While we did spend a good portion of our recent review of the “Fists of Ham” single lamenting the fact that the debut LP from Hackman (pictured above) is still yet to arrive, we are of course still happy to hear new remixes from the talented artist. This new rework of “Lazy Days”—the original for which was produced by a team of DJ/producers associated with the Big Chill party crew—is a particularly chunky production, one which finds Hackman employing his usual spread of spacey pads and low-swinging percussion while also letting a playful bassline sneak in underneath. Without a doubt, the combination makes for an enticing remix, and one that is likely to serve its ultimate purpose well—sharing news of Hackman’s upcoming set at The Big Chill House in London on August 24. Best yet, the fast-approaching night—a video flier for which can be found after the jump—is said to be as free as this very download used to spread the word.
Na, half of eclectic LA duo Nguzunguzu, has announced that his forthcoming debut EP, called Xtreme Tremble, is set for release via Fade to Mind next month. The news immediately follows the announcement of all-star collaborative project Future Brown—comprising Fatima al Qadiri, Nguzunguzu, and J-Cush—whose “Wanna Party” single we shared last week. Judging by the clip of EP track “Flute Gasp,” Xtreme Tremble looks to continue with the futuristic, club-minded direction that much of Fade to Mind’s output takes. Xtreme Tremble will drop on September 3, but before then, its tracklist can be viewed below, along with a preview of “Flute Gasp.”
Though Gerry Read hasn’t exactly maintained radio silence in 2013, the oddball house producer hasn’t nearly had the same kind of prolific year as the previous two. But things could be ramping up, as Fourth Wave has just announced that he’ll drop a new 12″ late next month. “You Got No God Damn Groove” b/w “Rubber Hands” seems to continue in a vein nearly identical to the skewed dancefloor music we’ve come to expect from Gerry Read. The wiggling basslines and extra-raw drums of his new a-side cut—which can be streamed below—clearly indicate that the young artist hasn’t lost his taste for the stranger corners of the house spectrum.
UK garage junkie T. Williams has been keeping particularly busy, as of late—sharing single after single from his upcoming Feelings Within EP for PMR, and plotting a co-headlining tour of North America with Mosca. And now with his new record’s release date just around the corner, Williams is treating us to the third track from that offering. Streaming below, “Mobb” is a heavy bassline tune, one which is propelled with a skipping drum pattern and colored in with a bit of sampled vocal melody. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, but in the hands of T. Williams, these simple ideas sound pretty impressive.
It would be difficult to deny that, in some ways at least, Bristol resident Laurie Osborne (a.k.a. Appleblim) has a natural aptitude for electronic music. He was, after all, one of the two producers behind Skull Disco; a label-cum-collaborative project from Osborne and partner Sam Shackleton, it was rightly regarded as one of the most adventurous and aesthetically complete enterprises to come out of the formative years of dubstep.
Since Skull Disco’s demise in 2008, Osborne has been running his current label, Apple Pips, where he’s been responsible for curating a release schedule that anticipated dubstep’s shift towards the more robust rhythms of house and techno. Early releases from the likes of Martyn, Ramadanman, and T++ began joining the dots between the deep, sub-focused textures of South London and the classic sounds of Detroit and Berlin, long before this became commonplace.
Appleblim “Vansan” (Skull Disco, 2007)
His DJ career has followed a similar trajectory too; at the helm of the sixth addition of Tempa’s seminal Dubstep Allstars mixes in 2008, Osborne was instrumental in testing the boundaries—both sonically and geographically—of dubstep’s then-intimate inner sanctum. His sets in the latter half of the ’00s were undoubtedly influential in breaking dubstep’s religious adherence to 140 bpm, allowing elements of house and techno to bleed into the sound. As a producer too, in the years following the dissolution of Skull Disco, he’s been responsible for a string of excellent collaborations with the likes of Peverelist, Geiom, Ramadanman, and October.
Yet despite all these achievements, Osborne, by his own admission, struggles with the fundamental process of creating electronic music. Having begun his musical career as bassist for alt-rock band The Monsoon Bassoon, the idea of sitting alone in the studio, as a solo producer, and creating tracks away from the influence of any collaborators is still, it seems, not something that comes naturally to him. It’s for this reason that—surprisingly for a DJ and label owner of his prominence—until recently, one could almost count the amount of solo Appleblim tunes in circulation on one hand.
“It’s just slackness and lack of confidence,” Osborne explains. “I’ve never really considered myself an electronic musician; I’m a bass player, a guitar player, and I can play drums and keys, whatever, but when I first started making tunes, I was just using Fruity Loops and cutting up samples, and I never felt that they were really finished tracks. They were just ideas that I happened to do and that Shackleton was happy enough to put out. I probably would never have done that on my own. It was only through Shack saying ‘Right, I’m mastering this release, get me something finished by next week and we’ll put it out.'”
Appleblim “Fluorescent” (Apple Pips, 2013)
That said, recent months have seen Osborne begin to approach production with a renewed energy. Following several years of hectic DJing, 2013 has seen him ease off the touring schedule, create a new studio space, and begin to tackle music making head-on. As a result, recent weeks have seen a string of new Appleblim tunes begin to emerge, including his first fully solo 12″, “Fluorescent” b/w “Past Present Future.” The key to this new approach, Osborne explains, is setting deadlines; he’s taken to booking mastering dates in advance and working to enforced timeframes. “That’s the only way I can get things done; if there’s a deadline, I’ll do it,” he says. “Like, for the recent SUB:STANCE boxset, they told me, ‘You’ve got to have something finished by this time, and if you don’t do it, you won’t be on there,’ so I did it! But I’ve always been really bad at setting myself deadlines like that. I’ve got tons of half-done tracks that I’m just tinkering with, but it always takes me a long time to do that final push.” Osborne continues, “I’ve had a reasonably good response [to my new material], but I never really know if people play my tunes. Even with Skull Disco, I don’t know how many people ever really played them in clubs; there were a few plays on Rinse and a few plays at DMZ but it was never really, like, peak time, big DJs playing my stuff. It was more like it would crop up in warm-up sets and stuff. So I never really think about people playing my tunes, but every now and then someone will come up and be like, ‘Oh, I heard your track out and it sounded really good.’ And that’s still a buzz.”
Osborne appears to be operating with increased confidence these days, but despite his recent surge in solo activity, the idea of collaboration remains key to his musical outlook. Aside from his recent solo endeavors, Osborne speaks enthusiastically about forthcoming projects with fellow Bristolians Komon and Al Tourettes. “I think the idea of collective music making is much more appealing to me,” he explains. “I don’t feel comfortable making music on my own. I don’t really write songs, I could never write songs with the band even—it was always just five people making music in a room together. It was more about arrangement. I’m still like that with the electronic stuff. I do bring ideas to the table, but I think my skills lie more in arranging or embellishing ideas that are already there and being knocked around. I just find every time I get in the studio with other people, lots happens.”
This natural inclination towards working with a collective seems to be manifesting itself in other ways too. As dubstep’s close-knit roots have fragmented over the past few years, he’s begun to put increasing emphasis on his local connections and friends, both when building his DJ sets and the Apple Pips release schedule. “With the way that the scene has changed and the way that my music making as changed, I want my sets to include mainly mine and my crew’s music,” Osborne explains. “My mates are making a lot of tunes, so my little core of people who release on the label are pretty prolific and they seem to be in a bit of a theme at the moment. Without trying to jump on the house thing, everything seems to be between 120 bpm and 130 bpm, because we all got a little tired of the 140 stuff. I’ve just realised recently, 60%, 70% of my sets are our stuff.”
“I think that’s cool because I come from the school of dubstep where it was all about having exclusive tunes; that was how you got a name DJing,” he continues. “It was the only way I ended up doing it, because I had access to these tunes from Bristol that, around the world, other people didn’t. I still like the exclusive nature, although I’m not chasing as many producers anymore. It used to be, because I wasn’t a music maker, or because we were all early in our music making careers, I was constantly hunting dubs off ‘big’ producers. Because we were so into the scene, we’d be like, ‘Look, we’re putting on little nights, do you fancy swapping some tunes?’ So you’d make a little CD with your stuff to give out, and you’d end up swapping it for tunes from people like Distance or Plastician. It was about trying to find these tunes that no one else had, and now, for me, it’s still about that same idea, except drawn more from a local pool of people.”
That seems fairly fitting though; there’s a cycle of influence within Bristol’s network of producers and DJs that seems to be the driving force behind the ever-evolving Apple Pips roster. Furthermore, many of the artists that Osborne references as influential in inspiring his renewed burst of creative energy—in particular Bristol collective Young Echo—come from a younger generation of creatively ambitious electronic artists for whom Skull Disco is an obvious, and often acknowledged, influence. “That’s the lovely thing about Bristol,” Osborne explains. “Every six months you’ll see, ‘Oh, so-and-so’s hooked-up with so-and-so and they’re doing a project together.’ Like, you’ve got Addison Groove and Sam Binga, and they’ve got a big tune in the drum & bass scene now, and that’s sick. And Jakes is doing his thing, and Komon is doing his thing. We’re not turning our back on anything; Komon can still make a drum & bass track that gets signed to Metalheadz, it’s all still in there, but it’s like, whatever you’re buzzing off in the studio at the time is what gets made. I see the label, basically, as just a vehicle for that; it’s just whatever people are making, that I think is good, [I want to] get it out there… Someone’s going to want to hear it, doesn’t matter if it’s 200 people or 2000. There’s stuff that I’m going to put out over the next three or four releases that’s probably not what people would expect from us, but that’s kind of cool, I think. It’s kind of fun.”
Seminal producer Andrew Weatherall has just served up his hypnotizing remix of a cut from Icelandic singer/songwriter Emiliana Torrini‘s upcoming Tookah LP for Rough Trade. Though he relies on a patient tempo, Weatherall’s version of “Speed of Dark” could make for decent dancefloor fare, as he stretches it to a 10-minute production packed full of rolling synths, classic drum-machine sounds, and spacey FX that—despite their genre-crossing nature—complement Torrini’s distinctive voice surprisingly well. Also worth mentioning is the attention Weatherall pays to the glut of reverb-soaked drones, sounds which give some added depth to his track’s looping framework.
Both Gingy and Bordello are competent producers in their own right, but the Canadian producers have undoubtedly crafted their most eye-popping work as a unit. The duo first gained considerable attention with last year’s Iron & Water, the title track of which also appeared on Turbo’s impressive manifesto compilation, New Jack Techno. The pair’s latest outing, Saturday Night Fervor, was originally recorded in January and was subsequently shelved for the summertime, but now that it’s arrived, it finds the pair’s productions more streamlined than ever before. With its sturdy drums and hyperactive interplay between synths and samples, it would be misleading to call the record a reinvention, but it does find Gingy & Bordello relying less on clever twists and more on a grounded, focused approach to production.
As one might expect, the titular “Saturday Night Fervor” is the standout original here. The tune is a patient, solidly built number that opens up with a muted stomp before allowing its spinning vocal samples and sawing rhythms to take shape. Eventually, the track anchors itself firmly to the dancefloor with the introduction of a winning chord and an engrossing low end, locking into a persistent groove that runs on autopilot for the rest of the track’s seven minutes. On the flip, Gingy & Bordello strip things down on the more skeletal “All Day,” though the tune is quickly one-upped by by techno mainstay Robert Hood, who continues his recent hot streak and closes the proceedings with an impeccable remix. His rework throttles the track’s original groove, creating an uptempo clatter of chopped vocals and pulsing drums, though the composition is tempered with lush, half-completed chord progressions. Without question, Hood’s remix steals the spotlight, but the EP remains a concise, fun listen that demonstrates why Gingy & Bordello is still an outfit that deserves our attention.
Niva‘s remix of Still Parade‘s “Actors” tune is a decidedly lush affair. It sees the Swedish producer abandoning the original song’s folk-tinged framework, soaking his version of the music in a blend of thick pads and spacey FX. Still Parade’s vocals have been considerably dialed back here, but they still play a crucial role in gracefully moving the tune along, whether it’s through the delivery of hushed lyrics or through multiple layers of treated harmonies. And Niva’s drumwork, although programmed, has a strong acoustic feel that helps bring the track to life.
In June, Don’t Be Afraid label boss Benjamin Semtek announced the launch of DBA Special Editions, a more straightforward, club-oriented counterpart to his leftfield house outpost. While the DBA roster includes the likes of Detroit hardware experimentalist MGUN and hazy producer-songwriter Alis, the new imprint’s inaugural release comes from Portland, Maine-based producer Disco Nihilist (a.k.a. Mike Taylor), who tends to focus more on crunchy drum programming than dilapidated song structures. The four cuts on his Journey to the End of the Night EP are certainly concise—each features a powerful beat and catchy, friendly instrumentation—but at times, the simplicity feels a bit plain.
For the most part, Taylor leaves his beats unembellished. The blunt, sturdy rhythm on opener “Money Don’t Matter Tonight” takes the lead, driving through a corrugated-sounding synth loop and swollen bassline with crisp, Chicago-style drum programming. On “Midnight to St. John,” Taylor rolls out more powerful kicks dusted with hi-hats and massive claps, which collapse into tightly controlled, sputtering breakdowns. It’s an effective, tried-and-true style of percussion, but it’s not compelling on its own, which makes stripped-down club tool “St. John’s Drums” feel a bit predictable. “Late Nights” deviates slightly from the rest; the kicks are strong, but Taylor fills out the rhythm with hand drums, a bright hook, and a waggling bassline, giving the track a swaggering momentum and a Latin tinge.
With the cheeky note “No tracklist, all tape hiss,” New York label RVNG posted a brand-new mix from breakout Brooklyn house experimentalist Anthony Naples to its website today. The hour-long DJ set is described as “a mix of blistered grooves,” which appears to be a spot-on summary once the clattering intro becomes the noisy, subterranean loop that launches Naples’ selections into more rhythmic territory. RVNG’s latest installment of its “ongoing/sporadic” mix series can be streamed in full here.
