Apple Pips, Fabric, 19th February

2010-02-10T16:53:00.005Z

Appleblim's Apple Pips label has some seriously good stuff coming out in the near future, a lot of it from local Bristol producers - established ones like Komonazmuk, as well as upcomers Al Tourettes, Arkist and Orphan 101. He's just recorded a staggering mix for Fabric, his first longform one for quite a while, as a promo for the upcoming Apple Pips takeover of Room Three on 19th February. It's going to be a massive one, featuring sets from Greena, Al Tourettes, Wedge and Gatekeeper, as well as the boss man himself.

Mix and interview up at Fabric's blog here.

The tracklist looks something like thiiis:

Data - The Fall of Phaeton (dub)
False Prophet - Wake Up [Spatial remix] (TAKE Records)
Gatekeeper - Atmosphere Processor (dub)
Arkist - Switch (dub)
Scuba - You Got Me (Hotflush)
Wedge - Worry Dolls (If Symptoms Persist)
Headhunter & Gatekeeper - Jellyfish (Transistor)
Addison Groove - Footcrab (Swamp 81)
Al Tourettes - She Shimmers (Apple Pips)
Joe - Untitled #2 (Apple Pips)
Greena - Actual Pain (Apple Pips)
Hard House Banton & Roska - Warning (dub)
Atki2 & Dub Boy - Tigerflower (Idle Hands)
Midland & Ramadanman - Your Words Matter (Aus)

That Midland & Ramadanman tune is something else entirely.

Zomby Vs. Actress - 'Nothing'

2010-02-10T16:39:00.003Z

More new, slightly terrifying Zomby and Actress music? Yes please.

After a pair of Zomby & Actress tracks appeared a month or so ago, another one has emerged today courtesy of Zomby's Twitter. Like the last two, 'Nothing' is a slow, sketch-like piece of dystopian atmosphere, glitching and roiling for a couple of minutes before swiftly cutting out.

Whether these are the full tracks, chopped in typically contrary Zomby style, or some kind of tease for an upcoming proper release (hint, hint), it remains to be seen, but they're quite lovely in a nocturnal, council estate kinda way.

Photo: 'New River' by Nico Hogg

Harmonimix - A Milli/Bills Bills Bills [White]

2010-02-10T16:32:00.003Z

There’s a cheeky sense of humour (not to mention copyright infringement) about the Harmonimix bootlegs that certainly warrants a release on an anonymous white label. Of course, in the information age it’s next to impossible to stay anonymous for too long. The fact that these ‘alternative’ versions of Lil Wayne’s ‘A Milli’ and, brilliantly, Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’ should be attributed to a certain Mr. James Blake has swiftly become common knowledge.

Even if they hadn’t previously been outed as his work, both tracks here have Blake’s sonic hallmarks stamped all over them. In a similar manner to his ‘Stop What You’re Doing’ remix, he takes the source material and constructs a new track over the top, adding layer upon layer of increasingly dissonant harmony until the music simply can’t support its own weight any more. It’s testament to his version of ‘A Milli’ that it stands out amongst its hordes of other remixes, the use of saccharine toy keyboard melodies somehow managing to convert the original’s bragging aggression into something surprisingly heartfelt.

The detuned dementia of ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’ is the real winner here though. It’s not simply because Destiny’s Child’s original has managed to avoid the kind of ubiquitous overplay Weezy’s been subjected to - although it has - but due to the sheer balls it takes to recast a silky smooth piece of modern R’n’B into this crunked-up robot chorus. There’s a little of the disorientation of his Hemlock release ‘Air & Lack Thereof’ in its staggering gait, but by the time he introduces a long-awaited human element in the final chorus it’s become obvious that Blake is following a pretty unique trajectory. Just like Ikonika, Untold or tourmates Mount Kimbie, once again a producer initially lumped in with the dubstep crowd is proving to be something quite different, and quite original.

Erik XVI - Stern-Gerlachs Versioner [Highpoint Lowlife]

2010-02-08T17:41:00.005Z

Leaving aside for a second the fact that their recent string of unique releases has been well and truly salivated over in these very pages, it does feel necessary to place some emphasis on Highpoint Lowlife’s latest. They've managed to bring together a sort of alternative all-star line up [Editor’s note: by which it’s possible to read: ‘followed with interest by me, perhaps not to the same extent by a large percentage of the population’] to remix Erik XVI’s Stern-Gerlachs Forsook EP. A surprisingly coherent listen, due to the source material’s common themes of melody and mood, it serves as an emphatic reminder of the considerable hotbed of underground talent the label is associated with.

Its opener is also one of its highlights; TVO’s aptly titled Latitudinal Mix of ‘Unionens sista dagar’ picks up immediately where his Starry Wisdom EP left off. Driven by the ominous clack and scuttle of insectoid mandibles, it’s a constantly shifting slab of techno that stretches off to infinity on a trancelike locked groove. When it finally heads skyward at around the six-minute mark, a translucent wash of ambience swells to occupy every available space, summoning up the hazy ghosts of Detroit. Both Ali Renault and Bill Ambrose also reach backward towards a similar geographic region, the former’s smooth lines a strong contrast to the latter’s Drexciyan electro stammer.

The capital’s bass mutations are well represented in the form of two polar opposites – Hot City’s sleazy, neon-lit garage and an ultra-minimalist, stripped back version of ‘Kalabaliken i Bender’ by Infrasonics bossman Spatial. Consisting of little more than brittle electronics and blank pulses of sub-bass, like the rest of his music it takes the structure of two-step to its logical extreme – stark and withdrawn, save a lone female voice crying into the void. It’s placing alongside Gravious’ absolutely immense Anti-Gravity Mix only serves to further emphasise both tracks’ considerable charm, as well as doing a neat job of highlighting the sheer diversity of interpretations on show here. Delectable stuff.

A Sunday tonic

2010-02-07T17:15:00.002Z

Some sublime Sunday hangover business: Mount Kimbie's remix of LV & Untold's 'Beacon'. A tonic to ease the pain from last night's Sonic Router birthday celebrations.

Mix, mix, mix

2010-02-06T21:29:00.005Z

Without further ado, a Ronseal-style post containing three of the week's best offers in the free mix department. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Alex Incyde has mixed up a storm for the latest in Dub War's ongoing series of podcasts, pulling together an impressive roster of none-deeper dubs including new material from Scuba, FaltyDL and Al Tourettes, plus an appearance from Bath boy Asusu's mighty 'No Kya'. Well worth the bandwidth theft for the few minutes it'll take to steal a bit of your hard drive. Download it here.

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CB/OB's got a lot of love for Cooly G - even amongst her peer group she seems almost criminally overlooked at times, perhaps because a huge quantity of her best material is only available on the Dub Organizer EPs from Blackmarket Records. Seriously -- take the time to investigate the fourth volume in the series, which shifts from the canned brass stabs and frosty glow of opener 'Weak' to the glorious percussive whirlwind that is 'Vs Perry'. It also happens to include her finest track to date, the softly yearning 'Him Da Biz', which has been rightly rinsed by Kode9 in his sets over the last six months or so. Following on from her tough-as contribution to FACT's podcast series, she's just recorded the first of a promised 'pair' of new mixes for XLR8R. Featuring material from herself, DVA, Martyn & DJ Gregory, it continues to skirt her distinctive line between downtempo atmosphere and dancefloor pace.

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Oh, and did someone mention a new free mix from Rinse FM's top man Geeneus? Arriving sometime in advance of his eagerly awaited Volumes Two compilation (hopefully featuring his incendiary collab with Ms. Dynamite, 'Get Low'), it flicks between hard-edged UKF stylings and his recent deeper house and techno excursions. It's good.

Short Circuitry: January-February 2010

2010-02-06T21:11:00.004Z

Muso's Guide have just published the latest in my ongoing series of Short Circuitry columns. This one takes a look at the future of bass mutants in 2010, from Fabric's excellent Elevator Music compilation to the first few Night Slugs releases - via Erik XVI's remixes EP, new stuff from Kieran Hebden, Millie & Andrea.

Bare love for Mosca --
"On the dancefloor, 2010 looks set to be Night Slugs’ year – the London night set up by Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 has spiraled out into its own label, the first couple of releases from which look set to saturate clubs for the foreseeable future. Their first official 12” is Mosca’s long-awaited Square One, based somewhere in the hinterlands where dub’s expansive space meets funky’s tribal bounce. It’s certainly less immediate than some of funky’s biggest hitters, the title track’s tension between smooth legato and shattered vocal soul more akin to Cooly G than Crazy Cousinz - a conviction borne out on the compulsively brilliant B-side. A nocturnal tryst through London clubland’s astral plane, ‘Nike’ is three tracks in one – ten minutes of constantly morphing, ethereal dance music that manages to cram in an impressive roster of influences yet sound like nothing else around."

Read the full column here.

The Ex & Brass Unbound + Zun Zun Egui

2010-02-04T11:53:00.003Z

Last Friday the Fleece played host to the opening night of an eagerly anticipated tour: The Ex & Brass Unbound, featuring the jazz chops of Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Roy Paci and Walter Wierbos. Even better, our local firebrands Zun Zun Egui were in support.

I reviewed the gig in full for Muso's Guide, but suffice to say that it was a singular experience - the entire time teetering on the edge of chaos, with excursions into free-jazz and frenzied Afrobeat all reined in by the skill of each musician on stage. Exhausting, but thoroughly worthwhile.

"And there are points where the bonds do seem to dissolve almost entirely – around halfway through the set everything falls away to a blaze of muddy background noise, structureless until Mats Gustafsson suddenly enters the vacant space with a furious and soulful saxophone figure. Whether it’s entirely planned or entirely improvised – or somewhere in the middle – it’s impossible to say, but it hardly matters."

Full review up here. I strongly urge you to make the effort to try and catch them at one of the remaining three dates.

A Made Up Sound - Sun Touch/Drain/Untitled [AMUS]

2010-02-04T11:44:00.005Z

Although his Unbalance album last year was a significant step forward from 2008’s Aerial, which managed to take occasional missteps into clinical austerity, I’ve always found Dave Huismans’ A Made Up Sound material far more engaging than his music as 2562. It’s got something to do with a level of human connection – 2562 seems to act as the home for some of Huismans’ most alien abstractions, all sharp angles and blank canvas synth wash. By contrast, the first 12” on his AMUS label remained defiantly in touch with body movement: ‘Rework’ remains his most direct statement yet, a deft exercise in perpetual motion with an addictive-as-hell central motif that swings like a pendulum across successively busier layers of percussion.

A different beast again, his second release for the label further rewires the circuits of house and techno into something even more elusive. Unlike the current upsurge in producers incorporating more relaxed percussive aspects to their slower tempo tracks, Huismans’ productions rely on precision and pinpoint accuracy – their appeal lies in the chemistry that ensues when that rhythmic tension is played off against looser elements. Despite what its title might suggest, ‘Sun Touch’ is one of his most icy tracks yet, a sparse construction built almost entirely of tightly interlocking elements: music as modern architecture, all sharp angles and translucent surfaces of steel and glass. But in the spirit of futurism, it’s not soulless, playing its cool exterior against barely tangible wisps of looped melody that drift through the superstructure like action potentials.

The same contradiction is also true of the excellent ‘Drain’, which reimagines the urban dissociation of Burial, Scuba and Instra:mental as outright dystopian menace. Sparse save the ever-present mechanistic grind, it stretches out to an infinity of imagined futures. At heart, Huismans comes across as a restless experimentalist. The final ‘Untitled (Shortcut)’ aside – itself a sketch-like version of last year’s ‘Love In Outer Space’ – only the most cerebral of dancefloors would be ready for the future shocks he delivers here. It’s music to lose your mind in.

145 Collective Presents...

2010-02-04T10:38:00.003Z

'WINTER OF LOVE', the latest in my ongoing collaborative efforts with local art peeps 145 Collective will be taking place at the Junction, Stokes Croft this Tuesday coming (9th February). The usual drill remains the same - interactive art in the back, live music in the front, this time from Jolt, We Are The Nynes and Open Tales. I will be doing my usual part, spinning vaguely appropriate music for a Tuesday night - depending on the mood, everything from Waits to Wiley and back again.

If all goes according to plan, next month should see our efforts move to a Friday. Expect an exponentially higher proportion of party music to folk delights.

DVA - Natty/Ganja [Hyperdub]

2010-02-04T10:30:00.003Z

Already the definition of a ‘buy on sight’ label, last year was an upping of the ante for Hyperdub. Quite aside from the heady list of seperate 12”s – crunked up stylings from Mark Pritchard and Joker, the double pronged grimewave of Cooly G’s ‘Narst’ and Kode9’s ‘Black Sun’ – ending 2009 with the 5 Years Of Hyperdub compilation was sufficient to consolidate exactly how influential Kode9’s label continues to be. But refreshingly enough, in this case the term ‘influential’ doesn’t have to indicate any level of beard strokery – it’s all visceral stuff, making groove and physicality as much a priority as emotional impact.

On the evidence of Kode9’s studio session on Gilles Peterson’s Radio 1 show last week, this year might just go one better. He bookended the show with his own unfinished dubs - the Spaceape-featuring ‘Other Man’ particularly spectacular, even in its embryonic form a synth-driven monster sharing its mutant DNA with ‘2 Far Gone’ and ‘Oozi’. By April we’re also due new material from Kyle Hall, Ikonika and Terror Danjah, whose upcoming 12” pulls together a pair of incendiary slabs of instrumental grime.

Meanwhile, as an opening gambit for 2010, Rinse’s own hyperactive breakfast host Scratcha DVA has put together a pair of bizarre and brilliant future house-not-house riddims. While the best products of the funky explosion thus far have worn their grime influences overtly – the clipped chords and driving energy of the likes of Cooly G and Roska – DVA takes his background in the genre and subverts it entirely. Stripped back to its bare essentials, ‘Natty’ sounds like nothing else out there. Its only touchstones are the percussion’s implied bounce and warping bursts of eski bass while a vague hint of tropical melody seems to stand out in hyperreality, lurching back and forth in a fug of overcaffeinated nausea. It’s heady stuff, the kind of track that forces a dancefloor to reassess its motion from the ground up.

Hitting the cough syrup hard, ‘Ganja’ is more direct and almost painfully insistent, some distant and sickly cousin to the cartoon kwaito of Mujava’s ‘Township Funk’. The most immediately pleasing aspect of funky’s emergence has been a loosening of percussive rigidity – there’s none of grime’s spasmodic kick-snare whipcrack or dubstep’s happy halfstep rut here. Instead, held in check by house’s mandatory offbeat hi-hat, DVA sends tendrils of Afrobeat percussion off in wildly divergent directions, hinting at the wild possibility of a thousand new drum patterns still to be discovered.

Download: The XX - Islands (FaltyDL Remix)

2010-01-31T23:16:00.004Z

A final treat for January - The Fader is giving away a free remix of The XX's 'Islands' by FaltyDL, who produced two of CB/OB's records of last year in Love Is A Liability and the Bravery EP. He reimagines the original as a slow-paced, nocturnal garage roller, as in thrall to the band's gothic meanderings as to his own distinctive style.

Grab it here.

Mosca - Square One [Night Slugs]

2010-01-31T22:28:00.003Z

Considering that it’s been summarily rinsed in the last few months by any DJ lucky enough to have a copy, it’s about time that Mosca’s long awaited Square One EP finally sees a release. Luckily it hasn’t lost any of its considerable charm, and on its digital version is backed by a formidable roster of remixes from his fellow Night Slugs associates.

Both of the originals here, ‘Square One’ and ‘Nike’, are built from fundamentally simple elements in the manner of say, Joy Orbison – rattling percussion simultaneously referential to house and garage, deftly sliced vocal snippets, technicolour synth work and the ever-present rumble of sub-bass. Yet the comparison ends here – in fact, using the same basic ingredients Mosca manages to turn Orbison’s reductionist ethos entirely on its head. B-side ‘Nike’ is ample evidence of this – along with his luscious three-parter ‘Gold Bricks, I See You’, which appeared on Fabric’s Elevator Music compilation, it manages to incorporate both compositional and sonic complexity into a superbly focused dancefloor track. Beginning life as slow-paced, synth-led hip-hop, three minutes in it seamlessly shifts gear into a taut house/garage hybrid, shot through with dubby synth stabs straight from a Basic Channel 12”. It’s this ethereal side that gradually come to dominate the track, culminating in a brief wash of ambience before a final blast of incandescent funky that burns briefly before tailing off, leaving a warm afterglow in its wake.

The same post-everything, anything-goes ethos currently upping the ante across the bass music spectrum also manages to elevate ‘Square One’ itself to far more than the sum of its parts. Its real success is in managing to incorporate elements from a whole host of different genres without diminishing the end result - the heavily reverbed chord stabs that drift through the track’s backdrop reveal a close affinity with both Berlin dub techno and the earlier variants of dubstep. Closer to the fore, its characteristic descending bass and loose tom hits are as close to grime as to UK house, placing Mosca alongside Kode9, Cooly G and Roska in creating a distinct hybrid sound: darker and more oppressive than funky’s big hitters, looser and more danceable than most mainstream dubstep.

As one of FACT magazine's top ten producers to watch in 2010, Mosca's recorded an excellent mix, which is available to download here.

http://www.myspace.com/deejaymosca

Martyn - Great Lengths remixes [3024]

2010-01-31T18:04:00.003Z

Fabric drafting in Martyn to mix the landmark fiftieth Fabric mix was a landmark all by itself - almost entirely given over to house and techno, the presence of a bass DJ in the series’ roster was a vindication of the increasing relevance of dubstep-borne music. It also served as official confirmation that the lines typically dividing relatively traditional, ‘serious’ house and techno sounds from the extrovert products of the post-rave explosion were becoming ever harder to define. Fabric 50 remained undeniably true to his roots in highly percussive bass music, with Zomby’s airhorn-waving house fusions sitting seamlessly alongside brand new material of the same ilk from Roska, Kode9 and Joy Orbison. But it still managed to effectively join the gaps between both worlds – mixing soulful broken beat courtesy of Maddslinky and Altered Natives into Zomby’s mindbending ‘Little Miss Naughty’, and placing the cavernous Berlin atmosphere of Ben Klock’s ‘Is This Insanity’ remix alongside Actress’ mournful view of London’s streets.

Arriving a couple of weeks after Fabric 50’s release, this pair of remix 12”s treads similar ground, allowing a diverse set of producers to tear apart the already impressive source material into a genreless blur of colour and shape. On the first plate, Zomby’s rework of ‘Hear Me’ twists the original’s plea into a pained and desperate cry for help. Superimposed over one of his most straightforward and danceable beats yet - all descending bass and loose-limbed Africanised percussion - it manages to create and sustain a mournful and melancholy party energy. A bit of a paradox on paper, but its shamanic nature brings to mind tribal funeral rites – as much a celebration of life as a recognition of death, and one imbued with that three am sense of immortality that draws a second into sensory eternity.

Both Ben Klock and Redshape draw out the latent techno influences scattered throughout Great Lengths. Redshape’s ‘Seventy Four’ reimagines the original as a hypnotic seven-minute sprawl, its metronomic backing building in stages over a circular central theme that unfolds to absorb the entire mix before receding. Even better is Ben Klock’s remix of ‘Is This Insanity’, Spaceape’s chill musings sounding more darkly prophetic than usual over an appropriately minimalist techno pulse. In true Klock style, it’s hard to imagine this sounding quite right anywhere other than a pitch-black Berlin warehouse – but as with much of his and Marcel Dettmann’s material, that evocative nature is a large part of its appeal.

As an appropriate closer, Illum Sphere’s remix of ‘Brilliant Orange’ is simply gorgeous – drowned in a tropical storm of vinyl fuzz, its humid pulses of minor key synth take on a strangely physical quality that resonates like voice through water. A little reminiscent of Nosaj Thing’s Drift or Clubroot’s self-titled debut, it seems to prioritise atmosphere over compositional progression – a welcome development after the techno-centric sounds that came before.

Hessle baby, Hessle

2010-01-25T22:00:00.003Z

Hessle Audio is ten! Well, sort of – the official release today of Pangaea’s self-titled EP marks the label’s tenth 12” release, coinciding in a bittersweet twist with their final Ruffage Session on Sub FM. It’s fair to say that Ben UFO, Ramadanman and Pangaea can take a fair amount of responsiblity for shaping the current health of bass music – both in their DJ sets and through Hessle Audio’s release roster. Over the past two and a half years they’ve put out a host of material that didn’t so much predict the future of dubstep as help to remould it entirely, from Martyn’s anthemic ‘Broken Heart’ remix and Pangaea’s gorgeous, wracked ‘Router’ to the slithering pseudo-grime of Untold’s ‘Anaconda’.

The trio marked the final ever Ruffage Session with a four hour celebratory special, managing to fit in an impressive array of new dubs, classics and some archive anomalies. It’s available to download here. In celebration/commiseration mode, they’ve also made available an archive of their ten favourite shows through Sonic Router. Particular mention should go to the Appleblim and Bok Bok sessions, both of which are among the most rinsed radio shows I’ve got on a packed-to-capacity hard drive.

Below are five of the best from the label's first ten...

TRG – Broken Heart (Martyn’s DCM Remix)

Pangaea – Router

Joe – Rut

Untold – Anaconda

Pearson Sound – WAD

http://www.myspace.com/hessleaudio

Cooly G TV

2010-01-24T20:48:00.003Z

The first installment of Cooly G TV has emerged on YouTube, courtesy of Switched On Productions. Cue Plastic People, graffiti and sweaty palms.

Ikonika - Contact, Love, Want, Have

2010-01-21T20:57:00.005Z

Not being ones for reporting news lightly, yesterday's revelation that we can expect Ikonika's debut album to drop on Hyperdub on April 6th is going to have to be the exception that proves the rule. Everything she's released thus far has been compulsively brilliant, and the sound quality of her productions has been on a steady increase, from the warped mindfuck of debut 'Please' to the crystalline synth auras of recent B-side 'Fish'. Her DJ sets have also been steadily growing in stature, gradually expanding to become vibrant bursts of pure energy that manage to incorporate elements of dubstep, house, funky and garage without remaining anything for too long.

The album will be preceded by an advance 12", 'The Idiot' (a clip of which is posted below). Dostoevsky fan perhaps - although given that her recent Planet Mu debut was titled 'Smuck', it's possible she just doesn't tolerate fools lightly. Either way, expect Contact, Love, Want, Have to be as essential as they come.

Gravious - Podcast No. 4

2010-01-21T20:49:00.003Z

Oft-overlooked Scottish dubstep head Gravious has just made his most recent podcast available for download from his website. It brings together a host of his newest productions, several of which are signed for vinyl release this year, and ranges from echo-drenched melody to moody, alien soundscaping. First to emerge on wax is his brooding remix of Erik XVI, out now (or very soon) on Highpoint Lowlife, which takes the staggered 'wonky' flex of Zomby's earlier tracks and fires it into orbit. In a good way, naturally.

The podcast's up for download here...

Mala & Gilles Peterson, chats and tunes

2010-01-17T18:33:00.004Z

It's pretty safe to say that Digital Mystik Mala's contribution to electronic music over the past five years cannot be understated. Of the Croydon duo/trio (depending on who you chat to) his music is the most inscrutable, infused with a curious sense of place-and-timelessness that sets him apart from co-conspirators Loefah and Coki. Tracks like 'Forgive', 'Anti-War Dub' and 'Level Nine' are as warm and soulful as they are futuristic, sounding as though they could as easily have been unearthed from a hidden archive of fifty-year-old tapes as made yesterday in a modern studio.

He's the guest on Gilles Peterson's latest downloadable podcast, chatting about his origins and production, playing some of his new tracks and a set of his current favourites. The result is probably the most rewarding hour I've spent listening to music for a long time, veering from the almost unbearable emotional weight of his own 'Education' to Steve Reich's 'New York Counterpoint', via classic dub and some new tracks from the Deep Medi label roster. Surely the internet's greatest achievement so far is in making gems like this freely available.

The download is hosted here, on Gilles Peterson's homepage.

Owen Pallett - Heartland [Domino]

2010-01-17T18:21:00.004Z

Yes, the man's no longer Final Fantasy, but there's a strangely appropriate side to Owen Pallett's decision to go without pseudonym. His new album Heartland is a fuller and more complete artistic experience than ever before, hugely enriched by the presence of an orchestra under his control but with his perverse sense of humour left intact. It's a marvelous collection of songs as well as a coherent listen in its own right, and will likely leave a similar impact on the rest of 2010 as Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion did on 2009.

I reviewed the record in full for Middle Boop:

"Happily, what hasn’t been lost is the deliciously voyeuristic slant to his lyrics. A sense of detachment from the subject, which on He Poos Clouds took the form of a computer game in which he controlled his object of desire, is more alive than ever in Owen’s self-imposed status as a deity. As ever, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that hidden beneath the surreal sheen of his wordplay lurks a cheeky album length innuendo. As if track titles like ‘Lewis Takes His Shirt Off’ weren’t enough, he throws the gauntlet down pretty clearly on ‘The Great Elsewhere’ when he invites the protagonist to “Wrestle, let’s wrestle / You can pin me to anything”. This God doesn’t just love, although he clearly does – he lusts. And better, he’s in control. Hardly the purest of role models then, but one with an impressive command of implied sexuality."

Sonic Router is 1

2010-01-17T17:47:00.004Z

The esteemed and excellent Sonic Router blog (to which I am an occasional contributor) reaches the grand old age of one next month, and to celebrate they've put together one hell of a line-up to take over the second room of Bristol's Dissident night. It's at Lakota on the 6th February, and the Sonic Router room will be glaced with the fluorescent stylings of the Blunted Robots Brackles and Shortstuff, Jack Sparrow's ultra-percussive dubstep and a dose of purple from Gemmy - as well as Kelly Twins, Reecha and SR's own MLR. The third room boasts a similarly impressive roster, hosted by Rooted Records' Idle Hands label - with Peverelist, October, Kowton and Atki2.

See you down the front...

Elevator Music [Fabric]

2010-01-15T19:18:00.003Z

Last Friday saw Fabric's launch party for their rather excellent new Elevator Music Volume One compilation, which does an impressive job of gathering together a host of unreleased tracks from new and established producers working in that grey area between dubstep, house, techno and garage. It speaks volumes that even the divisions between certain 'strains' of dubstep are beginning to crumble, leaving a bizarre and hugely exciting mutant field completely resistant to easy categorisation.

The music on Friday was ample evidence of that, from the distinctly garagey flavour to the end of Sigha's frosty techno set to Jackmaster's genre-defying end of night show, which managed to weave seamlessly between a host of different styles without losing an ounce of its addictive groove. In between, Joy Orbison played to an unsurprisingly packed room at the unseasonal time of 11:30, Mosca, Hot City, Shortstuff and Untold laid waste to the third room, and I once again managed to miss 2562. Either way, it was an appropriate way to open a year sure to be an exciting and innovative one for bass music.

I reviewed Elevator Music for Drowned In Sound here:
"Elevator Music’s real success is that it vindicates the notion that the music emerging from this axis is more than just dancefloor fodder. Innovation is driven by group interactions and friendly one-upmanship, rather than by any one producer. Anyone’s only as good as their last release - a forceful creative motivation, and one which makes each track on here as rewarding in this context as in a longer mix. It’s probably a bit early to be throwing around ‘compilation of the year’ accolades in January, but Elevator Music Volume 1 has thrown down one hell of a gauntlet. It’ll take some beating."

R.I.P Jay Reatard

2010-01-15T19:11:00.002Z

More sad news; this time the death of Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr - better known by his stage name of Jay Reatard, who passed away on January 13th at the shocking and entirely unfair age of 29.

I'm unfamiliar with the vast majority of his music, but to hear of anyone dying so young - let alone a talented and well-respected musician - is an awful thing. R.I.P.

R.I.P Vic Chesnutt

2010-01-15T18:57:00.005Z

It's been a few weeks now since Vic Chesnutt passed away, and in between the news sinking in and realising I'm (selfishly) very gutted to never have seen him perform live, I've been obsessively re-listening to his most recent pair of albums for Constellation. In fact, they're the only two I've heard - his gorgeous collaboration with A Silver Mt. Zion, North Star Deserter acted as an introduction. Last year's At The Cut, was a sparser and more sombre affair - perhaps unsurprising given the dubious benefit of hindsight.

There have been some fantastic tributes written to him on both The Quietus and Pitchfork, both of which articulate far better than I could how unique an artist he was, but it's suffice to say that to these ears he was a singular voice, sardonic, self-depreciating and witty in equal measure. His is a sad loss - R.I.P Vic.

Four Tet - Much Love To The Plastic People

2010-01-10T22:45:00.004Z

Kieran Hebden gave out a mix CD entitled Much Love To The Plastic People last month, at the final night of his DJ residency at the club of the same name. After circulating for a while on messageboards and blogs, he's posted the mix for download at Soundcloud. It's well worth a listen, starting on recent single 'Love Cry' and featuring a few new tracks, presumably off his upcoming There Is Love In You full length. Get it here.

Martin Kemp [Blunted Robots]

2010-01-06T22:39:00.003Z

There must be somethin' in the water round at the ol' Kemp family place. Brackles’ production trajectory over the past year has been quirky enough – the progression between the stop-start technoid dynamics of early track ‘Glazed’ and the dazzling neon hues of his recent remix of Crystal Fighters’ ‘I Love London’ couldn’t have been more dramatic – but if anything his brother has managed to outdo him on the dancefloor chemistry front.

And chemistry it is – ill-judged Spandau Ballet jokes aside, Martin Kemp’s production is pure gold. At this point, it's less an art than a science. There were hints in the warped aura and staggering gait of ‘No Charisma’, but the pair of tracks on his second Blunted Robots release see him do things with percussion that simply shouldn’t work in a dancefloor environment. UK funky’s commitment to tribalism is turned inside out on ‘After The Night’, each snare hit landing at precisely the opposite place than expected, lending a coarse sense of unpredictability that ramps the track’s tension to breaking point. Combined with the sinogrime-inspired minimalism of the track’s main melody it’s disorienting but relentlessly propulsive.

‘Aztec’ takes the previous track’s melodic Orientalism and runs with it; but instead of pushing ever-forward it expands laterally, building layer upon layer of bleeps and serrated hi-hats into an odd skanking rhythm. It remains almost impossibly supple though, contorting its stop-start dynamics into any number of geometric shapes over its six-minute length. Both tracks remain mysterious even after a huge number of listens (one of the main reasons this review is a few weeks late), but either way the diffuse yet hugely energetic nature of Kemp’s percussion is fast becoming a trademark.

And as if any more evidence was required, his remix of Royal T’s ‘1 Up’ is positively labyrinthine. Stabs of the original’s harsh motif burst out of the mix, shrouded in a whirl of elastic drum hits that combine to give the dizzying impression that you’ve either lost your marbles or ended up on a seriously perverse mind trip – and one that finds its resolution in dancing like your nerves are on fire. As far as these ears are concerned, the four tracks he’s officially released have already eclipsed his brother’s back catalogue (and that’s no mean feat). If there’s any justice, 2010 will be his year.

http://www.myspace.com/themartinkemp

Fact Freebies

2010-01-05T19:22:00.004Z

In typically generous form, FACT Magazine have seen fit to start the new year with a massive bang, giving away a pair of free tracks and a particularly mindblowing mix.

Greena's remix of Mosca's 'Square One' follows on where his recent Apple Pips debut left off: all asymmetric percussive patterns that borrow equally from house, garage and dubstep, and a cheeky sense of euphoric bounce nicked from Buraka Som Sistema's neon-tinted kuduro. My only qualm is that it doesn't last that little bit longer. It's available for seven days, here.

Meanwhile, Werk Discs head honcho Actress' collaboration with labelmate Disrupt is a lumbering beast of a track, a woozy, smoked-out synth line and Zomby-esque bleeps coalescing to form an odd, wonky form of techno. It's perverse, creepy and wierdly addictive, and available for seven days here.

Finally, Deadboy has delivered the latest in FACT's pretty-damn-essential mix series, turning in a neatly mixed blend of garage, funky and 'what-you-call-it' sounds to dazzling effect. His 'U Cheated' was a contender for one of my favourite tracks of 2009, welding melancholy vocal stabs to an absolutely killer bass breakdown that I've still not managed to hear on a dancefloor. He's got a new one, 'If U Want Me', coming out in the next month or so and it's even better, closing the mix in full-on party style.

Download it here, and catch him in Room 1 of Fabric this Friday, where he appears as part of the Numbers label's showcase alongside Todd Edwards, Rustie, Hudson Mohawke and Jackmaster. It's going to be massive.

Olafur Arnalds - Dyad 1909 [Erased Tapes]

2010-01-04T12:27:00.005Z

Erased Tapes has just released Olafur Arnalds' quite brilliant score for Wayne McGregor's recent ballet Dyad 1909 - great news by itself, but while digging around doing some research for the review, I stumbled across a fascinating set of articles and information about McGregor himself. I don't know a lot about contemporary dance at all, bar the projects that have formed a cross over with the music world (Merce Cunningham's Split Sides with Radiohead and Sigur Ros, Peter Broderick scoring Adrienne Hart's Falling From Trees), but as a biology graduate it's interesting to see that McGregor's been involved in a series of research projects about the cognitive and biological aspects of creativity.

At the end of every year when the 'best of' lists come out, there's always a discussion around the subjectivity and individuality of artistic creation and appreciation, and it always seems that there's precious little talk about what we do know about the science behind the creative process. There's a great article by Euan Ferguson, writing for the Observer, that discusses the projects with McGregor and some of the scientists involved in these research projects. It's well worth reading. There's also a lot more about his R-Research on McGregor's home page.

Arnalds' score itself is wonderful, further developing the subtle electronic elements of his earlier compositions. Both understated and openly dramatic, it seems to fit perfectly with the themes running through Dyad 1909 - the chill elemental power of the Antarctic, and a tough balletic delicacy of touch. '3326' is particularly striking, a sparse solo violin arrangement that builds to a furious and heartfelt crescendo. Quite aside from being my favourite thing he's yet written, this score suggests that his forthcoming third album will be his most fully realised statement yet.

New year, new mix

2010-01-02T20:19:00.004Z

Happy new year! After a bit of a break from normal service and with the reserves of Christmas spirit(s) more or less depleted at this point, here's a final shout from 2009 - a new mix of mine, made up almost entirely of tunes released over the last year. The aim was to try and cobble together fragments of my favourite tracks from the past twelve months, as well as working in lieu of a slightly predictable year-end list of CB/OB's 'Favourite ...'s of the year'. Usual agenda - Ableton-based, recorded live.

Download link here.

Tracklist
Kowton – Stasis (G Mix)
Julio Bashmore – Um Bongo
Hackman – Funky Tune
> Spherix – Lesser People
Shackleton – Death Is Not Final
Greena – Tenzado
> Hard House Banton – Reign
Martin Kemp – After The Night
J. Kenzo - Conqueror
Kode9 – Black Sun
Crazy Cousinz – Inflation
Doc Daneeka – Funky Bit
Geiom – Eyl Booty
L-Vis 1990 - Run
Hot City – No More
Martin Kemp – No Charisma
Scuba – Aesaunic
Pinch – Get Up (Guido Remix)
Ike Release – Jenova
> Joy Orbison – J. Doe
Ikonika – Fish
Untold – Dante
Pangaea – Memories
Naphta/Grievous Angel – Soundclash VIP
Guido – Beautiful Complication

Free Grievous Angel remix

2009-12-27T13:26:00.004Z

Perfect remedy to too much food and wine - a rather fine free remix of Monkey Steak's Tigris Riddim by man of the moment Grievous Angel, courtesy of the good people at Steak House Records.

Grab it here.

The second Steak House 12", a follow up from the first which featured Octa Push and Mr. Gasparov, is due for release in the new year and features three new tracks from the Monkey Steak duo (Atki2 & Hanuman). It looks set to be a good 'un.

http://www.myspace.com/steakhouserecords

Tune of the day: December 21st

2009-12-21T19:37:00.001Z

Tune/track of the day returns, inspired by a painstakingly slow, snow-coated shuffle home along with the rest of the walk-back-from-work masses:

Fennesz – ‘Black Sea’

Taken from Christian Fennesz’s latest and quite possibly greatest full-length, the title track from Black Sea neatly sums its parent up in ten gorgeous minutes. Shifting from an opening hum and crackle to a sudden burst of delay-drenched guitar, it conjures up an enduringly bleak landscape as suited to a darkened walk in the snow as to the quiet headspace of a midnight train journey.

10-20 - Lake [Highpoint Lowlife]

2009-12-19T13:23:00.005Z

Fresh from bigging up Highpoint Lowlife and 10-20 in my Short Circuitry 'summary of the year' thing, more big ups for 10-20's new EP Lake. It's expectedly great.

---

Highpoint Lowlife wunderkind 10-20’s self-titled debut album looks destined to wonder, delirious and confused, into the upper echelons of this year’s best ‘lost’ records. It’s a shame – his music is certainly worthy of wider appreciation, managing to cram into its awkward, lanky form elements of classic Warp electronica, folksy sampleplay and sudden glimpses of hip-hop influenced swagger. It’s a surprisingly complete record considering it came out of nowhere, marked by a devotion to peculiarly organic textures and claustrophobic closeness that reached its highpoint (heh) in the self-perpetuating ambient whorl of ‘Arcadeagle’. It’s also only four quid from the label’s website, which to these ears makes it the bargain of the year.

Following on from the full-length, he has turned his attention to the ‘Landforms’ series of EPs, beginning with the summer’s Island and now reaching its second installment. I’m not entirely sure to what extent mental projection is responsible, but Lake does sound distinctly more aquatic than its predecessor, each track drowning in limpid lakes of delay and sending hollow ripples outward from each burst of synthetic energy. The crunchy, static-infused ‘Overloam’d’ is certainly the least immediate thing he’s managed to craft yet, drawing attention to brief melodic flashes that burst suddenly outward to stain its greyscale backing in deepest green.

Out of the four tracks here, ‘Endzone’ is probably closest in spirit to his earlier work. With each release his fascination with texture over colour has become more pronounced, resulting in the hypnotic double blow of ‘Boat’ and ‘GolgothA’, both of which prioritise subtle shifts in pace and structure to create disorienting sonic environments in which to wonder. In this sense, 10-20 shares at least a little in common with sound installation artists – in particular a fascination with the structural integrity and architectural potential of music – but his sense of narrative arc remains a defining feature. These are still pieces, with defined temporal development, a beginning, middle and end, and are all the better for it. Roll on the subsequent landforms.

http://highpointlowlife.com/

A year of Short Circuitry

2009-12-19T10:50:00.002Z

My final Short Circuitry column of the year has just been published on Muso's Guide, encompassing a (relatively) swift run-through of the year in electronic music and a couple of lists which, whilst containing some fantastic stuff, could in no way be said to be definitive. Such is life.

The column can be found here, avec lists and embedded videos - here's a text only reproduction of the main body of the feature.

There’s something so offensively bland about end-of-year lists that I’m almost loathe to curate one myself - yet given that this column only started in July, it seems almost churlish not to. At this point, the power to make music of such technical proficiency that it makes the work of Warp’s early pioneers sound lo-fi by comparison is encoded within the hardware of every single computer. This fact is not only responsible for the remarkable state of diversity that electronic music finds itself in at the end of this decade, but also for its lucid, shapeshifting nature.

The second half of the noughties has been the point at which the ‘net has really come into its own for distribution of information – musical, cultural, political or otherwise. Away from questionable government interest in filesharing and data availability (I’m looking at you, Murdochs), and valid concerns about our increased reliance on screens for survival, such enforced globalisation has without a doubt been the key shaping force in modern music this decade. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the musical landscape circa now would be far less exciting without its myriad charms and pitfalls.

Which leads neatly into the soca beats and tribal flex of UK house: 2009 was the year when our bass sounds fully woke up and ‘got’ funky – and began getting funky with one another. The last twelve months have been characterised by incredibly rapid cross-pollination, giving rise to a host of luminous, supple and deeply sexy hybrids spanning the links connecting two-step, dubstep and UK funky itself. It’s been an intriguing cultural and musical collision: at the end of 2008 all eyes were on the ever-expanding fertile zone between dubstep and techno, exemplified by the mechanistic and cyclical heart of 2562’s debut album Aerial and the music on Appleblim’s Dubstep Allstars 6. A year later, the sounds of Detroit and Berlin have become absorbed into the living whole, one of many influences permeating cutting-edge dancefloor sounds – lending Untold’s skeletal grime a cool, chrome sheen, and infusing Peverelist’s gorgeous machine soul with an intrinsically mechanical, hypnotic heartbeat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his record for pushing things forward (FWD?), Kode9’s label Hyperdub has led the charge toward pastures new and flexible. One of the first traditionally ‘dubstep’ DJs to fully embrace the truly global permutations of funky, his own ‘Black Sun’ was something of a landmark release, its furiously acidic synthline as much a rallying cry to battle as a call for celebration. And, along with the swung futurism of the Blunted Robots crew, Geiom’s tropical bounce and Cooly G’s unique take on house, it was both: simultaneously declaring war on the stagnant cul-de-sac dubstep was staggering drunkenly into and opening the floor for a welcome return of an ‘anything goes’ mentality to the dance.

Elsewhere, the mainstream beckoned following chart-hogging and still-ubiquitous remix commissions for Skream (La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill', naturally) and Joker (Simian Mobile Disco’s ‘Cruel Intentions’). Next year looks set to be an exciting time for Joker and his compadres Gemmy and Guido, with their scorched melodies and future-shocked R’n’B perhaps arriving at the right time to court a mainstream increasingly excited by all-things synth-based.

Away from club concerns; though not strictly electronic, Broadcast & The Focus Group crafted a wonderful insular world of their own on their ‘stopgap’ EP Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, burying the occasional ‘proper’ song in the fuzzy detritus of a lifetime’s worth of nostalgia. It may have been the year’s finest example of what The Wire have recently been calling ‘hypnagogic pop’ – hazy and often beautiful music buried under the weight of its own past. Sounds as disparate as Leyland Kirby’s achingly beautiful ambience on Sadly The Future Is Not What It Once Was, Gold Panda’s sample-based travelogues and Nite Jewel’s uber lo-fi electro-pop tap into the same mindset. Whether such ideas differ in any way from Boards Of Canada’s kidulthood or the ghosts that haunt Burial’s spectral two-step - or whether they represent some more general social phenomenon - is up for more sophisticated discussion, the likes of which it seems excessive to go into here. Ultimately, each of these artists has enough character to last far beyond theorizing, and all are well worthy of investigation.

A similar atmosphere also defines the music of Highpoint Lowlife’s success story of the year (depending, of course, on how you define success), 10-20. He’s been startlingly prolific, releasing one of the year’s best records in the shape of his self-titled album, as well as two EPs from his new Landforms series, Island and Lake. His music itself treads a curious line between impossibly busy and warmly ambient, the tension between stuttering percussion and muted melody on tracks like ‘Hallows’ and ‘Arcadeagle’ creating an intense, hallucinatory sensory deprivation that finds its resolution somewhere between waking and dream.

Long term Highpoint Lowlife associate Ruaridh Law – The Village Orchestra, or TVO, to give him his official title – has had a similarly busy release schedule. His hour-long ambient improvisation I Can Hear The Sirens Singing Again was wonderful, but even better were the six-tracks of upfront, highly percussive techno that made up his The Starry Wisdom EP. Again treading the line between energy and introspection, ‘Aklo Cut With Saffron’ and ‘The King In Yellow’ drive relentlessly forward, even as delicate wisps of melody drift through the superstructure like smoke. Both intensely physical and almost intangible, it’s this delicious contrast that makes The Starry Wisdom the most rewarding techno record of the year.

To wind up where we began, in pleasingly techno-esque fashion, Highpoint Lowlife’s attitude towards swift releasing and digital distribution mirrors what I discussed in the opening paragraphs. In many ways Thorsten Sideboard’s label is leading the pack in terms of modern technology: each release is immediately available digitally at an almost comically reasonable price through the HL website. As a new decade starts and the debate about mp3 sharing continues unabated, it also posits an example of the internet’s largely untapped potential: here is a label unearthing as yet undiscovered gems and making them widely available, simply and cheaply, motivated by nothing other than love of music. At this point, that seems as inspirational an idea as any to take forward to the next decade.

Copenhagen

2009-12-19T01:19:00.000Z

What a disappointment.

'It's a London ting'

2009-12-15T18:07:00.008Z

Nico Hogg - 'Nightmare at minus 70 feet'

Since I relocated away from the Big Smoke for the second time, I’ve become increasingly aware of the hypnotic pull the city exerts; every time the coach pulls into Victoria station my identity immediately subsumes into the surrounding morass of ‘London’ as an entity. It’s a strangely safe and comfortable feeling. Ordinarily, traveling on a packed tube train is something to be dealt with rather than appreciated, but for at least the first half-hour post-arrival it takes on the rose-tinted sheen that comes from knowing you’re back in familiar territory.

When you grow up somewhere it’s easy to never stop and consider its effect on your psychology, attitudes and actions. I was only starting to appreciate the city for what it was when I left the first time, and that same experience has been repeated this year. A lot of people never leave – Ken Livingstone for one is proud of having spent his life in London. One of the people who first ‘properly’ introduced me to my home city, Nico Hogg, does an impresive job of photographically documenting some of its less obvious aspects. In focusing on events and areas oft ignored - or simply not noticed at all - by most bystanders, his photos manage to draw attention to some of the thousands of tiny stories that we swiftly pass by daily, creating tiny microcosms of the city's character as a whole.

Nico Hogg - 'Nicholl House, Woodberry Down'

Nico Hogg - 'Metronet, I do a f*ck to your mother'

Nico Hogg - 'Under the greenway'

Bass culture fiend Martin Clark is acutely aware of the city’s characteristic aspects, both conceptual and actual – London’s impact upon the evolution of post-garage music is a subject he has regularly discussed over the last five years of his Blackdown blog (which articulates everything I'm trying to say in this little piece in a far more coherent way). It was also the loose theme of his debut album with production partner Dusk. Upon its release, I initially found Margins Music to be an intriguing curio, delving deeper into the geographic and cultural boundaries and blends that have shaped UK bass music than any other producer’s music.

With a year or so’s retrospect, it’s one of the most complete albums to have emerged from the dubstep scene as a whole – shifting from tracks influenced by its progenitors’ love of early grime (‘Concrete Streets’ and ‘The Bits’, featuring Durrty Goodz and Trim respectively) to periods of swirling ambience and strikingly vibrant garage (‘Focus’). The album’s single most attractive character though is its unrestrained exploration of new musical modalities – droning tones and unusual scales taken from traditional Asian musics, which sound at once foreign and strangely familiar – London’s legacy. The thought of what we’d be left with if the BNP had their way is terrifying: London’s vitality simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its inseparable blend of cultures, nationalities, geographies, wealth, ideas and aspirations that exist alongside one another physically yet often seem to inhabit entirely different spaces (the ‘glass walls’ Blackdown referred to in his interview with Nico).

At the tail end of last month Clark’s label Keysound Recordings released Grievous Angel’s Margins Music Redux, a reimagining of the original album in keeping with his previous Ableton mixes, which manage to highlight hitherto unnoticed aspects of other artists’ tracks. He’s done a stellar job on Margins Music, weaving its entirety into a single unbroken hour or so’s journey and futher focusing the original record’s cross-cultural blend into a hypnotic, delay-drenched drift through London’s astral plane. Vocal snippets are awash in oceans of aquatic echo and often oddly muted within the mix, as though reaching the listener from the far side of some invisible void. Themes ebb and flow across the album’s length, opening and closing with the first and last word from Durrty Goodz, and climaxing during ‘Focus’ with an eerily poignant line from Trim’s ‘The Bits’ – intentional or not, it manages to refer simultaneously to the city’s recent past and the dystopian nature of its near future, as CCTV cameras close in on our every move.

“1984/This was not the world I was born in.
I fell from the sky and was found and kept/But I’m still curb crawling with intent”

As well as drawing attention to the roots of the duo’s distinctive sound, Grievous Angel has also done an impressive job of making explicit their links with other artists across the globe who strive to create a similar sense of dreamlike wonder: the awkward, percussive stutters and asymmetric scales recall Gang Gang Dance as their most abstract, whilst the ghosts of a hundred different voices that rise and fall throughout create a hypnagogic feeling of dissociation – not a million miles from the Wire’s handily lumped together crop of ‘hauntologists’.

It may well be destined to be one of 2009’s ‘lost’ records, buried beneath the shards of its parent genre’s recent fragmentation and the increasing demands of the dancefloor, but there are hidden treasures to be found amongst the alleys and mazelike twists of Margins Music Redux’s cityscape.

Dirty Three, in session 1998

2009-12-11T15:12:00.002Z

Whilst trawling YouTube for Dirty Three clips to include in my last post, I stumbled across this quite startling set of three songs performed in session during 1998. Warren Ellis is still clean shaven at this point, which essentially says all you need to know. Needless to say, they're well worth the time out of your life.

Last Horse On The Sand

Sue's Last Ride

Distant Shore

'Disneyland for rednecks'

2009-12-11T15:04:00.003Z

The benefit of hindsight is always a good thing where All Tomorrow’s Parties is concerned. It’s probably a side effect of it being held at Butlins, but it induces a curious and intoxicating sense of removal from the outside world that always takes a few days to wear off after the inevitably painful journey home on Monday.

The sight of a Butlins camp – a by-word, as far as the majority of festivalgoers are concerned, for cheap and tacky holidays from a bygone era – during the winter is oddly emotionally charged. There’s a unique sense of bleak beauty that emanates from its rows of identikit one-storey chalets and maze-like sports complex, abandoned save the odd small group playing chilly football on a small five-a-side pitch. During the night it bristles with activity, as warmly wrapped individuals huddle and run from home to central complex and back; in the early morning’s emptiness it glows with a sad serenity and the slightly uncomfortable juxtaposition of the old-fashioned and the new.

Which goes some way towards explaining the appeal of ATP’s winter festivals – quite aside from the year-round draw of some mightily impressive bookings and the living, breathing hangover cure that is the pool’s lazy river. Recently though, I’ve been a little skeptical about the festival’s increasing reliance on indie nostalgia – if still unable to resist its draw. The My Bloody Valentine curated Nightmare Before Christmas is a case in point, as it takes all of an hour onsite to remind me of exactly why I keep returning.

There’s also the small matter of the bands. Friday evening sees Josh T. Pearson take his preacher/demon act to new levels of intensity, wringing squalling treble noise from his guitar on a stage bathed in deep blood red. Whilst his performances always tend towards the anarchic, the presence of a drummer and swelling walls of scorched distortion brings fire and brimstone bubbling through the cracks between Pearson’s baritone yelps.

Yo La Tengo’s Popular Songs could almost qualify for lost album of 2009 status, disappearing as their records often do amongst waves of hyperbole for vastly inferior indie bands. In some ways their problem is that they’re simply too consistent. Friday’s show in Centre Stage acts as a reminder of how well pitched their precarious balancing act between pure pop and blistering feedback can be. ‘Periodically Double and Triple’ and ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ infuse sixties pop through a filter of keening Americana, ‘Autumn Sweater’ is beautifully understated and mind-bendingly intense fifteen-minute closer ‘Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind’ outdoes My Bloody Valentine’s performance later that evening for sheer acid-fried noise.

On Saturday, Lightning Bolt actually perform onstage, in an act of inclusiveness that turns the entire front half of Reds (myself included) into a seething mass of bodies. Every ATP seems to include at least one classic performance in the intimate confines of Reds – Be Your Own Pet’s scathing turn at Thurston Moore’s festival in 2006, my first exposure to Fuck Buttons in 2007, The Mae Shi’s glorious technicolour antics earlier this year – Lightning Bolt take the prize for the end of 2009. Later that evening, Bob Mould joins No Age onstage for a run through of three Husker Du songs. Yes.

As ever though, the Dirty Three’s performance on Sunday night acts as a reminder that, yes, they remain the finest live act in the world. Warren Ellis, Mick Turner and Jim White are probably the three most accomplished musicians onsite this weekend, yet Ellis’ wonderfully surreal and self-depreciating stage banter has the quality of making the huge Pavilion stage seem as tiny as a pub back-room. The sheer feral intensity of opener ‘Indian Love Song’ and serene beauty of ‘Some Things I Just Don’t Want To Know’ lift the sizeable crowd away from Ellis’ neatly observed “Disneyland for rednecks” and into hitherto unexplored regions of inner headspace. I could watch Dirty Three play every night for the rest of my life and find something new to enjoy every evening; such is the personality and dreamlike sense of wonder and loss they inject into their ostensibly simple instrumentals.

Which seems an apt way to describe each ATP really – each time the local bus rolls away from Butlins on a Monday morning an entirely different set of memories is left behind.

Peverelist - Jarvik Mindstate [Punch Drunk]

2009-12-10T15:33:00.005Z

ATP-related hiatus well and truly over (for another few months at least), I've spent the last few days continually obsessing over Jarvik Mindstate, the debut album from Peverelist (also known as 'Tom from Rooted'). It's just crashed straight into the top echelons of this year's finest albums for me - gathering together elements of jungle, d'n'b, techno, ambient and dubstep and blending them together with a big ol' dollop of Bristolian soul. I reviewed the album for Drowned in Sound (it also got an entirely inaccurate and woefully self-congratulatory piece on Pitchfork, but hopefully that can be ignored as much as humanly possible) - here it is again:

It’s probably worth opening with a proviso – I’m a bit of a geek for Tom Ford’s music. It may have had something to do with the fact that his involvement in Bristol’s electronic scene runs deep – he manages the city’s finest record shop, Rooted Records – but even on his earliest 12-inch releases the music he made as Peverelist seemed to emerge curiously, precociously whole. Shorn of many of his scene contemporaries’ commitment to gritty analogue hiss and hard dancefloor edge, ‘Erstwhile Rhythm’ and ‘Infinity Is Now’ were all chrome sheen and stumbling, looped melody – aspects that immediately drew slightly overzealous comparisons.

Much has been made of his perceived debt to techno; indeed, along with Scuba, 2562 and fellow Bristolian Appleblim his music is regularly cited as being a major point of crossover. And its presence is indisputably felt: his slowly deconstructed themes and habit of taking a single idea through to its logical conclusion are hallmarks that define the nine tracks that make up his debut album Jarvik Mindstate. The dreamlike permutations of ‘Bluez’ and labyrinthine tunnels of opener ‘Esperanto’ both use melody as a basis for experimentation, creating a consistent rhythmic environment in which a fairly simple central premise can be thoroughly explored.

Ford’s music tends to be mentioned in the same breath as London and Berlin - incorporating as it does elements of both cities’ dance cultures - but strangely enough rarely with reference to his home city’s history. Yet if Jarvik Mindstate – named after the inventor of the artificial heart - serves to confirm a single fact, it is that his music falls effortlessly into a continuum extrapolated straight from The Pop Group through The Wild Bunch, Smith & Mighty, Krust, Massive Attack and on into the future.

Bristol’s musical credentials barely need repeating. The city’s unique cultural and social heritage gave rise to a neatly drawn lineage of artists fusing emergent US hip-hop influences and the restless, rebellious energy of punk – epitomised by The Pop Group’s seething debut Y – with the bass ‘n’ space-heavy soundsystem culture of the city’s sizeable Caribbean community. The resultant blanket term ‘the Bristol sound’ in turn gave way to the vague and far more irritating trip-hop label - and in doing so opened the floodgates to a seemingly endless stream of turgid post-club pre-bed chillout fluff. The ubiquitous coffee table beckoned, with predictable results.

All of which makes it fairly easy to forget how otherworldly and alienated Blue Lines, Protection and Maxinquaye actually sound even now, after a decade-and-a-half of overplay. The same can be said of the city’s earlier junglist material, even after the slow stagnation of an increasingly homogenous drum ‘n’ bass scene. Ford’s label Punch Drunk Unearthed has just re-issued Smith & Mighty’s (al)mighty classic ‘Bass Is Maternal’, which in four minutes pretty much manages to define the phrase ‘ahead of its time’, predicting the following two decades of UK dance music in its deft amalgam of delicately sliced breakbeats, clipped vocal samples and cavernous bass echo.

In many ways Jarvik Mindstate picks off where the city’s pioneers left off, and Ford’s intricate attention to percussive detail betrays his interest in its early drum ‘n’ bass scene. ‘Yesterday I Saw The Future’ is jungle deconstructed, stripped bare to its very essence. Here, the drums themselves are the track’s central facet, interlocking to form odd tessellated shapes before disengaging again and returning to diffuse forms, all in front of the most skeletal of melodic frameworks. Pinch collaboration ‘Revival’ gives dub the same treatment, further elevating the genre’s studio trickery and spacious atmospheres to high electronic art.

If the danger remains that all of this could sound soulless, an excuse for tech-head experimentation, the adrenaline shots of chromatic synth that ripple across the appropriately cyclical ‘Not Yet Further Than’ provide ample evidence to the contrary. Similarly, both ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ and ‘Infinity Is Now’ are examples of shockingly emotive machine soul, their strikingly individual and weirdly beautiful aspects undiminished by regular play since their original releases.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Peverelist’s is a singular and fascinating ear for production - heavily stylised, instantly recognisable and relying on hypnotic repetition to generate eerie idiomotor responses. In spite of its modern exoskeleton, in addition to generating the same curious sense of urban dissociation common in his predecessors his music also maintains their distinctly human aspects. When all is stripped away what’s left is essentially the opposite of Robert Jarvik’s famed invention: a warm, beating heart, intrinsically mechanical but terrifyingly fragile.

..............

Yes, it's just that good.

The year's lost gems 1: Nite Jewel - Good Evening

2009-12-02T19:32:00.003Z

First off, I suppose it’s fair to say that my 2009 has been marked by total immersion in bass culture – theorising, dancing like a loon and writing about it afterwards: the lot. The upshot of this is the feeling that I’ve got some handle on the rapidly changing landscapes of UK-centric bass music. Its downside is the feeling that I’ve completely missed out on a large number of records, those ones that seem to have drifted past with minimal fanfare from either mainstream or indie press. With this in mind, December (with its tendency for few new record releases) presents a pretty decent catch-up opportunity. Recommendations on a postcard to the usual address.

Nite Jewel’s Good Evening, released on No Pain In Pop back in August, deals me a tiny pang of irritation at each listen, uncomfortable in the knowledge that I could have discovered this so much earlier. Loosely, its self-consciously lo-fi atmosphere and the delicately woven strands of free-association that make up each song’s narrative drive could fit neatly within the Wire’s incredibly smug ‘hypnagogic pop’ genre boundaries (or ‘glo-fi’, or whatever the latest term happens to be). Certainly all the elements are present and correct; primarily a curious sense of disconnection between music and listener, as though each song is emerging fully-formed from a separate temporal and spatial zone. Yet sticking a blanket term around a group of artists inevitably serves to set up invisible barriers, and there’s far more that attracts me to Ramona Gonzales’ music than to, say, Ariel Pink’s.

I’m sure most people remember times when the indistinct notes of a tune you recognise drift from someone else’s stereo, and you’re so sure you know what it is that your brain starts ‘hearing’ the vocals from the song in question. It doesn’t even matter if it’s not the song you thought it was – the mind is a powerful convincing tool. It’s an odd phenomenon, and one I can’t imagine has been given any ‘proper’ name as I’m not convinced there’s anything remotely tangible or scientific to it.

Anyway, on Good Evening Gonzales’ half-mumbled, half-sung vocals are buried so deep in a wash of hash fuzz that they sound more like half-recalled memories, an artificial, listen-too-hard-and-you’ll-miss-them construct of the imagination. As far as these ears are concerned it’s a major part of the record’s appeal, generating a kind of slightly wonky, off-key nostalgia that reaches its pinnacle on ‘Heart Won’t Start’. Like the entire history of indie/dance deconstructed and stripped bare to its basest components – addictive drumbeat, meaningful/less vocal slurs and blunted synth shimmer – it sounds a little like the early Factory bands might have, had they grown up in a sixties US hippie commune instead of the grey concrete jungle around seventies Manchester. Either way, it’s gorgeous and has barely left my stereo since I got hold of it.

http://www.myspace.com/nitejewel

Put the fun between your legs

2009-12-01T09:19:00.003Z

"Over the course of the last week Bristol’s Arnolfini has played host to an invasion of thinkers, doers and those of every persuasion in between, in an bid to form a collective mindset in the lead-up to the climate talks in Copenhagen in a couple of weeks’ time. The Bike Bloc was formed as a collaboration between the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and Climate Camp, each bringing to the table their own perspectives and thoughts under a common shared brief: a group of people gathering together to brainstorm, plan, prototype and create a finished product over the course of a short and intense session."

I've just published a short piece on threadme's fantastic 'Thoughts & Finds' blog about this week's Bike Bloc project at the Arnolfini, which has brought together a disparate group of people to work collectively and pool ideas to create an 'irresistable new machine of resistance'. The result has been a set of prototypes for the bloc, built out of old bicycles, which will be recreated and brought into operation in Copenhagen next week. It's been a worthy and interesting project for the Arnolfini to be involved in, bringing a living, open art project to a public art space and encouraging the generation of novel ideas.

http://blog.threadme.co.uk/

Geiom & Shortstuff [Planet Mu]

2009-11-28T19:52:00.002Z

Of the many trajectories along which post-garage sounds are traveling, there’s one in particular which is rapidly marking itself out from the others in its sheer, slavish devotion to shockingly bright melody and soca-infused funky beats. Despite her own productions’ often thoughtful and subtle nature, Ikonika is probably the best example of a DJ pulling out all the stops in this direction – her recent sets have flitted between genres with seeming ease, unhesitatingly flirting with the boundaries of excess and in doing so becoming thrilling exercises in how to work a packed floor. Her recent set for Resonance FM, available to stream on Soundcloud, functions as an impressive summary of where this strain of dubstep is at now – and includes, amongst others, Brackles’ mind-bendingly brilliant remix of Crystal Fighters’ ‘I Love London’.

The Other Woman featuring DJ Ikonika by ruthbarnes
Mix starts about halfway through

The epicentre of the group of producers actually making this material though seems to be focused on the Blunted Robots/Berkane Sol axis – Brackles, Shortstuff, Martin Kemp and Nottingham relations Geiom and Spam Chop. All are impressive DJ/producers in their own right, but some of their most exciting material is emerging from collaborations – Shortstuff in particular, whose ‘Tripped Up’ with Mickey Pearce was a highlight of Ramadanman’s recent Dubstep Allstars mix. Arriving with surprisingly little fanfare, Planet Mu’s latest contains the products of his work with Geiom, a pair of tracks that together constitute both his most dancefloor-ready and most musically progressive material yet.

To a certain extent it’s possible to detect the roles of each producer in the making of ‘No Hand Signals’ – the impossibly busy beat structure and schizophrenic dynamics are pure Shortstuff, yet Geiom’s composer’s ear and recent experiments at house tempo lend the track both longevity and a metronomic bounce that belies the complexity of its percussion. It’s also fantastic, seething with cartoonish energy and swung UK funky rhythms.

‘Wardenclyffe’ is the real gem here though, an aggressively melancholy garage skip that drifts along on gorgeous wisps of oriental synth melody. A minute or so in the track suddenly shifts gear, opening wide to allow a devastating descending breakdown to take over for a precious few seconds before kicking off at full pace once more. It manages the tough feat of being both a wonder to listen to on headphones and an absolute dancefloor bomb, and also happens to be one of the most spectacular tracks I’ve heard all year.

http://www.myspace.com/geiom
http://www.myspace.com/djshortstuff

Playlist: Hyperdub - Corsica Studios

2009-11-27T00:27:00.002Z

It’s been a pretty tiring few days on a plateau I’ve only really started to descend from now, and it’s Thursday/Friday already. Hyperdub’s fifth birthday celebration was on Saturday at Corsica Studios, and over the course of the seven or so hours spent there it served as a potent reminder of its roster’s heady blend of deep contemplation, druggy haze and razor-sharp, technicolour edge. Aside from the growing differences – of which there are many - between its key players, the combined effect of placing such a varied host of artists alongside one another brought into sharp relief their shared thought patterns. So rather than attempting to write a hazy, several-day-later review of the evening, this playlist is designed to try and emulate that effect.

King Midas Sound – Cool Out – one of the highlights of their live set, Kevin Martin’s almost supernaturally thick bass frequencies played off an oddly catchy vocal hook to hypnotic effect.

Digital Mystikz - Anti-War Dub – dropped by Mala in re-worked and re-energised form, its deeply considered aura and sentiment shines through whatever treatment it’s put through.

Skream – I (Loefah Remix) – no-one does bass frequencies like Loefah does; thick, viscous things that swallow an entire room full of people whole. Mala ending a set with this – one of my favourite half-stepped tunes – was a minor stroke of genius.

The Bug – Poison Dart ft. Warrior Queen – not much needs to be said about this except that it utterly ruins a dancefloor at 4:30 am.

Kode9 – Black Sun – Kode9 seems to be at his most effective when left to his own DJ devices for extended periods of time (see also: his whole night takeover of FWD earlier this year). His three-hour set saw the label’s boss move from his own warped take on UK funky through his label’s dubstepping back catalogue and a killer final hour of old school drum ‘n’ bass and jungle.

Ikonika – Smuck – over the course of this year, Ikonika’s sets have become ever harder and more streamlined, fusing into an inseperable fusion of colourful bleeps, restless forward propulsion and gut-wrenching bass drops.

Cooly G – Narst – coming straight after Ikonika’s technicolour, almost painfully vibrant melodies and fried circuit-board dynamics, Cooly G’s opener was a welcome slice of minimalism strapped to a lithe and slinky funky beat.

LD – Shake It – one of the final things we managed to stay dancing for, and an appropriately energetic send off into a freezing night.

Short Circuitry: November 2009

2009-11-24T18:37:00.003Z

Muso's Guide have just published the latest edition of Short Circuitry, featuring Hyperdub's London party last Saturday along new material from Four Tet, Joy Orbison, Kowton, Grievous Angel, and more.

Check it here.

Other Peoples' Tunes 1: The 'F**k National Express' Mix

2009-11-24T18:16:00.004Z

So called because it was thought out and planned on a hugely delayed bus from Bristol to London. Here's my middle finger to National Express: proof that something productive can come from the fact that one of your buses got 'lost' on the M4.

A new mix of other peoples' tunes - some new, some old - recorded by myself on Ableton in one go, no overdubs, re-recording or somesuch. Tracklist below:

Naphta – Soundclash 1 (Grievous Angel VIP)
Ghost – In The Club
Brackles – Rawkus
Asusu – Taurean
Guido – Chakra
Darkstar – Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer
Relocate – Origins (Original Mix)
Geiom – Bubbles
Scuba – Aesaunic
Peverelist – Clunk Click Every Trip
Pangaea – Router
Untold – Don’t Know, Don’t Care
Octa Push – Dubsssh
Ramadanman – Revenue (Untold Remix)
Roll Deep – Eskimo (Vocal Mix)
Sully – A Reminder
Joy Orbison – BRKLN CLLN
Ghosts On Tape – Predator Mode (Roska Remix)
Geeneus – Yellowtail VIP
Pearson Sound – Indelible
The Hizatron – Von Glooperstein
Kowton – Stasis (G Mix)

Download here, if the idea takes your fancy.

12" Round Up: October-November

2009-11-21T16:14:00.004Z

In slightly late style, here's a round-up of the last couple of months’ most essential releases on wax, ranging from the willfully psychedelic bassbin techno of Berkane Sol’s Hizatron/Geiom plate to T++’s bubbling tech reduction of Monolake’s epic ‘Atlas’.

The Hizatron – Von Glooperstein
Geiom – Bubbles [Berkane Sol]

Geiom’s Berkane Sol label has been one of the most consistent operators in UK bass over the last couple of years, acting as a home for his own productions as well as those of his Nottingham contemporaries. This most recent release has seen the turn of Wigflex’s Hizatron, who turns in ‘Von Glooperstein’, a downright evil sounding slab of brooding, bass-driven minimal techno that builds ever-so-slowly until every element begins circling one another; a battle between bass and percussion that generates a gradually escalating whirlpool of psychedelic elements. You’re lost at two minutes, and spat out at its end.

On the flipside Geiom returns to dubstep tempo for his most intensely percussive workout yet – ‘Bubbles’ does exactly that, swelling and bursting with minimal dancefloor fire. There’s talk of the next Sol release being his incredible ‘Sugar Coated Lover’, a second collaboration with vocalist Marita. Yes please.

Untold – Gonna Work Out Fine EP

This should really have had its own post all to itself, but as it’s been a few weeks now since Jack Dunning dropped his latest mutant creation on the world it has merged itself into the entirety of this round up. Still, Gonna Work Out Fine is indisputably one of the year’s finest releases, and is likely to withstand any competition for the top place over the next month or so. Much as the early signs were there, in the stretch-and-snap dynamics of early Hemlock release ‘Discipline’ and the slithering minimalism of ‘Anaconda’, there is very little that could have paved the way for a track like ‘Stop What You’re Doing’, its jerky nature and bass-driven propulsion demanding that you do exactly that.

Even better though are some of the other tracks on here: ‘Don’t Know, Don’t Care’ welds a devastating stop-start grime hybrid to classic house piano licks, and ‘Palamino’s rising synth intro stretches on for what feels like an eternity, generating a sublime vertigo that sudden falls away when the snare driven riddim hits in full force. I reviewed the record in full for Sonic Router, but it really has to be heard to be believed – this is the bold new world for bass music in 2009, and its willful ignorance of anything as stilted as ‘genre’ is an inspiration to carry over into 2010.

Hyetal – Neon Speech/Gold Or Soul [Soul Motive]

Bristol producer Hyetal’s ‘Pixel Rainbow Sequence’ was a sleeper hit, akin to fellow residents Joker and Gemmy in its technicolour synth-led chaos. His new 12” for Soul Motive is a little more considered, two slices of melancholy, melody-led dubstep that hark back to the city’s trip-hop heritage – ‘Neon Speech’ is strangely delicate and moody despite the presence of thick subs. ‘Gold Or Soul’ is the standout though, a slow roller buoyed by thick swells of aquatic synth wash that seems to end all too soon.

Joy Orbison – J. Doe/BRKLN CLLN [Doldrums]

It’s a little unfortunate for Joy Orbison that ‘Hyph Mngo’ was so hyped, and so loved by everyone from Martin Clark and Mary Anne Hobbs to Sacha and Zane Lowe (one notable exception being Energy Flash author Simon Reynolds), as it sets him an almost insurmountable peak to reach with each subsequent release. Luckily enough this doesn’t seem to be a particular stress point for him, as the first 12” on his Doldrums label gathers two more of his productions that stand up well to their predecessors.

Even if neither gathers quite the same MDMA-enhanced serotonin mindfuck that the intro to ‘Hyph Mngo’ is capable of causing even now, both give some indication that he’s already developed a singular style, blending strongly house-influenced, complex drum patterns with thick, shimmering synths and dreamlike vocal stabs. ‘J. Doe’ follows that formula to a tee, building in miniscule increments with almost sickening restraint before a glorious resolution two-and-a-half minutes in. ‘BRKLN CLLN’ sees him on a funky flex, cyclical percussion reaching ever greater heights as the track continues to grow to ever-greater heights over its length.

Joy’s may be a relatively simplistic concoction, but when the results are this slick, there’s not a lot that can be said to deny his endorphin-focused pleasures.

Ghosts On Tape – Predator Mode (Roska Remix) [Wireblock]

Roska is fast becoming the funky-remixer du jour, recently reworking everyone from Untold and DVA to Four Tet and upcoming synth botherer Ghosts on Tape. The latter is one of Roska’s best remixes thus far, taking the original’s cheeky vocal sample and layering it above dark, grimey beats and an escalating techno infusion. Well worthy of investigation.

Gemmy – Johnny 5 EP [Planet Mu]

The title track of Gemmy’s new EP was the highlight of his mix for Mary Anne Hobbs’ Bristol: Rise Up Special, all frazzled SNES melodies and grinding low end. All four tracks on this release are easily its equal, shifting from delicate skank (‘Shanti Riddim’) to full-on, head-busting dubstep (‘Wata Down Sound’). Full review for Sonic Router here.

Monolake – Atlas (T++ Remix)

Torsten Profrock takes hold of Monolake’s huge techno-odyssey ‘Atlas’ and boils it down to the barest of elements in true T++ style, before layering it up with progressive, shifting percussion that slides back and forth as though sinking in quicksand. Profrock’s forte seems to be in taking the raw materials of other peoples’ music and filling every corner with some sort of sound – be it odd bubbling, scrapes and grinding or ever-present static wash – yet somehow maintaining its intrinsic groove and danceability, in spite of his work’s devastatingly minimalist nature.

Photo: 'Ridley Market' by Nico Hogg

Apple Pips Autumn: Al Tourettes & Instra:mental

2009-11-20T15:43:00.004Z

Laurie Osborne’s Apple Pips imprint seems to have been operating in fits and starts lately. During the summer, no sooner had Brackles’ long awaited Get A Job/Lizards 12” hit the shelves than the label’s seventh installment arrived, pitting a second Appleblim-Ramadanman collaboration on an unsuspecting world. ‘Justify’ was the definition of a slow-burner, hiding its riches in the label’s least dancefloor-aimed release. Yet its smooth transition between rough and smooth - the opening crackle of staccato synth suddenly opening wide to a flood of aquatic melody that drenched the track in nocturnal ambience and more than a hint of foreboding – offered a glimpse into Osborne’s mindset.

Never aiming merely to provide the next big floor hit, the Apple Pips roster thus far has staged excursions ever deeper into the crossover realms between UK bass and gaseous, white-noise infused house and techno. This autumn’s two releases follow the same set precedent, with a minor detour in the shape of Instra:mental’s quite startling ‘Leave It All Behind’.

Pips008 is the turn of sometime Appleblim co-producer Al Tourettes, who turns in a pair of incredibly odd but strangely compulsive tracks that straddle the lines between dubbed-out Bristol business and the percussive whirlwinds of labelmate Torsten Profrock. In fact, the closest comparison here is Profrock’s work as T++, all dense, mechanistic whirrs and melody generated the interplay of a host of separate mechanical components.

It’s not exactly what you’d describe as floor-friendly – on ‘Dodgem’ the kick drum seems to go out of its way to form an awkward, stumbling rhythm more suited to falling down a set of stairs than dancing with any level of grace – but compulsive in its sheer complexity. The same is true of ‘Sunken’, each individual piece of the puzzle has been placed so deliberately that listening requires an impressive feat of concentration.

On Pips009, Instra:mental follow the stellar ‘Watching You’ with a pair of more experimental oddities that take the duo further than ever from their roots at drum ‘n’ bass tempo. I reviewed the record in full last month for Sonic Router, but it really is an astonishing piece of work. Nowhere near as immediately accessible as ‘Watching You’, but equally rewarding, ‘Leave It All Behind’ sets their distinctive vocoder work over a swirling 4/4 backdrop. On the flip, ‘Forbidden’ is a tough-as-nails exploration of austere techno/dubstep territory, bristling with barely resolved aggression and reining in their typical displays of emotion on a tight leash, so as not to let the track's elastic tension tear itself apart entirely.

http://www.applepipsrecordings.co.uk/