Download a New Mix from Kevin McPhee

Toronto-based DJ/producer Kevin McPhee has only popped up on XLR8R a handful of times since we tapped him for a Bubblin’ Up profile last summer—having only released a few tracks and the solid WNCL012 EP in the interim. (We also caught a great set from him when he performed at Foundry last month.) The latest bit to trickle down from McPhee arrives today as a mix for UK club night Louche‘s ongoing podcast series. The DJ set, though devoid of any tracklist, begins with over 10 minutes of ambient soundscapes before diving into the realms of acid house, hip-hop, UK garage, and techno—all with the slightly odd, analog-bent quality we’ve come to expect from McPhee. The mix can be downloaded at no cost, here.

Chad Valley feat. Twin Shadow “I Owe You This (Bwana Remix)”**

Following a string of releases in 2012 which included his Baby Let Me Finish EP, Canadian producer Bwana (pictured above) is back with a remix of the Twin Shadow-featuing single from UK synth-popper Chad Valley, “I Owe You This.” Bwana overhauls the original’s retro flare in favor of more forward-thinking electronics and loads of percussive elements. The vocals—which are far dreamier and toned-down in this version—take a supporting role to Bwana’s intricate rhythms, which offers a nice counterpoint to Jacques Renault’s recent remix of the same tune. Right now, Chad Valley is in the midst of a North American tour, the dates of which can be found after the jump.

04/10 – Richmond, VA – Strange Matter *
04/11 – Washington, DC – Rock & Roll Hotel *
04/12 – Brooklyn, NY – Glasslands w/ Rush Midnight
04/13 – NYC, NY – Mercury Lounge w/ Selebreties
04/15 – Hamden, CT – The Outer Space *
04/16 – Boston, MA – Brighton Music Hall *
04/17 – Montreal, QC – Il Motore *
04/18 – Toronto, ON – The Drake *
04/19 – Pontiac, MI – Crofoot Ballroom *
04/20 – Columbus, OH – Double Happiness *
04/21 – Chicago, IL – Schubas *
04/22 – Madison, WI – High Noon Saloon *
04/23 – Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry *
04/26 – Seattle, WA – Barboza ^
04/27 – Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge ^
04/29 – San Francisco, CA – Bottom Of The Hill ^
04/30 – Los Angeles, CA – The Echo ^
05/01 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar ^
05/02 – Phoenix, AZ – Rhythm Room ^
05/04 – El Paso, TX – Lowbrow Palace ^
05/06 – Dallas, TX – Three Links ^
05/07 – Austin, TX – Holy Mountain ^
05/08 – Houston, TX – Fitzgerald’s ^
* with Ghost Beach
^ with Ski Lodge

I Owe You This feat. Twin Shadow (Bwana Remix)

Watch James Blake’s Video for “Overgrown”

Though our review of Overgrown proved that we’re not so much in love with the new album by sullen UK troubadour James Blake as we are the work on some of his past 12″s and EPs, this video for that LP’s title track nonetheless has us intrigued. The decidedly dark and cinematic piece finds the singer/songwriter/producer waking from his bed in a remote cabin to slowly and deliberately walk to the edge of a seaside cliff, amassing a group of hooded followers on his journey. We’re not entirely sure what to make of it all, but it makes for an interesting companion to one of Overgrown‘s better tracks.

Check Out Youandewan’s ‘April’ Mix

XLR8R isn’t really in the habit of posting exclusive DJ mixes outside of our own weekly podcast series, but occasionally we’re presented with an option that makes us say, “Well, why not?” So, here we are with an hour-long set of solid tunes from Leeds DJ/producer Youandewan. Appropriately titled April, the UK artist’s offering weaves through 14 cuts which range from the deep and dubby to the, um, not as deep and dubby. What’s more: Youandewan’s own unreleased tunes make an appearance—next to bits from the likes of Mike Huckaby, Sepalcure, and others—before they drop as part of his upcoming EPs for Secretsundaze and Simple, the release dates of which have yet to be announced. Nonetheless, the April mix can be streamed in the player below, where the tracklist can also be found.

Toro y Moi – So Many Details (Intro Edit)
Youandewan – Times
Youandewan – Talk About
Nowakowski – They Get Up
Taron Trekka – Nenndas
Youandewan – Furthurrr
Losoul – Slightly (Mike Huckaby Remix)
BLM – Brick
Agnes – Chew Rebellion (Edit)
Haraket – Taint (Youandewan Version)
Moomin – A Day & Night
Ivano Tetelepta – 113
Sepalcure – Outside (Filtered Seaside)
Youandewan – Alice

Bubblin’ Up: Evenings

It’s a moment of transition for Nathan Broaddus. Only a few years out of college, the man behind Evenings currently resides in his home state of Virginia, having recently lived in New York for a spell. Right now, he’s contemplating another change of scenery. “I’m hanging out here, thinking about moving somewhere,” he says. “That’s all up in the air at the moment.” It’s unclear what the next chapter will hold, but with the release of Yore—an album-length compilation of previously (mostly) digital-only Evenings tracks—he’s closing the first chapter of an accidental career that’s just beginning to bloom. Combining a longing, nostalgic air with a keen, playful sense of structure and hooks, Evenings carves out a niche that’s inviting to both pop-oriented and more fringe tastes.

Yore is Broaddus’ first legitimate, physically released album, but he’s been recording songs for years. In the late 2000s, he started throwing tracks up on MySpace with little notion that anyone would ever hear them. Near the end of his second year at the University of Virginia, he went on a short road trip with his brother and a few friends to the Bonnaroo festival in nearby Tennessee. When he came back, he found an email from No Pain in Pop asking to share “Friend [Lover],” a song he had posted online just before he split town. The label’s post, as well as another by Double Denim Records, increased his visibility, and by 2010 he had put together his first cohesive release, the North Dorm EP. The five contemplative, restless, pop-smart tracks therein could sit comfortably alongside contemporary producers like Toro y Moi and Washed Out, or among more established, similarly wistful artists like Boards of Canada or Four Tet.

Yore

“I’m still really fond of the music on there,” he says of North Dorm, most of which shows up on Yore. “Sometimes it will come on and I won’t completely dislike it.” LA-based producer Shlohmo got ahold of the EP and connected with Broaddus, paving the way for Evenings’ eventual hook-up with the Friends of Friends imprint, which is releasing the new compilation. “[Shlohmo] was really cool about hyping my music, and he got me in touch with Leeor [Brown, from Friends of Friends],” explains Broaddus. “From there, I moved to New York and started playing a few shows up there.”

In 2011, he self-released a full-length Evenings album called Lately, which was issued digitally and as a limited-edition cassette. Much that record was recorded while Broaddus was living abroad for a short time in France, and the title track, a pensive, piano-flecked ambient cut, is one of the strongest offerings on Yore, even though it has a more knowingly ambient feel when compared to the rest of the compilation. The song is somewhere between very familiar and strangely new—like a rare feeling or emotion that you know you’ve felt before, but have trouble placing.

“Music is a really good way, if you can, to get out those weird emotions that you don’t know what else to do with,” Broaddus says. “I didn’t ever expect myself to start making electronic music as a serious thing, it just kinda happened because I was working by myself.” A large part of why his music sounds the way it does, says Broaddus, is the fact that he does everything himself. “When you’re trying to make music by yourself, the electronic influence just creeps in on its own,” he explains. “I guess you could play your own drums and just play every single instrument, but it’s easier if you’re working on your own to just put it together with drum machines and Ableton, if you can.”

With the exception of a very limited 7″ single of “Lo-Vélo” and “Babe” that was issued by Turntable Kitchen back in 2011, Yore is the first time most of the tracks from North Dorm and Lately have been given a proper release. Broaddus considers it more of a collection than an actual album per se, but given what’s been done to it—on top of remastering, the songs have been resequenced, some extra instrumentation has been added, and a new song has been thrown in the mix as well—it can easily be listened to and thought about as a single album.

North Dorm

The end product is homespun but hi-fi, a good aesthetic fit with his Friends of Friends brethren. Broaddus maximizes the capabilities of the various pieces of equipment he has around—guitars, reel-to-reels, synths, drum machines, his computer—making very high-fidelity-sounding music with only a hint of crackle. At the same time, there’s a rawness there that plays into its charm, its openness to connection, and its comforting quality.

Sampled field recordings of flowing water provide a potent, affecting rhythmic texture alongside a mallet-struck drum on “Goodbye Forever,” one of the album’s highlights. “The samples that you do hear are samples that I recorded myself,” explains Broaddus, who employs a couple of analog synthesizers, including a Yamaha SK-15. “It’s not a very popular synthesizer, but I like it a lot for the organ sounds,” he says. Sometimes he’ll take MIDI patches and run them through reel-to-reel tape machines to warm them up to get the sounds he wants out of them. “The frequencies you can pull out of those waveforms after you’ve run them through analog equipment sound so much better,” he says.

His music, fragmented yet unfailingly bright, at times conveys the mixed feelings of loss and subsequent disorientation, and expresses the difficulties of having to rebuild and reconfigure with what’s still around. “Ager [Mind Reel]” is structured in this very way, anxiously colliding Tangerine Dream-like synths before breaking down halfway through for a computer-voice-spoken interlude, then picking itself back up again in a rearranged, more humbled mode.

“Babe” is Evenings’ most obvious hit—a quietly pulsating, midtempo jam with a deep synth hook that deftly melds with an infectious rhythm track. Another standout is “Softly We Go,” whose plucked guitar leads are melodic yet freeform, providing a shifting foundation for the soft, eminent synth that guides the song’s hesitant melody into an orderly, serene headspace.

Lately

On top of the new release, there’s a strong group of tracks, hosted on Bandcamp as Unreleased Collection, which, with the exception of “Chesapeake,” didn’t end up on an official release. According to Broaddus, an album of new Evenings material is coming sometime in the near future, but the details are under wraps for the time being. The shape his new music will take, as well as Broaddus’ new locale of residence, is as yet unknown, but it seems likely that the rather simple modus operandi he spells out will hold true: “The songs are for listening—that’s the reason I created them… to listen and enjoy, hang out, [and] have something peaceful to listen to.”

The Range “PS3 (Obey City Remix)”*Donky Pitch*

Last summer, Rhode Island producer The Range (a.k.a. James Hinton) sent us “Nothing Left,” a haunting track from his first EP for Donky Pitch, Disk, which will soon be followed by the Seneca EP. Our first taste of that release, “PS 3,” hit the internet late last month, and found Hinton exploring faster tempos and more manic energy than before. Brooklyn resident, LuckyMe signee, and fellow Astro Nautico crew member Obey City (a.k.a. Sam Obey) allows the calmer elements of “PS 3” to stand out on his remix. Obey’s version pushes introspective melodies and waves of bass which ebb and flow in a haze of clean synth pads. The touching “PS 3 (Obey City Remix)” will join the rest of The Range’s Seneca EP—along with three original tracks and more remixes from Howse and Supreme Cuts—when it drops on April 22. Before then, a preview of all six of the record’s tunes can be found after the jump.

PS 3 (Obey City Remix)

Various Artists Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin’ Zone—Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1986-93

It’s been almost 30 years since the advent of acid house in Chicago. In the time since then, the unmistakable sound of the TB-303 bass synthesizer has enjoyed successive waves of reinvention and popularity, becoming one of dance music’s defining characteristics in the process. Along the way, the 303 itself has become fetishized to an insane degree, fetching high prices on the secondhand market and more recently even inspiring boutique-made exact copies in the DIY underground. It’s from within this acid-crazed context that Soul Jazz finds itself as it releases Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin’ Zone—Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1986-93, the follow up to last year’s Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sound digital dancehall compilation, and a spiritual companion to its 2005 acid comp, Can You Jack? Chicago Acid And Experimental House 1985-95.

But does the world need another acid-house compilation? Truth be told, Soul Jazz’s prior effort in this regard was suitably comprehensive for those new to the form, featuring many of the touchstone works now widely considered classics—that compilation was seemingly designed with the intention of being an easy point of entry. By contrast, the label’s latest offering doesn’t seem to know where it stands, offering a collection that dips pretty far into obscurity while also serving up some fairly obvious choices, albeit ones that are loud and remastered. Presumably, the thing tying it all together is a graphic novel by Paolo Parisi, which, the record’s press release states, tells the story of Chicago house via science fiction. Sadly, that graphic novel wasn’t included with XLR8R‘s review copy, so it’s hard to say how well its narrative ties the whole thing together. That being said, the compilation stands rather well, purely on the basis of its musical merits.

The two obvious cuts on here are Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It?” and Housemaster Boyz’s “House Nation”—neither were on Soul Jazz’s previous acid compilation, both are essential, and both have been comped many times before. Their inclusion is made up for by a number of tracks that were overlooked previously, only available on vinyl, and, as of this writing, not uploaded to YouTube, which is saying something. The compilation starts boldly on this footing with Acid Wash’s “Hallucinate,” a cut from ’93 that stylistically looks back to the first wave of Chicago while jumping through a series of trance-inducing loops. This leads naturally into the so-goofy-it’s-good monologue of “The Jackin’ Zone” and its relentless live percussion.

From there, things start to wander between the profound and mundane. The first real peak comes in the form of the reverberating drums of Phuture’s “Slam.” Manic in its intensity, it worms its way across the stereo image with an abrasive insistence that places it at a cross section between the tougher side of Chicago and the militancy of UR-style hardcore techno. There’s other music with muscle as well, as Larry Heard drops the prefix from his alias and appears as “Fingers” to deliver “Ecstacy” and “Juice,” two of his most brutal rhythm tracks since his Gherkin Jerks project. Derrick Carter follows closely, in his The Unknown guise, with a Detroit-indebted cut called “Abstract Expressionism” that differentiates itself via vinyl spinbacks and other assorted tape-deck manipulations.

Given the often campy nature of the first wave of acid house, it’s not entirely surprising that the compilation can sometimes get a little too cheesy to take. The spoken word on Pleasure Zone’s “I Can’t Understand,” while seemingly totally earnest, is also ridiculously melodramatic; A Blackman A Blackman and Another Blackman’s “I Believe” mixes a Newcleus “Jam on It” bassline with “Baby Wants to Ride” vocals with questionable results; and even though JM Silk’s “Music Is the Key (Underground Mix)” is a classic, there really are far better tracks by that producer that could have made the cut. Then again, there are so many acid tracks that it must be a nightmare to decide which ones to include; in the case of this compilation, the proceedings could have used a more considered approach.

Power “Longer Days, Darker Nights”**

Cork-based beatsmith Chris Power can’t be faulted for having an abundance of energy: The producer, who simply goes by Power and comprises half of Manmaid, is a spritely 19 years old, and still seems to be experimenting with his sound on each new track. Featured here, “Longer Days, Darker Nights” might be something Power should explore further. It’s a very energetic cut driven by sparse, hiccuping percussion and an infectious synth that helps set the tone for the rest of the production. As it continues on, “Longer Days, Darker Nights” is joined by minor-key bells, clipped vocals, and washes of ambient synths that swell inside of the major-key progression, all of which keep Power’s music fresh and somewhat unpredictable.

Longer Days, Darker Nights

Longer Days_Darker Nights

Perc Work Softer Revisited

Where did sci-fi techno go? These days, it seems that the most listened-to contemporary techno spends its time hanging around abandoned factories rather than dreaming about interstellar travel. Perhaps economic austerity calls for some version of realism, but it’s just as likely that computers have made notions of the future seem kind of quaint and attainable. Perc (a.k.a. Ali Wells) has been doing the industrial-techno thing since The X-Files went off the air, which is about three stylistic lifetimes in electronic-music terms. Last year’s A New Brutality EP helped define techno’s rehardened tone, sporting a grim tower-block image on its label alongside a track titled “Cash 4 Gold,” but this remix collection from Chicago’s Prosthetic Pressings label actually looks back to the b-side of a 12″ from 2008. It’s unclear at first why this particular cut is the focus, especially since Perc is not unprolific, but whatever the case, the absence of a clear referent frees remixers Orphx and Desonanz to strike a balance between underlining and annihilating the source material.

Both takes on “Work Softer” draw out qualities in Perc’s music that are easy to miss at first glance. Wells can be as grotty as anyone, but there’s a latent dubbiness in his production style that keeps the flitting, fluorescent kicks from being merely exhausting. Canadian duo Orphx dives into this side of Perc; bookended by ambient segues, the pair flows organically between a few different ideas, resulting in a stunningly nonlinear version. Without breaking out of a humid grayscale, it makes pocked stainless steel seem almost alive. Desonanz—another duo, albeit one that’s only half Canadian—approaches things with a less open-ended agenda on its primary remix and vaguely distinct dub, for the most part brawling straight down the middle. Still, interesting details are embedded deep in the mix, lending a mirage-like depth that asserts itself at unexpected times.

Mohammed Alidu “Aikaso (Murlo Remix)”**

The original tunes by Mohammed Alidu (pictured above) have a delicate power to them, with sounds rooted in the artist’s native Ghana. Alidu was born into an exhalted family lineage of “talking drum” chiefs, and has built his career upon the Playing for Change project, as well as an exhausting pedigree of gigs, teaching positions, and communal forms of expression. Now based in Los Angeles (where he’ll be performing next week), his upcoming Talking Drum EP (out in June via Akwaaba) takes on a heavier Western slant: Soulful horns, playful drums, and elements of pop and dancehall are peppered throughout. The latter of those influences helps make the backbone (along with soca) that fuels UK producer and recent Bubblin’ Up subject Murlo, who reworks the tune into a territory which is decidedly more tropical than one might expect from a Londoner. The UK remixer keeps the focal points of Alidu’s music intact: Impressive polyrhythms, hopping drums, and infectious vocal hooks rub up against the darker side of Murlo’s sound. His playfulness is undercut by a subtle and melancholy low end, but rather than making the tune gloomy, the undertones manage to enhance the joyous sounds they share space with.

Aikaso

Aikaso (Murlo Remix)

Aikaso (Murlo Remix)

Aikaso (Murlo Remix)

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