Video: Maxmillion Dunbar “Loving the Drift”

The clip for Maxmillion Dunbar‘s gorgeous second single, “Loving the Drift,” is as much a labor of love as the song itself. Dunbar has been honing his sound as half of Beautiful Swimmers and as a solo artist, with the majority of his forthcoming album House of Woo being recorded alongside his girlfriend. There’s an unimpeachable sensuality running through “Loving the Drift,” as Dunbar never lets his windswept synth work fully take off; instead, it teases, leers, and stays afloat only thanks to the production’s lofty bassline and some freaky 909 drum work.

Matching the sounds, the visuals for “Loving the Drift”—crafted by New York-based artist/curator Aurora Halal—break the song out from behind closed doors, but only to a point. In a spray of shifting colors and disembodied dancers, Halal’s piece “offers the point of view from one person’s psychedelic and disorienting but warm personal journey in a public place.” House of Woo is out on February 19 via RVNG Intl, and you can check out its first single, “Woo,” here.

Dusky Readies New EP for Aus

The London duo of Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman (a.k.a. Dusky) slowly brought itself to low boil over the course of 2012, releasing a handful of EPs, 12″s, and remixes on labels like School, Simple, and Anjunadeep. Dusky’s first statement of 2013 is now poised to continue that trend when it appears next month via Will Saul’s Aus label. Called Nobody Else, the four-track EP is said to boast the same kind of bass-focused, house/garage/techno hybrids fans have come to expect from Harriman’s and Granger-Howell’s productions, and will be released on March 18. Before then, you can check out the tracklist and artwork for Dusky’s Nobody Else EP below.

1. Nobody Else
2. What I Never Knew
3. Atone
4. Dummy

Error Operator “August Filled with Rain”

Unfortunately, London-based producer Error Operator has announced that he’s ceased making music in order to pursue other ventures. As a token of appreciation for the support he’s received over the years, he’s given us “August Filled With Rain,” which is apparently the end-all song for the artist born Andrew Collins. The melancholy production opens with gentle guitar strums, and slowly builds up to a soft melody of warm, meditative synths. The details—sparkling chimes, subtle low end, and crackling vinyl dust—give Error Operator’s final salvo a calming vibe that makes for both a testament of his skills as a producer and a suitable farewell to his work in that world.

August Filled With Rain

Kompakt Announces New Compilation Series, Celebrates 20 Years

Kompakt has seen a tireless release schedule since it was founded 20 years ago in Cologne. The outpost’s brand of minimalist, often pop-laden house, techno, and ambient music has gained the label a signature stamp. But before Kompakt even began to make its mark, it was a record shop, and in celebration of its 1993 opening, Kompakt is unveiling a new series of compilations, called Kompakt 20 Jahre Kollection. The first installment, Kollection 1, will arrive on March 18, and will feature two discs of tracks pulled from the label’s extensive discography of singles, b-sides, rarities, and oddities (a.k.a. “secret weapons,” according to the press release), as well as new material from some of the label’s up-and-comers. Among the artists featured on Kollection 1 will be The Field (pictured above), Rex the Dog, Superpitcher, Matias Aguayo, Voigt & Voigt, and Justus Köhncke. And as we previously reported, there is more to come: Kompakt is planning a European tour, several album releases, and a forthcoming documentary to chronicle its 20 year journey. You can check out the artwork and massive tracklist for the first edition of the Kompakt 20 Jahre Kollection below.

CD 1
01. Heiko Voss – I Think About You
02. Matias Aguayo – Minimal (DJ Koze Mix)
03. Dorau/Köhncke – Durch Die Nacht (Geiger Mix)
04. Matias Aguayo – Walter Neff
05. Justus Köhncke – 2 After 909
06. Voigt & Voigt – Vision 03
07. Leandro Fresco – Cera Uno
08. Michael Mayer – Lovefood
09. Pluxus – Transient
10. The Field – Over The Ice
11. Wighnomy Bros. – Wurz + Blosse
12. Mayer/Voigt – Transparenza
13. Dettinger – Totentanz

CD 2
01. Jonas Bering – Melanie
02. Kaito – Everlasting
03. Superpitcher – Happiness (Lawrence Mix)
04. Gus Gus – Within You
05. Scsi 9 – Morskaya
06. Thomas Fehlmann – Making It Whistle
07. DJ Koze – Mariposa
08. Gui Boratto – Arquipélago
09. John Tejada -Unstable Condition
10. Rex The Dog – Prototype
11. Partial Arts – Trauermusik
12. The Rice Twins – For Penny And Alexis

James Blake Officially Announces Sophomore Album; Hear First Single Now

One of the most notable troubadours to emerge from the UK electronic scene in recent memory, James Blake has announced today the follow up to his self-titled debut LP, an album called Overgrown. Roughly two years after the release of James Blake, the singer/songwriter/producer’s latest full-length is said to showcase his “[growth] as a singer and songwriter while at the same time returning to the brain melting electronic perfection of his early releases on Hemlock and Hessle, moving way beyond any post-dubstep pigeonholes to include stunning reinterpretations of both hip-hop and house.” The album is preceded by its first single, “Retrograde,” which you can now stream below before it’s officially released on February 11 via Republic. Overgrown will be released courtesy of the same label on April 8, around the time Blake will be touring North America. You can check out those dates below.

4/16 San Francisco, CA, The Mezzanine
4/17 San Francisco, CA, The Mezzanine
4/18 Santa Cruz, CA, Rio Theater
4/23 Seattle, WA, Neptune
4/24 Portland, OR, Wonder Ballroom
4/25 Vancouver, BC, Commodore
4/27 Salt Lake City, UT, Depot
4/28 Denver, CO, Ogden Theater
4/29 Kansa City, MO, Liberty Hall
5/1 Minneapolis, MN, First Avenue
5/2 Chicago, IL, Metro
5/3 Detroit, MI, Majestic Theater
5/4 Toronto, ON, Danforth Music Hall
5/6 Montreal, QB, Metropolis
5/8 Boston, MA, House of Blues
5/9 New York, NY, Terminal 5
5/11 Philadelphia, PA, TLA
5/12 Washington, D.C., 9:30 Club
5/13 Chapel Hill, NC, Cat’s Cradle
5/14 Atlanta, GA, Masquerade

Hi, Doctor Nick! – Buying a Proper DJ Set-Up and the Value of Making Good Content

Nick Hook can’t be stopped. Once again, the good doctor is on the road, yet he still made sure to sit down, scrape his brain for knowledge, and put together some advice for the XLR8R massive. For the uninitiated, Doctor Nick does this every Thursday, answering questions about music, life, love, DJing, production, travel, studio gear, and more. He can help you, so send your questions—seriously, we always need more questions—to doctornick@xlr8r.com and let the wisdom flow.

Hi.

Hope everyone is well. I’m back in LA. I went home to New York for eight hours and got called back to work in LA the next morning. Life. Ride the wave. Check out Kilo Kish‘s mixtape that came out today. Shout out to Salva for a dope day of Japanese food and listening to new beats. His new record is sick. Shout out to Philly and its amazing art museum. I played this warehouse party in the hood and it was amazing. Ummm…. yeah. Just send in more questions. Haha. 🙂

Hi Doctor Nick,
I’m just finishing a stretch of traveling that’s lasted almost a year, and it’s been rad, to say the least. I’ve had the chance to DJ at a few house parties using a super basic mixer (one that can fit in a tiny suitcase), but I’m moving to San Francisco in a few weeks and want to get a bit more serious about playing at bars, warehouse parties, wherever. There’s no doubt that I’ll be mad broke when I land in SF, but I was hoping you might have some advice on what a solid “entry level” set-up would be if I could scrape together a couple hundred dollars. You’ve mentioned that Serato is a solid program for DJing, but what kind of mixers should I go for? Also, with my limited experience in a city that breeds killer DJs, what would be your advice to get going without coming on too strong? No one wants to be that guy who annoys the shit out of every venue or booking guy. Thanks a ton in advance, your wisdom helps get me through every Thursday in Thailand.
Jordan

Thailand. Awesome. It’s humbling to me that people around the world read this.

This is my advice, but I come from the school of get the right shit, especially when it comes to DJ stuff. Eat ramen and work a few extra days so you buy it once and never have to buy it again. If you want CDJs, try and get the Pioneer 2000s or 900s, and if you want turntables, buy Technics 1200s. If you don’t, you’re gonna end up buying some bullshit that’s gonna make you a worse DJ, and at some point, you’ll just end up buying the good stuff anyways. I had belt-drive Geminis and a Scratchmaster mixer at first. I don’t think I really learned to beatmatch ’til i got 1200s.

To be honest, I’ve been on the USB/CDJ wave lately. I’m kinda burnt on computers and the USB stick brings you back to listening and not looking like a secretary. Plus, it kinda helps you prepare for each gig and you don’t get lost in your iTunes and keep reverting to your old tricks.

I have a Novation Twitch at the crib, which I really love for parties and bringing around when there is no set-up. We leave it on the kitchen table and DJ chopped-and-screwed and get nuts with it when we are hanging around. If you wanna get into contraptions, I really dig that.

As far as a mixer, I’d advise a cheap mixer first alongside the right decks. Upgrade it later. Again, the usual standard is the Pioneer 800 or that Allen + Heath Xone:92 joint. But you could get something for 100 bucks and still be ok.

For finding gigs and stuff, I don’t wanna sound like a broken horse, so I think we could look at old columns for answers. Also, once you get to SF, maybe you’ll see my editor Shawn in the streets and you can give him a mixtape.

Hi Doctor Nick,
My question isn’t so much regarding music production, but rather it has to do with writing about music and sharing it. I want to know if anyone cares about editorial content anymore. I have a Tumblr blog and I feel like I get more hits from posting a stupid picture than I do from a well-written piece about some music that I actually care about. People want instant satisfaction and it almost gives the impression that nobody takes the time to read a post or cares enough to find out more about an artist. What do you think?
Mikolaj

We live in the land of ADD. You are absolutely right. If a video is over 13 seconds long, we are prone to switch it. I spilled a beer on my laptop a few weeks ago and almost on purpose, I didn’t buy a new one ’til the last possible second. It ended up being a month, but I found myself sitting on my bed, taking out old Wax Poetics magazines with 13-page articles, reading books, and listening to whole records. It felt amazing, and then, literally the second I got my laptop back, I was back to watching YouTubes of John Legend getting boners on stage and turtles fucking. It sucks. I hate it.

That said, if you actually care about writing good articles, please do it. I love reading the New York Times cuz they still care. You might as well be the one fighting the good fight. I’m looking ahead, but I actually do see a backlash to the internet coming. It’s fun to stay dumb, but at some point, don’t we gotta say that content matters?

I’m so bored of the internet, and trying to break the addiction is the hardest part. Maybe the key is writing like five paragraphs, then putting a stupid picture so we can have ADD for 10 seconds before getting back to the meat and potatoes.

On the real, my favorite sites right now are ones that are pushing through and trying to provide information, documentaries, etc. It’s inspiring to find people that still care. As a producer, I have the same problem where the full-length LP format is dead. It’s something that means so much to me, and all I care about is paying attention to that format and keeping it alive. Yeah, you can barrage us with a million singles and endless content, but when you make a record that’s gonna last forever, that means something. It tells an amazing story and it’s such a payoff when it’s done right.

Hi, Doctor Nick! appears every Thursday on XLR8R. Do you have a question for Doctor Nick? Please submit your inquires to doctornick@xlr8r.com. Nick Hook can help you.

Squeaky Lobster “Y.N.V.”

The handle of Brussels-based producer Squeaky Lobster seems to do the quality of his productions a bit of a disservice. While his cheeky moniker may have been slightly lost in translation, the potency of his hip-hop-flavored, incredibly detailed beats certainly has not. “Y.N.V.” comes to us as an extra cut from the sessions which yielded the man’s forthcoming Killing Eleven EP for hometown imprint Vlek, but still serves an impressive example of the larger-than-life boom-bap Squeaky Lobster is able to conjure up—filling this particular cut to the brim with slithering synth tones, massive kicks, and rapidfire snares. The producer’s Killing Eleven EP drops on February 11, but can be streamed in full prior to that date, after the jump.

Y.N.V.

Grouper The Man Who Died In His Boat

The inspiration behind The Man Who Died In His Boat, Liz Harris’s latest album as Grouper, merits re-mentioning. As a teenager in Oregon, Harris visited the recent wreck of a sailboat with her father. The boat had drifted back to shore after being abandoned by its owner, for unknowable reasons, at sea. In her brief account, Harris recalls feeling disturbed by her voyeurism, viewing the remains of the owner’s life within the cabin. The album was recorded alongside 2008’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, based on the similarly morbid adolescent experience of, well, dragging a dead deer up a hill.

That album was Harris’s critical and commercial breakthrough, an anomaly in her catalog and perhaps her finest moment to date. This is because it found her flirting with accessibility, both in terms of song structure and the record’s overall structure. Harris frequently seems to exist within hermetic chambers of reverb, and while still quite foggy, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill represented a de-smudging. Her mind was suddenly penetrable—more than her usual forbidding drones, placid guitar strums were prevalent throughout the album, and on key track “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” one could even sing along with a hook, as Harris mumbled, “your love is enormous/it’s lifting me up.” Moreover, the album appeared as a flowing suite, with each track merged with the next. When those hooks did appear, it was as though they were in relief, hovering above the artist’s signature, particularly Cascadian ambience. That signature being as strong as it was, her subsequent efforts have been unequivocally beautiful. But the record’s opiated pop dirges have been in short supply, typically coming one or two per effort, and never chained to the narrative with the same emphasis. The Man Who Died In His Boat, then, is the artifact fans of that album’s sound have been waiting for.

It delivers on at least one front. The sound of Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, or at least of Harris circa 2008, pervades. The songs have the same insular, filtered shiver; the guitar is tuned similarly, strummed similarly. Furthermore, this is an album of Grouper songs, and ought to appease those who are less charmed by the artist’s more ambient work. Of course, these songs are fairly ambient as well. They’re delivered with a hushed patience, and their elements blur together in a drowsy trance. Even when she is definitely singing words, Harris’ voice frequently functions as a kind of pad. This characteristic is fully exploited on “Difference (Voices),” which is all layered glossolalic coos and softly twanging guitar.

A few tracks seem like aborted experiments, albeit delivered with the artist’s signature. The resonant piano on “Vanishing Point” feels uncharacteristically upfront, though it’s eventually softened by delay trails. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill casts long shadows over some of the opening numbers, a few of which sound like castoffs from that record. Delivered without that album’s self-contained narrative (even if that narrative seemed only vaguely related to its titular story), they begin to meander. Granted, meandering is part of Grouper’s charm, but The Man Who Died In His Boat, at least initially, plays like more of a collection than a story.

Harris absolutely remedies this in the final section, however. The stretch from “Towers” through “STS” features some of the most convincing deployments of her somnolent sound to date. On the brief “Living Room,” she delivers a piece on par with the aforementioned “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” or her most recent definably pop tune, “Alien Observer,” from 2011’s A I A : Alien Observer. As on those tracks, her voice thrusts above its sedative backdrop, and her words about “pretending to relate” point to a truth more universal than the album’s foundational teenage memory. Harris sings, “I’m looking for the place the spirit meets the skin/Can’t figure out why that place feels so hard to be in,” and her description of an “ill-fitting party” comes across like a tranquilizing panic attack, or a sedative prayer for comfort (or at least a sudden bout of narcolepsy). The record may not be Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, but pieces like “Living Room” are the essence of Harris’s singular oeuvre.

Blind Prophet “Into Focus”

Earlier this month, budding East Coast producer Blind Prophet released a two-track effort for his own South Fork Sound imprint, calling it “Switch it Up” b/w “After Hours.” Now, the Long Island resident has offered up “Into Focus,” an extra tune full of sharp percussion, airy chords, and just the faintest touches of melody. While this particular offering stays in invitingly mellow territory, Blind Prophet’s recent release is full of more dancefloor-appropriate fare, put together—of course—with the same precise aesthetic. After giving “Into Focus” a spin, you can compare and contrast the tune with the stream of “Switch it Up” and “After Hours” found after the jump.

Into Focus

Leon Vynehall Rosalind EP

Following his breakout 2012, Brighton’s Leon Vynehall is making a triumphant return to the imprint which first debuted his work. With three tracks marked by the loose percussion and fuzzy edges that colored his two previous efforts, the Rosalind EP captures a producer who’s still very much honing his craft while nonetheless continuing to deliver unmistakably solid tunes.

In our Bubblin’ Up profile of him last year, Vynehall told us, “I prefer dance music that isn’t really quantized, regimented, and super mixed down to the nano-perfect spot.” This approach is very much intact on Rosalind. In fact, in comparison to his past EPs for Well Rounded and George FitzGerald’s ManMakeMusic label, this record includes an even wider array of misshapen and lopsided elements. Thankfully, they all manage to fit together as cohesively as before. The opening and haphazardly named “Untitled 017” displays this best and in doing so, makes for the EP’s strongest effort. Beginning with a pattern of Gerry Read-esque hats and stuttering percussion, Vynehall strings together a melody using pitched vocal samples, each of which not only seems to have originated from a different piece of music, but also sounds like it’s been run through its own individual filter path. In truth, the song is sort of like a dustier, and maybe a bit stonier, take on the multi-sampled constructions of Akufen. Almost without warning, a restlessly funky bassline fills in the bottom end, joined by pads of organ that coyly build and unravel just beneath the surface. What makes “Untitled 017” such a strong track is that Vynehall is able to use these disparate elements to build a genuine song, one which is at times catchy—the vocal samples’ combined melody and the song’s occasional synth flourishes are pleasantly hard to get out of one’s head—without being forced.

Donning a similarly unremarkable title, the EP’s second track, “Title #7,” utilizes a slightly dustier sonic palette while offering a more straightforward dancefloor affair. Here, the jumpy vocals of “Untitled 017” are replaced with a simpler re-pitched vocal, while the bassline tosses and turns beneath dark, piano-like chords and droning strings. Again, the comparison to Gerry Read is almost unavoidable, but where Read seems to use his textures as a means to indulge in the weird and unexpected—which, at this point, is certainly not something we object to—Vynehall sounds as if he is trying to build productions with more substantial arrangements using comparable, although by no means unoriginal, tools.

The title track serves as more of an outro than a full song, closing the EP on a stoney, downtempo note and leaving “Untitled 017” and “Title #7” as the sole floor-worthy productions Rosalind has to offer. Fortunately, those cuts are strong enough to hold up the effort, which ultimately adds to Vynehall’s increasingly dependable discography.

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