Da Lata “Um Amor A Mais (Prophets of the South Fundi Remix)”

Chris Franck and Patrick Forge have been conjuring Afro-Brazilian sounds as Da Lata (pictured above) for 20 years, with their latest LP Fabiola dropping on October 21 via Agogo. Ahead of that occasion, “Um Amor A Mais”—the lead single from the London duo’s new album—has received a remix treatment from Glasgow-via-South Africa outfit Prophets of the South. With traditional staccato guitars, spoken and lightly chanted vocals, and Africanized synth glides, this club version of Da Lata’s song retains the ecstatic drum-circle state of the continent’s root music, while also outfitting it with some contemporary charm.

Funkee (Prophets of the South Fundi Remix)

Funkee (Prophets of the South Fundi Remix)

Um Amor A Mais (Prophets of the South Fundi Remix)

Peach Readies New 12″ from Earth House Hold

The new label helmed by resident TURBOTAX®DJ Rem Koolhaus, Peach, has just announced the details of its second release, a 12″ from Earth House Hold—a handle of veteran producer Bvdub (a.k.a. Brock Van Wey). See Through You will follow Peach’s inaugural release, the solid “Vines” b/w “Pyrex” by Cromie & Sage Caswell, when it drops on vinyl and digital formats on November 5. Van Wey has been steadily navigating the borders between deep house and ambient tropes for a decade, but his less frequent output under the Earth House Hold moniker references his days in the San Francisco deep-house scene of the ’90s. His two new tracks, “Back Where I Belong” and “A Little Late for That Now,” find the producer crafting layered and soulful house cuts which clock in at nearly 12 minutes each, and, according to the label, “recall the sultry glow and hypnotic excellence of artists like Sade.”

Five Minutes with 214 at New Forms Festival

XLR8R spent much of last weekend taking in the sights and sounds of Vancouver’s annual New Forms Festival (our full review can be found here). While making our way around the Northwest city, we took some time to catch up with a number of the weekend’s performers. Having already shared our chats with Lee Gamble and Anthony Naples, our final conversation finds us speaking with Chris Roman, a Seattle-based producer better known for his electro-minded 214 alias (or, alternately, by his house-minded J. Alvarez handle), who delivered a rare live hardware performance to close out the festival’s Saturday night. We caught up with Roman—a producer we deemed one of 2012’s best new artists—for a few minutes during the afternoon before his set to talk about why he decided to trek all his gear north of the US border and what exactly the man has been up to this year.

XLR8R: You’re playing a hardware set at New Forms. What made you want to do that instead of just DJing?
Chris Roman: I used to mostly play hardware sets about two or three years ago. I started doing it just as a way to get more gigs, and to be able to differentiate myself a bit. Since that time, I’ve picked up so much more hardware and have done a lot of new work with all of it. I thought it was time to revive the live set if someone wanted to book me for it. Right now, the set uses a mix of analog and digital gear, which makes it easier to play live as 214 rather than J. Alvarez. I’ve just found it a little harder to play straight-up house on analog gear.

What had made you stop doing the live hardware sets more recently?
It ended up just being too time consuming; packing everything up, then setting up and breaking down—it was just a lot of time and effort. And honestly, the pay usually wasn’t good enough for me to continue to risk taking my gear out of the studio.

Is that something you’re constantly worried about while you’re playing live—someone spilling a beer on your gear or knocking over your table?
It really depends on the stage and set-up of the venue. If I’m very close to the audience, then I’m pretty much always having a massive heart attack. [laughs]

What is different about the live set-up now as opposed to how you had it a few years ago?
When I was playing live before, I was only using two Elektron boxes, but now I’ve added another one and a new drum machine as well. I’ve tried to make it now to where I have two drum machines available in the set, and a couple of synths that I use for basslines or just noodling around. That makes me much more comfortable. Now, I feel like I have more room to do what I need and [don ‘t need to] worry about getting limited by the amount of gear at hand.

How much of the set is based on predetermined sequences and how much is improvised usually?
It’s definitely not entirely improvised. There is a lot of stuff that I’ve set up to make things work smoothly and transition correctly, but then there are a few “wild card” moments where I can improvise if I want.

Is the set mostly made up of songs you have already released or plan on releasing, or are these things that were made specifically for the live set?
Most all of it was made just for this set. I’ve been working on the songs for the past few months, and I’m not sure if they’ll eventually become tracks that get released or if they’ll just continue to be only a part of the live set.

It’s been a while since you played live. Is there anything in particular you’re excited or concerned about going into tonight?
I’m just excited to share the set. No one has really heard this stuff yet, so it will be nice to see people’s reactions and get a sense for how they feel about it. I’m just hoping I don’t fumble through it and that the crowd ends up digging it. In a live situation, you can’t really go off course—I can’t just put on another record. [laughs] Since it’s live, I’m locked into it, and I just have to go for it.

What have you been working on recently? Do you have releases on the way from either alias?
I’m kind of putting the J. Alvarez alias on hiatus for a bit after this winter. I’ve focused on that side of things for the last year and a half, and it’s not that I’m bored, but I like to switch back and forth after some time. I’m going to finish an EP as J. Alvarez for the Peach label, then I’ve got a track coming out on a compliation for Hallucination Limited later on this year. As 214, I’ll be doing another EP for [Clone sublabel] Frustrated Funk and another single track for a compilation that will be coming out very soon via the Touchin’ Bass label. I put a record out with them a few years ago, then they sort of took a break, but now they are starting up again and will be putting out a double-LP comp very soon, which will feature one of my tracks alongside a bunch of other artists on the label.

Do you feel like the electro sound has started to regain some traction in the last two or three years?
I think it has, especially with artists like Boddika and others like him that have started to bring the sound back a little bit in their productions. I think some of UK folks who were making dubstep and drum & bass have started messing around in the electro tempo and that’s helped, but I still think it’s closer to the bottom of the totem pole within the electronic-music community. But there are definitely artists experimenting with that style and within those tempos right now, and that’s been good. One of the reasons I’m going back to the 214 alias is that more people have been making electro records, or at least records that somehow reference electro, and I’ve just been getting inspired again.

Now that we’re entering the final stretch of 2013, is there anything specific you hope to accomplish before the year is through?
Really, I just want to play a couple more live gigs, and keep releasing more records and making more music. I’ve got a day gig, so this music thing is still more of a side hobby. It’d be great to do it full time, but that’s tough! [laughs] As long as I can keep making music and doing my thing, I’ll be happy.

Machinedrum Announces ‘Vapor City’ World Tour

With only a week or so left before the release of his Vapor City LP via Ninja Tune, Berlin-based producer Travis Stewart (a.k.a. Machinedrum) has just detailed his plans for an upcoming world tour. The multi-faceted artist will be launching the world premiere of his brand-new live show on September 27 in Seattle as part of this year’s Decibel Fesitval, a performance which Stewart says will include “a video projection made by visual artist Weirdcore,” “myself playing electronics, guitar, and vocals,” and collaborator Lane Barrington handling the drums and samples. He will continue to tour through October, November, and December, making stops all throughout parts of Europe, the UK, North America, and Japan until his final performance on December 14 in Miami. In the midst of his regular shows, Stewart also has three special Boiler Room appearances planned for New York, London, and Berlin, the details of which will be announced soon. Before it all kicks off at the end of this month, the full list of dates for Machinedrum’s Vapor City Live world tour can be found below.

Hi-Five: Forest Swords Discusses Five Albums He Was Listening to While Making His Debut LP

Earlier this month, shadowy UK producer Forest Swords released his first full-length, Engravings, via the Tri Angle label. The widely praised LP combines darkly colored abstraction with beatwork that borrows heavily from hip-hop and R&B, and drenches the results in thick layers of reverb. There’s little question that Forest Swords has cooked up a unique sonic brew, prompting many to wonder about his influences. In search of some answers, we asked the British artist to select some tunes for our Hi-Five series, and he responded with an eclectic list of albums that both soundtracked and shaped the making of Engravings.

Herman Chin Loy Aquarius Dub (Selected track: “Jah Jah Dub”)

I discovered this a couple of years ago and fell in love with it. It’s a very early dub album, and it’s actually very flat and minimal—there’s barely anything there a lot of the time. It’s so empty. It’s claustrophobic in places, like you’re in the room, and lacks much of the huge trippiness and studio trickery of later dub. It’s superb; bare bones.

Bjork Vespertine (Selected track: “Heirloom”)

I started to revisit this record after I rewatched a documentary about the making of the album. Bjork talked about honing in on microscopic sounds and rhythms, and then zooming out again and never losing sight of the bigger song. It was definitely inspiring in terms of the way I approached tweaking the sounds I chose for Engravings, and the smaller minutiae of what’s going on across it. The melodies and layering on this record are some of the best Bjork has done. I’m always curious to see where she takes her music.

Wu-Tang Clan Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Robin, who runs Tri Angle, heard an early version of [my album] and compared some of the sounds to RZA. I’d actually never really listened properly to Wu-Tang before, so I started delving into their back catalog. This record is astonishing, and in turn it definitely filtered back into what I was doing towards the end of Engravings, and the way I approached working through the top layers of rhythm and texture. It sounds so dusty, and sounds absolutely beautiful on vinyl. I caught them at Primavera in Barcelona last year and it was brilliantly chaotic.

DJ Screw Payin’ Dues

Engravings was particularly stressful to make in places, and I started seeking out albums that felt soothing on some level. It ended up with DJ Screw a lot of the time—pretty much every one of his tapes has a brilliantly selected tracklist, and they’re always perfectly sequenced. It’s got that hip-hop bounce I craved, but is halfway towards being droney, a bit dreamy perhaps. The tempo he kept a lot of these tracks at definitely connects—it just sounds “right” for me. It makes your vibrations a little higher just by slowing everything down a bit. I love how his sound veers between being almost warming and reassuring, and actually pretty intimidating and cold in places. It’s great to hear it shift depending on his song choice.

David Borden The Continuing Story of Counterpoint (Selected track: “Part 1”)

A friend of mine recommended me this series and I loved it instantly. Borden is a composer, and did a lot of music experimentations and meditations in the ’70s and ’80s, taking these huge journeys into counterpoint and minimalism, with lots of different parts. The Continuing Story of Counterpoint and its different components were written over about 10 years, I think. They move and sway in really fascinating ways—it’s very skilled and focused because it’s so repetitive and engaging. It really taught me a lot about the power of keeping it minimal when the temptation is there to pile layers on layers. He was actually commissioned to write the score for The Exorcist at one point, but it didn’t get used.

Noah Pred “Circles and Circles (Instrumental Dub)”

Running up to the release of Noah Pred‘s Third Culture LP—dropping this fall on his own Thoughtless Music label—the spacey house and techno artist has shared an instrumental dub version of its first single, “Circles and Circles.” Uncomplicated in its use of hygienic percussion and wooly bass tones, the production employs a modicum of echo, delay, and synth plinks to achieve its desired mood. Pred’s palette of restrained lounge vibes makes the cut more suited for dawn or twilight than late-night peaks. In addition, the Berlin-based DJ/producer has released a circuitous music video for his original single (directed by AUTO64), which can be viewed after the jump.

Circles and Circles (Instrumental Dub)

Call Super Black Octagons

JR Seaton makes weird house music as Call Super. Just don’t call it “outsider house.” A cursory listen ticks the familiar boxes: rough-and-ready energy, haphazard fidelity, sounds that swim against the current he’s eagerly describing. But a more intentional reading reveals that Seaton’s sound has more in common with the early-morning ambience of Sweden’s Aniara Recordings than anything with a bristly, after-hours vibe. Black Octagons, Seaton’s latest for Fabric offshoot label Houndstooth, runs fluently from blistering drum offensives to stoned, molten drift. It sounds like he’s playing games with himself, at a healthy remove from the expectations that have lately arisen around certain frequencies.

“Informer” leads with a deep-house drum-machine rhythm whose disruptive hits whiz by like bullets at a firing range. Call Super foregrounds roughed-up sounds, but those overdriven, brittle drums form a culvert over streams of mollifying sound design. Wet keys and rustling noises are mixed too low to ever take center stage, but their presence is enough to subliminally guide the experience from what seems a mournful distance. These three tracks would be overtly accessible and probably less effective if the polarity was flipped, allowing the elliptical melodies and streams of synth babble to take the lead. Instead, Black Octagons wears its garment inside out, the logo across the chest a ghostly backward message we can mostly guess at from the way the fabric is puckered. Even as its snares thwack against the listener’s skull, “Informer” and the final title track purposefully unite dubby space and rhythmic drive. “Dewsbury Severance” makes use of the same technique to somewhat different ends, slithering along as elegantly as an Actress track. The other cuts’ belligerent thrust is replaced by a more subtle sense of motion here, with Call Super tricking divergent sounds into working toward a common goal. He makes up for its sluggish pace with a sense of heavy momentum, like a frozen river breaking up during a hazy spring thaw.

Armeria “Not the Same (Taneli Remix)”

Leeds-based newcomer Armeria has slowly been making a name for himself with a few sublime house tracks, including his “Not the Same” single for Cool Kid Music (out on September 23). Featured here, UK producer Taneli (pictured above) remixes the lively cut, cooling down the sun-drenched original version into a mellower groove. Pitched vocals wisp about in the background as a glittery and beautifully piercing tone sustains throughout the reworked production, elevating the whole thing elevated as Taneli keeps his starry gaze on the dancefloor.

Not The Same (Taneli Remix)

Leon Vynehall Open EP

Leon Vynehall has been the recipient of no small amount of praise in recent months following a solid string of EPs and 12″s on labels like Well Rounded, Aus, and George Fitzgerald’s ManMakeMusic, which released his collaborative Laszlo Dancehall EP.
The Brighton DJ/producer—who last year was the subject of one of our Bubblin’ Up features, and who also did an XLR8Rpodcast earlier this year—represents something close to the zeitgeist of present-day UK dance music with his seamless blend of house, techno, and vintage garage swing.

It is largely within this territory that his latest EP, released via Martyn’s 3024 label, stays. A-side “I Get Mine, You Get Yours” possesses an impressive bump ‘n’ flex groove and a crafty sense of big-room dynamics, but ultimately feels a bit rote. On the flipside, “Step or Stone (Breath or Bone)” takes things in a livelier direction with its twisting, infectious organ line and techno-leaning menace, while “I Know Your Face, Heroine” recalls Vynehall’s earlier ambient workouts. Most impressive though is the digital-only fourth-track, “XVI (Rox Out),” which starts out as interestingly lopsided house and only gets weirder with the introduction of sampled bursts of diva vocals over a bed of skittering percussion.

On the whole, the four tracks on Open lack some of the rhythmic inventiveness that has characterized Vynehall’s previous singles. Largely gone are the sonic oddities that were present in even a track as crowdpleasing as the recent “Brother,” in favor of a rhythmic sameness. There’s no denying that Vynehall is a talented producer who knows his way around a melodic hook, but it’s perhaps worth wondering how much mileage the currently trending UK house sound has left in it.

Pinch and Mumdance Go B2B on New Mix

Tectonic label head Pinch and veteran producer Mumdance have turned in a new mix featuring the pair of Londoners going B2B as they offer a comprehensive sampling of heavy, dubwise tunes. Featuring a slew of as-yet-unreleased material and select cuts on the way from labels like Keysound, Houndstooth, Swamp81, and Tectonic, the hour-long mix is certainly not for the faint of heart. Pinch and Mumdance’s 20-track B2B session can be streamed in full below (where its tracklist is also included), and downloaded here for the price of a Tweet or Facebook post.

01 Shapednoise – As Others See Us (Hospital Productions)
02 Pinch & Mumdance – Turbo Mitzi (Dubplate)
03 Nubian Minds – Beat Refix (Dubplate)
04 Zed Bias – Copper (Forthcoming on Swamp 81)
05 Mumdance & Logos – Legion (Forthcoming on Tectonic Recordings)
06 Mumdance & Logos – Proto (Forthcoming on Tectonic Recordings)
07 Mumdance & Mao – Truth (Forthcoming on Keysound)
08 Acre – Burning Memories (Forthcoming on Cold Recordings)
09 Pinch – Down (Forthcoming on Cold Recordings)
10 DJ Richard – Leech2 (White Material)
11 Mumdance & Logos – Turrican 2 (Forthcoming on Keysound)
12 Special Request – Cold Blooded (Forthcoming on Houndstooth)
13 Mumdance – Doom (Forthcoming on Tectonic)
14 Ipman – Hellzapoppin’ (Cold Recordings Dubplate)
15 Answer Code Request – Main Mode (MDR)
16 Elmono – Casa (Cold Recordings Dubplate)
17 Mumdance & Logos – In Reverse PIV (Forthcoming on Keysound)
18 Mumdance & Logos – Move Your Body (Tectonic Dubplate)
19 Logos – Stasis Jam (Forthcoming on Keysound)
20 Lee Gamble – Rufige (Pan)

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