Today, Montreal based musician and video artist Devon Hansen released his new album, Primitives, under his Opal Tapes-affiliated moniker Stefan Jós. The album saw release via Japan’s Flau imprint, following on from his hypnotic EP Things You Left Behind.
Primitives is a beautifully restrained album filled with minimalistic rhythms, moody atmospheres, and intricate textures, drawing the listener in with its rich sound design and tightly wound layers. Hansen, who also releases as Lotide and D.Hansen, uses his Stefan Jós moniker for his more beat driven, club-focused material. Hansen will also be performing a live set as Stefan Jós at the upcoming MUTEK Montreal.
You can stream Primitives in full below, with the album available for purchase here.
Rightfully championed as one of the worlds most acclaimed DJs, producers, and label bosses, Sasha (a.k.a Alexander Paul Coe) has consistently delivered some of dance music’s most dynamic and innovative music.
Picking up from where previous his latest solo release “Vapourspace” left off, he has returned with another exquisite production entitled “Ether.”
“Ether”, an intensely built track that is driven by a thunderous bass drum rhythm, demonstrates Sasha’s wonderful production skills with it’s carefully layered and beautifully distorted synth arrangement.
Also included is an “Intro Mix”, a perfect re-work that follows the same fashion as “Vapourspace” by providing a softer opening to the main production.
German producer Array Access has been making beats since 2010. His latest piece of work, a beautiful four-track EP entitled “Variations”, is scheduled for release on a new label, Ressort Imprint.
“Variations” consists of two tracks, two remixes and a hard-hitting bonus track.
The two original tracks entitled “Variations” illustrate this young producer’s passion from the very first minute and take us on a cruise through rough beats while floating on airy synthesizer sounds at the same time.
Additionally to that, the remixers did their best to keep the beauty vivid. The Swedish producer Evigt Mörker stays true to his style and serves an interpretation fitting foggy clubs and misty forests alike while Eomac defends his reputation as being one of the most interesting artists these days with a take that is deeply anchored in modern electronica.
Next up on rising UK label Construct is the first of the new Construct LTD EPs, CLTD001. The CLTD releases will follow a slightly different path from the main label, with certain artists using pseudonyms and sometimes experimenting with sounds they might not always be associated with. CLTD001 presents a tougher and more stripped back sound, featuring tracks from Water Walk (Paul Louth & Mike Thornhill), Hugo Barritt, Stratowerx (Sam Russo) and William Welt. In support of the release, we’ve been gifted an unreleased version of William Welt’s track “Shortcut Home,” a deep and hypnotic outing with a fathoms deep kick and bassline combo, chopped vocals, and delayed, rhythmic-like chords swirling underneath. You can download the unreleased version of “Shortcut Home” for free below, with the full EP available for preorder here.
With a career that spans more than ten years already firmly under his belt, the German DJ-producer Phillip Lauer might not seem to comfortably slot into XLR8R’s Get Familiar series. Lauer is, however, a man of many guises—and the vast majority of his previous musical work has come under a range of different monikers and collaborative projects, including Tuff City Kids (with Gerd Janson), Hotel Lauer [with his brother, Jacob] and deep-house duo Arto Mwambe. Away his production and remix duties, Lauer is a widely-acclaimed DJ and founder of Brontosaurus, the label he started with two pals in 2006 through which he puts out both his own music and that of his “weirdest musician friends.”
It is only now, however, following the release of Borndom, his impossibly infectious, just-released second full-length LP on Permanent Vacation, that he is being fully acknowledged as Lauer, the pseudonym he adopts for his solo production work. XLR8R caught up with Lauer to learn more about his early musical inspirations, production values for the album and what else 2015 has in store for him.
“I bought some cheap software to produce some music and, although it completely sucked, I just got hooked.”
With early musical influences that include hip-hop and punk rock, Lauer has been producing electronic music ever since the late ’90s. “I was a skateboard kid and I loved the videos,” he says. “I started to play in bands, and then I just kind of stumbled across some electronic music that I liked, and my interest just grew from there. I bought some cheap software to produce some music and, although it completely sucked, I just got hooked.”
His first production, under the name ���Kizz My Phillipino Azz,” was a deep-house tune mastered straight from tape and became the last catalog number of the a friend’s label, Inbetween Records. “My first release was the label’s last one,” jokes Lauer.
Although he was “definitely not taking his production too seriously at that moment,” Lauer honed his skills over time and carefully mastered his ’80s-influenced disco sound with a string of well-received releases on such labels as Séparé Recordings and Punkt Music. Remixes, too—including high-profile productions for labels as varied as Trevor Jackson’s Output and Jazzanova’s Sonar Kollektiv—steadily became a larger part of his repertoire,, creating a reputation that eventually inspired the now-dormant Arto Mwambe project with his fellow Frankfurt producer Chris Beisswenger in 2004—perhaps Lauer’s most lauded work collaboration to date.
There is a quite unmistakeable and undeniable enthusiasm in Lauer’s voice as he talks. His modern day contemporaries might become tempted by the glitz and glamor that success in music inevitably offers, but there is a sense that Lauer remains very much a musician’s musician, motivated by little more than refining his craft and a profound love for his work. “I am just trying to do my thing,” he says. “For me, it’s not a profession—it’s still just something I really enjoy and I would do it even if it didn’t pay me enough to live.” he adds. “Throughout my whole career, I have been doing it alongside my job in a distribution company—until that went bust last year. I tried to find some other things to do but it didn’t interest me, and I was already making enough money [from music] to feed my family and pay the rent.”
By seamlessly combining his love of house music and wavy disco beats, Lauer has steadily, almost unintentionally, adopted a impossibly beautiful melodic sound that’s both easily attributed to his name and reflective of his affection for ’80s and ’90s electropop music. “There is no plan behind it—it just turns out like that,” he says. “I was listening a lot to the radio when I was growing up, and I think that the tracks stuck in my head more than with other people,” he adds. “Also, I think the machines I use also give me a different sound. They are all from the ’80s and ’90s and so make very unique notes.”
Released three years following his marvelous debut solo LP, Phillips on Janson’s Running Back label in 2012, Borndom was recorded over a three month period in the quiet attic studio of Lauer’s home, near where he regularly DJs at Offenbach’s Robert Johnson club. The name, inspired by the word “boredom,” ironically reflects a lack of inspiration or vision in what Lauer was trying to produce. “I didn’t have a concept behind the album, and because there is no main theme behind it, I just wanted a really basic name. Everyone knows the word “boredom,” so that’s what I was thinking. I also think it sounds good,” says Lauer. “I was going to name it Phillips 2, but I decided to go with Borndom!”
“Although each track was finished in my new studio, I have been thinking about this album ever since I finished the last one, and so I see it as an accumulation of all the different ideas and inspirations I have collected over that time,” he says. “Over the past few years, I’ve had so many ideas for music that wouldn’t fit on a twelve because they aren’t very clubby, so I put them aside and used a lot of them in the album. As soon as I felt ready and knew I wanted to release another LP, I filtered through this big pile of stuff to find all the good ideas.”
As for the result, Borndom takes the listener on a thirteen-track trip that only Lauer could devise. While remaining true to his signature sound and showcasing further his supreme songwriting attributes, Lauer’s latest solo work exudes a greater sense of maturity, moving away from the Balearic dancefloor tracks of his previous LP in favor of a progressive journey of distinctive synth lines and minimal ’80s pop melodies, with the welcome addition of vocals. “A lot of people told me that I should add vocals so that’s what I just started to believe. I did a couple of tries where I added my vocals—but there is not yet a plug-in that can make it sound like I can sing, so I just asked some friends if they would help me”
“I do think Borndom feels more like an album, but I didn’t intend for it to sound any different [than Phillips],” he says. “However, I would say that I put more effort into Borndom. For Phillips, I wanted to see if I could finish enough tracks to make an album because I had never done it, but for for the new one, I knew I could do it so it is a lot more consciously put together.”
As for what’s to come, it’s clear that Lauer’s recent focus on his solo material is no precedent for his future intentions. For now, it’s more collaborative projects, including some new tracks with Tim Sweeney from Beats in Space and more remixes and productions from Tuff City Kids. Rest assured, however: Lauer will be back soon.
In March, Tokyo-based beatmaker Submerseannounced he’d be returning to the Project: Mooncircle imprint with a new EP. Entitled Stay Home, the record was said to take its cues from ’90s slow jams and R&B music videos, and was partially inspired by the views of urban life visible from the window of Submerse’s ninth-story apartment in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo. Now, just a week ahead of its release, the former XLR8R podcast contributor has offered up an advance stream of EP cut “Thinking About You.”
“Thinking About You” features Submerse’s signature slow-burning beat collages, nodding toward fellow producers such as Lapalux and Shlohmo. The EP follows from Submerse’s 2014 debut album, Slow Waves, and is due out on May 26 in both vinyl and digital formats; bonus tracks will be available through the purchase of limited-edition CDs. In the meantime, further details of Stay Home are available here, and “Thinking About You” can be heard below.
Jack J of Vancouver label and collective Mood Hut debuts on Future Times next month with the Thirstin’ EP. As reported by Resident Advisor, the producer born Jack Jutson first gained attention as one half of XLR8R favorites and proprietors of playful, dusty house Pender Street Steppers, before releasing his first solo 12″ in 2014. Jutson is the latest Mood Hut affiliate to ally with Maxmillion Dunbar’s DC-based Future Times label, following records from Hashman Deejay and House of Doors last year.
According to the imprint, a-side cut “Thirstin'” “takes the day-in-the-life quintessence of Something (On My Mind) even further, using his voice to beautify the sparkling, spaced track.” Flipside, “Atmosphere” is said to have a “Patrick Adams vibe.” Clips for both tracks can be previewed below, ahead of the EP’s official arrival in June.
French producer my.head has been releasing music for around half a decade, churning out genre-spanning tracks on his own and across collaborations with grime artist Last Japan and Norwegian singer/producer Ida Dillan. This week saw the release of his latest EP, En Noir, on Kastle’s Symbols imprint. The cinematic EP was born out of “hardship and a solitary, 18 month recording process,” taking in Sci-Fi movies, video games, and contemporary hip-hop as influences. Pulled from the EP is “Reversed Wish,” an atmospheric cut underpinned by thick, floating pads, with twisted vocals, snare rolls, and faint wind chimes filling things out. The EP is available now and can be purchased here, with “Reversed Wish” available as a free download below.
In early 20012, few people outside of the Netherlands were familiar with Lars Dales and Maarten Smeets. Nowadays, pretty much anybody with an interest in quality house music knows who they are—perhaps not by their names, but definitely by their production moniker. Dales and Smeets are the men behind Detroit Swindle, a duo which in three short years has rocketed to the top of the four-to-the-floor universe through a series of rock-solid releaes, released on some of dance music’s most revered labels. One of those labels, Freerange, has just released the pair’s Figure of Speech EP, a release that sees Dales and Smeets adding a touch of Afro- and Brazilian-tinged swagger to their bag of strutting tricks. XLR8R caught up with the pair via Skype at Detroit Swindle’s Amsterdam headquarters, and discovered that the charming twosome are a bit amazed themselves at their rapid ascent.
You guys seem like such an established part of the house-music scene nowadays – but in reality, you’ve only been releasing music as Detroit Swindle for three years. I’m guessing those three years must be something of a blur. Dales: Yeah, it has been! We started because we just wanted to do it, basically, and it’s all happened very quickly. The goal wasn’t big success; the goal was to make music, and see what happened. Then from the first release on, it just all happened with a bang—and the ball has never really stopped rolling.
What had you both been doing before Detroit Swindle? Smeets: Lars had been DJing a long time as his job, and I used to working in advertising. But I had been promoting parties here in Amsterdam as a fun side project for a while, mainly the underground, techno, German, Dixon-style kind of stuff. Lars was doing more hip-hop kind of stuff. We knew each other through promoting through the same club a while back, but never really got together. But then at some point, we did—and this is what happened!
Did you pick up any marketing skills from your advertising days that have helped you out in the dance-music world? Smeets: Lars is actually the big Facebook and Twitter fan, so he does all the social stuff. Which I guess is funny, because that’s how I used to earn my money.
That’s probably why you don’t want to do it now. Smeets: That’s probably true. [laughs] But having a experience in advertising does make a difference, I think—you kind of know what people on the other side of the spectrum want to see. You know how communication works. Dales: And how business is conducted. Most artists have a very…”artist” point of view, I guess. Which we do too, I guess, but we both had tons of experience from our former jobs. Besides DJing, I had been a promoter for a decade, and from that, we know how to talk to a promoter when something is wrong or something has to be changed. Having a background in different things has definitely helped.
Speaking of marketing—how did you settle on Detroit Swindle as a name? Dales: We had known for a while, and then we lost touch for a long time, and then after ten years we re-met, and started talking about music. Maarten was playing for me and my former partner at this café-club, and we needed to have a serious talk about the music he was playing. It was a gay club, and what he was playing was maybe a little bit too…serious, maybe. So we were talking about that, and realized that we really liked all the same stuff. The biggest common denominator was music from Detroit—Motown stuff, a lot of Detroit hip-hop and other things. So when we finally started this project, we wanted to pay homage to our biggest musical connection. But we didn’t want to sound like we were saying we’re from Detroit—so the Swindle part was added to be a little tongue-in-cheek, and to let people know that we’re not actually from Detroit. Sometimes people don’t understand it, though—we have to explain it.
I wonder if Motor City Drum Ensemble has the same problem. Smeets: He can say that he’s Stuttgart, which is the the German motor city—so he’s okay. Dales: It doesn’t really matter anymore where you are from; music doesn’t have any geographical boundary now, anyway. It’s more about the music you make rather than the name you choose. In retrospect, yes, we might have chosen a different name, because people from Detroit tend to misinterpret our intentions.
Detroit natives can be very protective of their city. Smeets: And rightly so. Dales: We don’t want to borrow their culture heritage. We just want to pay homage to the music we grew up with.
It’s certainly a catchy name. Smeets: You can still say when you’re drunk, which is important.
Has your own hometown, Amsterdam, been supportive of what you’ve been doing? Dales: Yes—but the funny thing for us was that we didn’t really start out as a resident DJ team somewhere in Amsterdam. We started by making and releasing music—and our first success was international, not local. The records were picked up in England and in Germany, and then suddenly we’re doing a U.S. tour. Everything that happened here actually came a bit later than the rest of the world. We do headline a lot of parties here, but we’re still building our name here more than you might expect. We do seem to be getting more and more supporters every day, which is really nice to see.
Where does it seem like you have the most support. Dales: It used to be U.K., Germany, Holland, and then the United States that were our biggest followers. But I just checked Souncloud today, and now it goes, U.K., United States, Germany and Holland. So the United States is going up.
You’ve just released the Figure Of Speech EP on Freerange, and you’ve been associated with Freerange since Detroit Swindle’s early days—how did the original hook-up with that label happen? Smeets: We actually had a list of labels that we really wanted to release on, sort of like if everything happened according to whatever our biggest plan might be, we might get a release on Freerange. And we’d be the happiest guys in town. We got in touch with Jamie [Odell, a.k.a. Freerange label founder Jimpster] through a mutual friend and sent him “Creep,” which was the title track from the first EP—and he was blown away by it. When we got his e-mail saying that he wanted the track, and if we had two other tracks to put on the release, we just couldn’t believe it. Dales: We hadn’t even been releasing music for half a year then. So we had to make bigger goals at that point!
You had already reached your original goal. Dales: Right. And because we love Freerange so much, we said we would do more EPs for the label. We’ve released one a year since then.
The Figure Of Speech EP isn’t a huge departure, style-wise, for Detroit Swindle., but the title track has a definite Afro influence, and “Live at the Cosmic Carnival” has a real tribal feel to it. Were you making an effort to add a bit of rhythmic diversity to your sound, or was it simply just the way those tracks came out? Dales: In the past year, we’ve actually been playing a lot of Afro-infused stuff, and buying a lot of records with that sound. This particular record came together after we visited Recordland in Calgary, which is one of the biggest second-hand record shops we’ve ever been to. We bought a bunch of weird conga stuff and African drum records that had all these great samples. So its two things: We’ve been playing a lot of Afro-infused stuff and have really been enjoying it, and from that, we’ve been getting inspiration to make something that we get the same enjoyment thing. And thanks to Recordland, we had the opportunity to sample lots of obscure old percussion solos and all kinds of things. So it’s not really an effort; it’s more just that the music has evolved. Smeets: Our music has become more and more diverse, I think—we’ll play disco, too, or we’ll fit funk and soul tracks into our sets. The evolution is that our sound is getting broader, with more influences coming out. Dales: In the beginning, we were mostly listening to deep house, so we didn’t really have the foundation yet. I mean, we had the hip-hop thing, and the funk and soul thing, but we never had much background with Afrobeat, for example, or the original true disco stuff. So we weren’t playing that. Now we’re playing it more and more and more, and that comes through in this EP, I think.
Besides Freerange, the quality of labels that Detroit’s been on in the past three years is quite amazing. There’s Dirt Crew Recordings,Murmur, Tsuba…these are among the elite of the world’s house-music labels, which must give you guys a feeling of fulfillment. Smeets: It’s been really special to be on labels that we really regard highly, and that a lot of other people regard highly as well. The fact that we have a good connection with people like Jamie, and Kevin [Griffiths] from Tsuba and Peter [Gyselaers] from Dirt Crew has really helped both with our production work and our confidence about what we’re doing. We’re really lucky. Dales: The weird thing is that we never really thought that we had released so many tracks! We were looking at our own Beatport page and saw that there were over 35 tracks. We were like, really? You don’t really think about it until you see it.
I guess you can get a lot done when you are full-time artists. Smeets: In the beginning, it wasn’t so easy. For the first year, Lars was still playing other gigs because, well, you’ve got to pay your bill. I had a kid—now I have two—and was still working three days a week at the ad agency. We had to put every free hour we had in the studio. Dales: I think we actually spend less time now in the studio than we did then. That’s because of the touring. Smeets: Basically, we’ve been really busy! [laughs]
And you’ve also been busy with your own label, Heist. Other than releasing your own material on Heist, how do you decide what to put out on the label? Dales: It’s all gut feeling. Most of the people that we’ve released, we already knew, either personally or professionally. But beyond that, we just ask people, “We really dig your sound—would you be up for releasing on your label?” And luckily, most of them are. As the label grows and does well, it gets even easier to get people. Now they’re like, “Oh my God, it’s Heist—I really want to do it!” We do occasionally get a demo that really hits us. Smeets: Like this one we have coming out in September. It’s from this completely unknown couple of guys Dales: I think they have 31 friends on Facebook, who are probably their mothers and fathers and friends and nieces. [laughs] But they make really cool stuff. And that’s the best part about having your own label. Maarten: It’s not about money; it’s not about likes; it’s just about sharing amazing music.
Can you name this up-and-coming act? Smeets: Yes, we can! It’s Ouer. Not the easiest of names, but that’s not important. It’s nice, electronic, distorted but soulful house with a very cool vibe. Dales: One of the guys actually booked us in the very beginning, right after we started. Suddenly he sent us all these tracks—and they were all amazing.
So what’s next on the Detroit Swindle agenda? Smeets: Well, we’ve been doing our live set for a while now—but we’ve completely changed it over the past year, and now it involves a lot more gear. Which is a lot of fun, but a bitch to carry around! So we’ll be doing that a lot. We have a big festival coming up in Belgium in a place called Dour, and for that, we’ll be bringing a keyboard player, an amazing player who used to tour with Jamie Lidell. It’s almost like the Detroit Swindle Band! Or something that might evolve into that, at least. It’s a lot of work—we still need to practice a lot—but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. And we’ll be coming back to the States in the first two weeks of July, and doing all these other cool festivals, like this solstice festival in Iceland, something in Croatia, and the Southern Soul Festival in Montenegro with Gilles Peterson, Nightmares on Wax and Ron Trent. We’re really concentrating on trying to do a lot of diverse, not-too-obvious kinds of shows. Which might not be the best idea, business-wise—but if its fun to do, it doesn’t matter so much how much you get paid.
“Fun” seems to be the operative word for you guys. Dales: This is our job, so we do need to make enough money to live, but it was never about the money. We can’t really complain—we’re buying lots of cool stuff for the studio, we get to travel, and we get to buy cool sneakers or whatever. But it’s really about doing what we love to do. I know that sounds super-corny—but we really just want to make music and play music.
Bristol talent Marcel Lune, whose esoteric, slightly hyperactive productions have previously found favour in our Downloads section, has announced his debut LP. Entitled Sounds From The Desert Gully, the full-length offering is said to gather together 12 “maximalist, genre spanning grooves” that blend influences as diverse as hip hop, saccharine pop, G-Funk, 2-Step and glitch. No audio samples are yet available online, but we have included the album’s artwork and tracklist below ahead of its full release via Tony Thorpe’s Studio Rockers label on July 17.
01. Noookula 02. Cali 96 ft Lee Laamaj 03. Voids 04. Soul Beat Runner 05. Voyager 06. Seawolf 07. Gully State 08. D’angelo 09. Fantazia ft Haze 10. Only You 11. Under The Willow 12. Eight Legged Elephant
