As if yesterday’s plethora of mixes uploaded by Hyperdub boss Kode9 weren’t enough, the UK bass authority has now shared even more DJ sets—including appearances from dubstep stalwarts like Mala (pictured above), Loefah, and Youngsta. Dating as far back as 2005, these recordings outline a particularly vital time for dubstep and bass-focused house music, making their availability as free streams and downloads quite the treat. Among the 30 or so mixes, you’ll also find Kode9 & The Spaceape’s contribution to the Dubstep Allstars series, a podcast for FACT, a mix for LuckyMe, and plenty of B2B sets. You can check out some of our select favorites below, and peruse the whole bunch here.
Cosmo Vitelli (pictured above) is no stranger to staying busy. The Frenchman made his mark as a seemingly tireless house and disco DJ/producer in the late-’90s before—amongst many other musical endeavours—going on to launch his own imprint, I’m a Cliché, and, years later in 2010, form the Bot’Ox outfit with the help of Julien Briffaz. Earlier this week, the Bot’Ox project released an EP built around a twisted bit of synth-funk called “2.4.1,” which arrived in its original form accompanied by four remixes—including this one from Vitelli himself. On his rework, the off-kilter funk of “2.4.1” gets reshaped into a dark, elongated house track which offers up pockets of melody and pitched-down vocals as it makes its way to the dancefloor through piles of gorgeous synths. After giving Vitelli’s remix a whirl, you can stream the entire 2.4.1 EP via the player embedded after the jump.
Hemlock label boss Untold (a.k.a. Jack Dunning) has announced that his latest imprint, Pennyroyal, will be a home for “rough and ready” techno, with releases in the works from J. Tijn and Deep Medi affiliate Silkie. What’s more: Dunning has dropped a mix to give us all a taste of his new endeavor. The Pennyroyal Intro Mix premiered over on Dummy today, and though there’s no tracklist for the 30-minute set, we are told that fresh tunes from Pennyroyal do appear. You can give that whole thing a listen, as well as check out a very brief Q&A with Untold, while you wait for Pennyroyal’s first releases to drop in March and April, here.
We’re not going to try too hard to sell you this edition of Press Play; the names behind the audio and video in the players embeded after the jump can speak for themselves. So, if you’re interested in what’s available to stream and download from Boddika, DJ Q, Thefft, Machinedrum, Mano Le Tough, Phaseone, Matmos, Artifact, DJ Rashad, and others, we suggest you get to pressing those play buttons.
Check out this interview with Nonplus boss Boddika, during which he talks about the label’s plans and the possibility of future production collaborations.
The ever-prolific Machinedrum gave the internet quite a gift, offering a ton of his remixes from over the years to stream and download for absolutely free.
While we continue to wait for DJ Rashad’s new EP to drop on March 18 via Hyperdub, you can preview snippets of Rollin’ now.
This airy and emotive production is “Hunter,” one of 11 tracks set to drop on March 7 as the new LP from up-and-comer Phaseone.
In an unexpected turn of events, Unknown to the Unknown has posted an actual music video—strange as it may be—to its YouTube account. The fun-loving clip previews a bouncy garage jam called “Say to You,” which will be released on Monday from bassline mainstay DJ Q operating under the alias Classified.
Here’s a stream of Seb Wildblood’s new EP for MadTech, including two original productions and remixes from fresh talents Artifact and Thefft.
Mano Le Tough continues to tease his forthcoming album, Changing Days, with another shuffling house number, “A Thing from Above.”
Following the duo’s In the Studio feature from earlier this week, Matmos unveiled a remix of “Aetheric Vehicle”—lifted from the brand-new The Marriage of True Minds LP—by Drew Daniel’s Soft Pink Truth project.
Check out our premiere of a forthcoming EP on the way from Hypercolour early next month, three tracks of touching deep house from 18-year-old newcomer J.Wiltshire.
Irish newcomer The Cyclist continues to preview his upcoming album for Leaving Records and Stones Throw by sharing its motorik title track, “Bones in Motion.”
You should check out Co La’s latest track, “Melter’s Delight,” before it’s released as part of his Moody Coup LP for Software on May 7.
After he dropped his Daul Kim EP via Push & Run, St. Louis producer Parisian issued this 45-minute mix for The 405, featuring tunes from the likes of Objekt, Fatima Al Qadiri, Nosaj Thing, and the mixer himself.
On paper, Commotion—the Keysound debut of London producer Owen Darby (a.k.a Wen)—doesn’t come across as anything particularly unique. Darby makes music at 130 bpm, but with one foot firmly planted in the dark spaciousness of classic dubstep. Like countless other young producers breaking out of the UK right now, his productions owe an unabashed debt to vintage grime. Each of the four tracks here rides along on patchwork of square-wave synth sounds and cold percussive noises pinched wholesale out of early Eskibeat and Ruff Sqwad instrumentals, and Darby peppers each with snatches of vocal sourced from relatively easy-to-ID bars by the likes of Wiley and Trim. In short, Commotion is the sort of release that wears its influences very much on its sleeve. Yet in actuality, despite all their nostalgic source material, Darby’s productions come across as fresh and remarkably forward thinking; unlike many of his peers who seem to be merely paying homage to their roots, Wen takes a very familiar sound palette on Commotion and paints it into something intriguingly spacious and uniquely engaging.
Perhaps, as Keysound boss (and Darby’s most vocal champion) Blackdown has posited in the past, the darkness and space in Darby’s music feels fresh as a direct response to the color and density that has prevailed in UK funky, grime, and garage over the past couple of years. Much like fellow recent Keysound signing Beneath, Darby’s trump card lies in the way he creates mood and tension with a bare minimum of elements; “Nightcrawler,” for example, gets all its power and energy from the interplay between a looming, simplistic sub-bass and unpredictable bursts of tightly wound percussion. Throughout the EP, Darby’s drum patterns come across like classic UK funky, albeit with sizeable chunks of the beat removed—without the backbone of a solid 4×4 kick, the syncopated snares often land in completely unexpected places, while the assorted digital percussion noises sprinkled throughout each track are liable to rear their heads for momentary bursts of rapid-fire chaos, only to disappear again indefinitely. It’s this contrast between intensity and emptiness that makes Darby’s productions the sort of music that—just like early dubstep—sounds awe-inspiringly powerful on a club soundsystem.
It’s pleasing that the four tracks which make up Commotion share something of a cohesive aesthetic; while eclecticism in electronic music is often commendable, here it’s fascinating to see the differing ways in which Darby paints with the same murky, digital grime sounds throughout each song. The title track and “Spark It,” in particular, sound like they’re constructed from snatches of pirate-radio dubs played at speeds way slower than intended. It’s closing track “Road” that proves to be the standout of the release though—with its rolling snare rhythm, it has the closest thing to a conventional beat of any of the four, but Darby packs endless amounts of tension into menacing synth horns and the evocative, fractured vocal. It’s the perfect demonstration of how Wen is working with sounds that are entirely familiar within the realm of underground music, yet he has such an impeccable command over them that it’s well worth taking notice.
In addition to the release of Native Instrument’s Traktor app for the iPad, this week brought an in-depth look into the Baltimore home studio of experimental duo Matmos, a useful guide for building beats, and a comprehensive video with Four Tet which takes viewers deep into the sessions for “Sing” and “Love Cry”—two standout tracks from the producer’s excellent 2010 LP There Is Love in You.
A Traktor app for the iPad:
– Yesterday, Native Instruments released the Traktor DJ app for the iPad, keeping much of the software’s functioanlity intact while utilizing iOS’s touch control capabilities. You can check the teaser video above—featuring the one and only Richie Hawtin—and read up on the full details of the new software here.
A look inside Matmos’ home studio and Four Tet’s Pro Tools sessions:
– Earlier this week, we added yet another eye-popping set of photographs and in-depth Q&A to our In the Studio series, heading out East to talk with Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt of Matmos. In the feature, we picked the veteran sonic adventurers’ brains about their unconventional production process, took a look at their quirky set of tools, and drooled over their one-of-a-kind synths housed in their basement studio. Read the full interview here.
– Back in 2010, Future Music Magazine managed to sit down with Four Tet inside a London studio to talk about the production process behind his then-new album, There Is Love in You. For one reason or another, the full version of the conversation only just hit YouTube this week, presenting an almost 45-minute look into the Pro Tools sessions and mixing processes which yielded album standouts “Sing” and “Love Cry.” It may be a lengthy piece, but the video provides an incredibly illuminating chance to see how one of the most consistently unique producers of the past few years builds his tunes.
Resident Advisor wants to help you make better beats:
As part of its somewhat irregular series of production-minded guides, Resident Advisor shared A Guide to Drum Programming earlier this week, leading readers through some of the most common—but often overlooked—techniques which yield sophisticated drum patterns and sounds. The informative article (which also comes complete with audio examples to help it all make sense) can be read in full here.
In conjunction with his Fourth Wave-released Skyway EP, Greek producer Dimitris Dimas (a.k.a ? ?, pronounced “Delta Delta”) has let go of one-off song “Skinny Dipping.” The tune seems intentionally unpolished, as the producer’s use of raw drum samples sounds like he’s just testing the audio out instead of using them to add any real structure to the song. Nonetheless, the delicate melodies and shimmering, intricate chimes help make “Skinny Dipping” as groovy as it is mysterious.
It’s appropriate that Strut’s latest compilation, a retrospective of oddball New York label Celluloid Records, would invoke the title of Fab Five Freddy’s dubbed-out and strange hip-hop cut “Change the Beat.” As its namesake suggests, Change the Beat: The Celluloid Records Story 1980 – 1987 is a glimpse into a distant time when rhythm, tempo, and genre had yet to be codified, especially in respect to hip-hop. With 26 tracks on offer, it’s a long and convoluted trip through one of the most influential catalogs in modern dance music.
The story of Celluloid is bound up in the lives of two men. The first is Jean Karakos, a Parisian record store owner who enjoyed critical success in the ’70s while releasing experimental jazz by heavyweights like Archie Shepp, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Gong on his BYG Actuel label. This background with boundary-pushing music would ultimately influence Karakos to push Celluloid into the fertile intersection of New York’s dance and art culture happening in the city’s downtown scene. The second man is Bill Laswell, the avant-garde musician and producer behind Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album and its associated b-boy anthem, “Rockit.” Laswell would play a major role in the label’s continuing development, releasing his own productions on Celluloid while continuing his career producing mainstream pop artists full-time. Naturally, Laswell’s contributions make up a lot of the compilation, with out-there rock experiments like Massacre’s “Killing Time” and Last Exit’s “Big Boss Man” colliding with the electro-tinged Afro-funk of his work with Manu Dibango on “Abele Dance (’85 Remix)” and Deadline on “Makossa Rock.”
Listening through, shock is a recurring theme, with a feat of programming that often surprises in the way it shifts from style to style. Early on, this manifests in a play of contrast between the label’s punk output and its more synth-oriented no-wave workouts. Ferdinand’s “Tele, Apres La Meteo” bursts at the seams with seething guitar-rock energy, but is counterbalanced almost immediately by the femme—and similarly Francophone—hi-NRG disco of Mathematiques Modernes’ ‘”Disco Rough (Long Version).” Similarly, frequent Residents collaborator Snakefinger delivers a weird Allman Brothers parody with “Living in Vain,” whose quick four minutes soon gives way to the superb, weed-smoke-drenched dub of Winston Edwards & Blackbeard’s “Downing Street Rock.”
Yet for all its genre-defying experiments, ultimately it’s the label’s contribution to hip-hop that’s secured it its place in pop culture. The first premonitions of this side of its catalog comes in the form of Lightnin’ Rod’s “Sport,” an overlooked classic of Last Poets-style spoken-word rhyme set over chattering Chic guitars and a hissing disco four-to-the-floor. In terms of aesthetics, this is old-school to the core, with a delivery that’s reminiscent of Rudy Ray Moore in the way it emphasizes verbal puns and badass posturing over ‘yes yes y’all’-style party bravado.
This strain is picked up again later by the Last Poets themselves, who are represented by the dystopian original version of “The Mean Machine.” This is an interesting choice, as the song is more readily associated with the label’s catalog via Grandmixer D.ST’s remix, which is excluded in favor of “Home of Hip-Hop,” the scratch master’s rambling seven-minute ode to the days of the boogie-down Bronx. Unexpected inclusions aside, the compilation doesn’t disappoint in its delivery of essential material, rolling out timeless works like Timezone’s “Wildstyle (12″ Vocal),” B Side with Bernard Fowler’s “Odeon,” and the aforementioned “Change the Beat”—though one does wonder why Strut decided to go with the vocal version of Futura 2000’s “The Escapades of Futura 2000 (feat. The Clash)” over the dub, as the expansive soundscape is far more enjoyable than the graffiti star’s bafflingly awful verse. But then again, listening to him rap is a reminder of just how much innocence has been lost over the years.
There are further contortions and brief flirtations with other styles as well. Former Cream drummer Ginger Baker makes an appearance with “Dust to Dust,” a jangling orchestra of guitars that evokes Fleetwood Mac as much as it does Jesus & Mary Chain; Richard Hell & The Voidoids seethe with gritty, Velvet Underground-worthy frankness on “Destiny Street”; and French siren Sapho’s “Carmel” momentarily lifts the proceedings into darkly ethereal dance pop. But to continue listing the record’s high points would be to deprive the listener of experiencing the breadth of Celluloid’s discography. The compilation may not contain everything, yet Strut has managed to boil the label down into a continually fascinating document of a long-gone time and place that’s well worth seeking out.
San Francisco resident Nicholas Yu (who operates under the peculiar National Park System handle) just turned in this melodically rich, fuzz-filled remix of “Ghosts and Lovers,” a song which first appeared on last year’s For Ostland LP from NYC-based industrial outfit Nihiti (and, incidentally, had already appeared as a remix in our Downloads section back in July). This churning rework, packed to the brim with glistening noise and shoegazey pads, is out now, alongside a number of other adventurous reimaginings of “Ghosts and Lovers,” on Nihiti’s Ghosts & Versions 12″. You can stream the rest of those tunes after the jump.
On top of his regular gig writing for FADER, Duncan Cooper also finds the time to produce entropic pop under the name Wildarms. His new EP, Clear Eyes, is a gleefully eclectic mish-mash of influences, right down to its title—which references Friday Night Lights—and cover—which plasters a giant happy face over a painting by British neo-classicist painter John William Godward. As for the music, the record finds Cooper mixing breakbeats, new-age atmosphere, and jungle rhythms, ultimately creating a sound that bursts with joyful nostalgia. Granted, we’ve heard it all before, albeit never quite like this.
It fits that Clear Eyes is seeing release via Cascine, a label with a laser-focused dedication to layered electronic pop. Opener “Full Hearts” is a relaxed, gauzy affair with handclaps, bird chirps, and Eastern-inspired pentatonics, not to mention a hip-hop hype man for good measure. “Love Is Just True” turns up the new-age vibes even further, laying a sample that repeats the phrase “two hearts beating as one” over wind chimes and a beat that could have been borrowed from ’80s Sade. While the cut-and-paste nature of Cooper’s songwriting may sound like overt kitsch on paper, Clear Eyes avoids coming across like a chopped-up Pure Moods comp, largely thanks to his ability to stitch divergent sounds together so seamlessly.
While the tone of the EP mostly remains at a low simmer, the most fun moment may be when Cooper heats things up on “Acceptance.” The track starts slow, but around the midway point, it morphs into an ode to ’90s rave culture, courtesy of a brain-meltingly upbeat jungle rhythm. It may sound like an odd (or possibly just goofy) direction to take, but the finished product is no less out of place than the bits of smooth R&B and new jack swing found elsewhere on the EP. Clear Eyes ends with “Twice,” a marimba-driven island-pop track that’s all sandy beaches and vacation vibes. It’s both the record’s most traditional pop song and the emotional high point. As the track finishes, a young woman’s voice—apparently taken from a YouTube video—relates the simple power of a kiss.
Returning to the artwork, it’s fitting that Cooper chose a defaced John William Godward painting to represent his music. As the story goes, Godward committed suicide, leaving a note explaining that the world wasn’t big enough for both him and Pablo Picasso. Cooper’s goal for the EP seems to hinge on the exact opposite sentiment—that there’s more than enough room for everyone, no matter how seemingly contradictory their sounds may be. In the end, Clear Eyes often thrives with its unusual pairings, and Cooper’s ability to create his own sun-drenched world from such disparate elements is an enjoyable surprise.
