Following on the heels of his Feel the Heat EP, LA artist—and former XLR8R podcast contributor—Groundislava has revealed the full details of his upcoming third LP, Frozen Throne. Set to arrive on September 23 via Friends of Friends, Frozen Throne is said to find its creator “exploring the blurred lines between fiction and reality, and technologies’ heavy interplay between these two worlds.” Furthermore, Los Angeles singer/songwriter duo Rare Times features heavily on the LP, including on “Girl Behind the Glass,” the album’s neon-soaked lead single, which is streaming in full below. Frozen Throne‘s artwork and full tracklist have also been included below the player.
01 Girl Behind The Glass (ft. Rare Times) 02 Terminate Uplink 03 Frozen Throne (ft. Rare Times) 04 Under The Glow (ft. Rare Times) 05 The Descent 06 Feel The Heat (ft. Rare Times) 07 October Acid 08 A Way Out 09 October Pt. 2 (ft. Rare Times) 10 Steel Sky (ft. Rare Times)
Dutch producer Applescal will return to his own Atomnation label with the five-track Mirage EP next month. “This EP is a little darker than the work I’ve released in the past,” the artists says in a press release, going on to explain, “I sampled world music and meditation music and then messed that up in Ableton. It’s a very different approach of making music.” Having already released LP track “The Veil” as part of a single series earlier in the year, Mirage will feature four new works from the producer, including the methodical, acid-flecked “Royal Slump,” which is streaming in full below.
Applescal’s Mirage EP is set to land on August 12; its full tracklist can also be found below.
01 The Veil 02 Royal Slump 03 Dark Hearts 04 Drowning Souls 05 Dozen People
Hailing from Toronto, Nicholas Spencer and Parker Nowlan (a.k.a. HolloH) are set to release a self-titled EP via the Rare Beef label next week. Here we have “Laying Awake,” a polshed production from the HolloH EP which serves as its most house-minded effort. Spanning over four minutes, the tune at first builds with layers of slow, moody chords and light melodic adornments, until—just after the one-minute mark—the pair lays into a low-reaching dancefloor stomp, from which it doesn’t take its sights off for the rest of the track’s heavy-handed run. HolloH’s six-track self-titled EP is slated to arrive in full on August 5.
With the release of Simian Mobile Disco’s next full-length effort, Whorl, still over a month away from seeing its release, the UK duo has shared a new video for the album’s second single, “Dervish.” Taking on a similarly hypnotic form as the video for the record’s first single, “Tangents,” Simian Mobile Disco’s new clip is built around an ever-changing set of grainy shapes, which look like the most psychedelic result one could possibly get manipulating the tracking knobs on a VHS tape. The morphing set of images pairs nicely with “Dervish,” an efficient production which places cascading chords and bubbling synth melodies over a sturdy dancefloor beat.
The full video for “Dervish” can be watched below; SMD’s Whorl LP is set to arrive via Anti- on September 9. In the meantime, the pair’s recent addition to our 20 Questions interview series can be read here.
FKA Twigs has been the subject of a fair amount of hype recently, and not without reason—the London-based, multidisciplinary artist seems to have hit on a particularly potent sound and visual aesthetic hybrid. Amidst a string of highly stylized videos that have been surfacing throughout the summer, she announced plans to release her debut full-length via the Young Turks label, and before the record drops, LP cut “Pendulum” has been made available to stream. The track, which shows off her fractured, somewhat ethereal take on R&B, is set to a series of distorted images and can be streamed in full below. The full 10-track album, LP1, is due out on August 12.
A standout of Montreal’s early-aughts techno scene, Deadbeat has since gone on to relocate to Berlin, where the former XLR8R podcast contributor has maintained a prolific streak of noteworthy releases, and launched his own label, BLKRTZ, in 2011. Now, the artist born Scott Monteith has launched a campaign to help raise funds for a deluxe vinyl reissue of his first three full-length albums, which originally appeared via Pole’s now defunct ~scape label, and have long been out of print.
“Much to my surprise, I recently realized that the new year would mark the 10th anniversary of the release of my third album on the ~scape label, New World Observer,” Monteith explains. “Having not listened to it for some time I was doubly horrified when I went looking for it to find that I no longer possessed a single vinyl copy of it in my collection here in Berlin.” Thus the idea for the deluxe vinyl box set was born, with the artist hoping to “lovingly remaster and package” New World Observer along with his two other LPs completed between 2002 and 2005—Wild Life Documentaries and Something Borrowed, Something Blue—all of which are said to have been produced in a “little grey room” that served as Monteith’s first full-time studio.
Over on the Indie GoGo campaign, supporters can claim a copy of the box set for €75, along with a number of other packages which include a remix from the man himself and a USB key with Deadbeat’s entire back catalog. More information can be found here, while the three albums set to be included in the reissue can be streamed in full below.
Wild Life Documentaries 01 Open My Eyes That I May See 02 Organ In The Attic Sings The Blues 03 For Palestine 04 For Israel (Jaffa Revisited) 05 Let It Rain 06 Cause For Hope 07 To Berlin With Love 08 A Dub For Akufen 09 When First You Gave Me Shivers 10 Kezia
Something Borrowed, Something Blue 01 A Brief Explanation 02 Head Over Heels 03 White Out 04 Requiem 05 Steady As A Rock 06 Fixed Elections 07 A Joyful Noise (Part I) 08 A Joyful Noise (Part 2) 09 Quitting Time 10 Portable Memory (The Final Cut)
New World Observer 01 Slow Rot From Rhetoric 02 Port-Au-Prince 03 N’Importe Quoi 04 Abu Ghraib 05 Texas Tea 06 O LIttle Town Of Bethlehem 07 Time Is Passing Slowly 08 Rock Of Ages 09 Ruination 10 Habitat For Heavy Hearts
Romanian producer Liar is next up to appear on Canadian label Infinite Machine’s growing catalog, who has dropped notable EPs from recent XLR8R podcast contributor Pixelord and East London duo Wallwork & RZR in the past few weeks. With his Scorpio EP set to land via the label August 18, Liar has passed along this remix of EP cut “Key Party” from Canadian talent Spurz. On it, Spurz reshapes the track into an even more heavy-handed club affair, one where machine-made percussion rattles and rolls underneath a focused assemblage of blistering synths. Before Liar’s full Scorpio EP sees its official release, the record is available to preview after the jump.
Earlier this month, Ikonika revealed plans to release a new EP for Hyperdub, which has long served as her label home base. Before Position lands at the end of the summer, the London-based producer has shared EP cut “Praxis” as a teaser. While the upcoming record was reportedly inspired by recent touring experience—it’s said to be primed for club play and showcases the artist in “straight-up banger mode”—this introspective bass mutation finds her revisiting themes from her debut LP, Contact, Want, Love, Have, and is built around refractive neon synths, a slow-growing melody, and filtered percussion.
Position will see official release on August 25, and “Praxis” can be streamed in full below. In addition, Ikonika dropped a new mix today, turning in a fifty-minute set for FACT’s ongoing podcast series, which can be streamed and downloaded in full here.
The second annual Dekmantel Festival is taking place this weekend in Amsterdam, which prompted us to take a closer look at the impressive crew making it happen.
In the wake of last year’s inaugural festival, the name Dekmantel has quickly shot to prominence. And while this ascent may have seemed swift for the casual observer, the story of how the small team behind it—which also maintains party promoter and record label arms under the same name—got to this point is one of slow and steady development, lifelong friendships, and an unshakable passion for music. As Thomas Martojo—who runs the company alongside his childhood friend and co-founder Casper Tielrooij and newer addition Matthijs Theben Terville—explains, the group first began to take shape when its members were quite young.
“There was a group of about 10 us who all lived in The Hague,” he says, “which is a relatively big place by Dutch standards, but still feels like a town. In our teens, we discovered electronic music but there wasn’t much going on there, so we started getting into the party scenes in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. It became a tradition to get on the train every weekend and go to big techno parties in these places.” To anyone with a reasonable understanding of the history of electronic music in Europe, The Hague of 10 to 15 years ago might sound like the perfect place to start out; however, for Martojo and his friends, this wasn’t The Hague of I-F, Viewlexx, Bunker, and the Cybernetic Broadcasting System. “We were only 15 or 16 during the final years of that notorious scene,” he says. “The kinds of house and techno we were listening to were totally different to the stuff coming out of The Hague. That scene was so incredibly underground, with parties for maybe 150 people in squatted buildings, that at our age we just didn’t know that it was going on. It’s a shame really, because these days we book those guys all the time—they’re heroes in our book. It just came too early for us though.”
Dekmantel Soundsystem: Casper Tielrooij, Jan van Kampen, Thomas Martojo
Having cut their teeth by going to big events in the larger cities of the Netherlands, the friends moved en masse to Amsterdam in their early 20s, which is where things really started to happen. “We were getting into a lot of American house music,” Martojo says, “but there wasn’t really any of that getting played in Amsterdam at the time, so we started to do our own parties. San Proper played our first one [in 2007], which was at a 200-capacity club where we just put 200 of our friends on the guest list.” Never tying itself to one club, Dekmantel allowed the size of the venues to grow with its own popularity and the profile of its guests, from 200 to 400 to 600 and up to 1,500 for the crew’s third birthday party. Detroit was a major focus of those early years; artists like Robert Hood and Moodymann were among the earliest guests, and kept coming back—their total Dekmantel appearances now reach into double digits. In parallel to these relationships with legendary Detroit names, Dekmantel also developed close ties with a raft of top-flight UK talent (Floating Points, Joy Orbison, Ben UFO, and the Numbers crew are all regular bookings) and the Ostgut Ton/Berghain family, amongst others. And while Dekmantel’s ace curation continues to be at the heart of its appeal, the guys themselves aren’t exactly slouches when it comes to DJing. Martojo and Tielrooij team up with Jan van Kampen to form Dekmantel Sounsystem (pictured at top), and while the trio reliably warms up Dekmantel events, it’s increasingly finding itself being tapped for other promoters’ bills as well.
Once the parties had become established, the next part of the Dekmantel operation to take shape was the record label, although it actually happened in the most unplanned of ways. “We had gotten to know Juju & Jordash, who played one of our parties and then gave us a load of unreleased music that they couldn’t find a label for,” says Martojo. “We were blown away by the quality of it, and we thought, ‘If nobody wants to release this stuff, then we need to start our own label to release it, because it needs to be heard.’ So the first things we ever released [were an EP and] a full album by them, and then an EP by San Proper.” Those first releases appeared in 2009 and 2010, and since then, more material from both Juju & Jordash and San Proper, plus EPs from the likes of Joey Anderson, Mark du Mosch, and Vakula, have cemented the label’s reputation as a go-to hub of interesting, high-quality house music.
Matthijs Theben Terville
Still, it was last year’s introduction of the Dekmantel Festival that truly elevated the crew to another level. A three-day event in a forest near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the festival garnered ecstatic reviews—including one from XLR8R—for its blend of a fantasy line-up (John Talabot, Levon Vincent, and Move D featured among dozens of similarly impressive names), boutique scale, and happy, relaxed atmosphere. “Not much about last year could have gone any better,” Martojo admits. “We really had no idea what to expect, but we found when we started booking for it that we could pretty much just put together the ideal line-up of artists. That’s pretty extraordinary because the Dutch festival season is one of the most crowded in the world—in Amsterdam alone, through the summer there are between eight and 10 festivals to choose from every weekend. It certainly helped that we already had long-standing relationships with a lot of the artists we wanted to book, but everything just turned out amazingly well, not only in terms of the program, but also in terms of production and the crowd who came along.”
The festival’s original capacity of 5000 is to be raised to around 8 or 9000 this year, a move that Martojo says is necessary from a financial standpoint but shouldn’t compromise the event’s original charm. “When people came last year, I think they expected it to be a big festival because of the strength of the line-up. It wouldn’t have been financially viable to keep the capacity at 5000 again, but we’re really confident that we can take the capacity up by a few thousand and still keep the small-scale mood of last year.” Along with the increase in capacity will come the addition of a fifth stage, the purely DJ-focused Selector Stage, which will feature the likes of Ben UFO, DJ Harvey, Gerd Janson, Prins Thomas, and Optimo. XLR8R, Resident Advisor, RBMA, and Boiler Room have been enlisted for the other stages, which reflects the widespread stamp of approval that Dekmantel has been given.
Having personally curated every one of the almost 100 names on the bill this year, Martojo reacts with amused indignation at being asked to pick a highlight. When pressed, however, he picks out the booking of Three Chairs (Moodymann, Marcellus Pittman, Rick Wilhite and Theo Parrish) as the one he was most happy about confirming. “We’ve been trying to get them booked since day one, but it’s so complicated to get them all together inside a venue. Last year they weren’t available, so this year, they were the first booking. We’ve been fanboys of all of them for so long, and now they’re coming to play a six-hour set for us, which is just amazing really.”
Save for the medium-term possibility of starting occasional parties outside the Netherlands, Dekmantel’s events calendar seems to have grown to what the crew considers to be an ideal size. On one end of the spectrum, the teams heads up a couple of not-too-big festivals (Dekmantel also runs the one-day Lente Kabinet event), yet the crew also has carte blanche to hold parties big or small in Amsterdam whenever it sees fit. “We don’t really want the festivals or parties to grow any bigger,” Martojo says. “I think 2015 will be the year to really step things up with the label and maybe branch out a bit on the music that comes out on it. If you look at the festival, the line-up really runs from A to Z, so we’d like to try and see if we can make that shine through more on the label. With whom? You’ll just have to wait and see.”
Matt Walsh (pictured above) is a London DJ/producer who serves as the driving force behind the Clouded Vision label. Next month, Walsh is set to issue The Clouded Vision Experiment Level 2, the second in a compilation series that will gather new and exclusive material from the label’s catalog for a triple-vinyl package and an accompanying mix CD stitched together by the label head himself. Featured in the collection is Walsh’s remix of Remote‘s “Alcyone,” the title track of the French duo’s 2013 EP for the label. On his rework, Walsh focuses on an uncomplicated drum-machine beat, which pulses underneath spacey processions of analog synths and gently tweaked acid melodies. Furthermore, Walsh takes two separate breaks during the course of his remix, cutting out the track’s rhythmic elements in order to further highlight the depth of Remote’s original synth work. The full The Clouded Vision Experiment Level 2 compilation/mix CD will see its official release on August 11.
