The b-side to OneAuff‘s recently released Heavy Heady EP is a slice of heavenly disco house that follows in the spaced-out tradition of Norwegian producers Todd Terje and Lindstrom. “Knits” is built around an old-school organ stab and bongo rhythms and the track rises and falls as layers of synth and rolling bass come and go. Brooklyn-based producer OneAuff (a.k.a. Steve Raney) has previously released material on Throne of Blood with collaborator Eamon Harkin as Harkin & Raney and has several remixes and a digital-only releases under his belt, but Heavy Heady just might be his most complete and fully realized record to date. In addition to “Knits,” the EP also contains the title track and remixes by Nick Chacona and Tuff City Kids.
Civil Music, label home to artists such as Starkey, Drums of Death, and Om Unit, will be releasing a new EP from young Brooklyn-based producer Kuhn on November 14. The expansive Slime Beach EP (pictured above) contains four originals and six remixes, including this one by London-based producer Drop/Dead. One of two Drop/Dead reworks on the EP, the track offers an easier listen than the original, swapping out the brooding detuned pads, footwork rhythms, and panned polyrhythmic vocals for a groovier, garage-influenced sound with thumping percussion and even more severely altered vocal snippets. Prior to Slime Beach, Kuhn originally entered the scene with a series of self-released EPs, and has chosen to continue the tradition by offering another free remix EP, We’re Gonna Make It, which can be found after the jump.
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Brooklyn bass duo Sepalcure isn’t taking any chances when it comes to spreading the word about its forthcoming self-titled LP, which is scheduled to drop on November 22 via the Hotflush label. This week saw the release of the “Pencil Pimp” single—perhaps you remember b-side “I’m Alright,” which we recently offered for free download—and now Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma have unveiled the “Pencil Pimp” video. The clip’s plot isn’t exactly clear, but it seems that stern-faced hipsters, bonfires, intense trust exercises, and arty masks are involved. (via Pitchfork)
On November 28, Less Music will be releasing a vinyl-only 10″ single by Toronto-based beatmaker and Night Slugs affiliate Egyptrixx, with help from visual artists Datdatdat and Seripop, and indie band Ohbijou. The A-side, “Old Black,” is a cover of Seattle drone band Earth, and features vocals by Ohbijou with an accompanying video by Datdatdat. The b-side is an Egyptrixx original called “Hiawatha,” and the album artwork (pictured above) is provided by Montreal-based design collective Seripop.
Prior to the release of his new three-track single, “Connected,” via Moshi Moshi imprint Tender Age, UK producer D/R/U/G/S has opted to share with us a new track that will not be be on his forthcoming record. “Mila” is an accessible piece of laid-back electropop with a steady four-on-the-floor kick and chopped-up female and male vocal samples that bounce off each other like a skittering call and response. The atmospheric and uplifting track is particularly soothing when the synth glissando periodically settles on its expected harmonic resolution. D/R/UG/S’ new single comes out on November 28, but is available now exclusively on vinyl.
Over the past few months, XLR8R has been curating a special set of charts for Beatport. This week’s chart comes from Manchester native xxxy, who’s currently residing in London and mixing up a propulsive combination of garage and bass rhythms. Here are 10 tunes he’s been enjoying as of late, a collection that obviously lists some potent dancefloor weapons but surprisingly also includes a few introspective gems as well.
Listen to each individual track by clicking the song titles above, or go here to check out the entire chart. To see the rest of the charts in the XLR8R x Beatport series, click here.
Last week, XLR8R was invited to Berlin to check out Berlin Music Days, a multi-day festival celebrating the city and its rich electronic-music scene. Our complete festival wrap-up is here, but we also found a few minutes to chat with UK outfit Dark Sky, whom you may remember from the excellent podcast the young trio turned in for us last summer. Fresh off a long DJ set, Carlo Anderson, Tom Edwards, and (the rather quiet) Matt Benyayer sat down with us around 4:30 a.m. in the basement of a club and discussed their music, their influences, and their first impressions of Berlin.
XLR8R: Tonight you ended up playing for four and a half hours. Is that how long you normally play?
Carlo Anderson: No, that’s the longest set we’ve done so far.
Tom Edwards: It was difficult, especially at the beginning. We had to pace ourselves. But it was fun. We got to play tunes that we’d normally never get to play in the club, so it was good to do it.
XLR8R: There are three of you, so do you normally trade off every song, every few songs?
CA: It depends on the vibe of the set. Sometimes we’ll do two or three tracks each, sometimes we’ll just do one. It just comes down to the vibe of what we’re feeling.
XLR8R: So, how long have you guys been working together, and how did you meet initially?
CA: Two, two and a half years now I think.
TE: Maybe three. Matt and I went to school together, and Carlo and I met at a sound engineering college. It was during that time that we decided to start this project, Dark Sky.
XLR8R: But two of you had another project before this.
TE: Yeah, the Boogaloo Crew was Matt and I.
XLR8R: Was that a different sound?
TE: Yeah, the tunes we put out were very dubstep, 140 bpm, but the DJ sets were Baltimore club, with garage and dubstep.
XLR8R: When you started Dark Sky, was there a certain sonic idea?
TE: For myself, I had enjoyed doing the party sets, but after hearing new artists coming up, I wanted to do something different, a bit deeper, more experimental.
CA: [We were] just trying new sounds and seeing what happened. We never really intended it to become the main project, or for it to become as successful as it has. We just wanted to try something different.
TE: It wasn’t like, “We want to do something like this person.”
XLR8R: Some of the first Dark Sky productions to surface were remixes. Is that where you started?
CA: We got a remix with The xx quite early on, through a friend of ours. I think, off the back of that, we got asked to do quite a lot of remixes. At the time, it was a good way of getting our profile out there to a new audience. Also, they were tunes that we either liked or thought we could do something interesting with. It was never an intentional thing, it’s just the way it happened.
XLR8R: Is that Kelis remix a bootleg?
CA: No, that’s official. I’m a huge fan of Kelis, I’ve been listening to her for years.
TE: We were like, “We can’t turn this down this is Kelis,” even though the original was…
CA: [laughs] It wasn’t as good as her other stuff. It was no “Millionaire.”
XLR8R: What was the first original Dark Sky track that came out?
TE: “Ghost Notes” b/w “Something to Lose.” That came out on Black Acre, a 12″. But the original plane was to do something with Picures Music, the Frames EP, but while we were constructing that, Ian from Black Acre got in contact.
CA: It’s all thanks to Fantastic Mr Fox. He heard some of our stuff on MySpace. He liked it and put in a mix. Off the back of that, he started playing it to Ian from Black Acre and, next thing we know, we got an email from him. It was really quite surprising because we really hadn’t been producing for that long at that point in time. It was very humbling because we were big fans of Black Acre—we still are—especially Fantastic Mr Fox, we were listening to his stuff quite a lot at that time.
TE: With Blunted, we knew Brackles for quite awhile, from playing gigs with him. I’d also been talking to Shortstuff on AIM quite a lot, and just send him stuff now and again.
CA: [It was] the XLR8R mix from Scratcha DVA. He put “High Rise” on that, when it was still unfinished.
TE: “High Rise” was originally going to come out on another label. The guy was managing Brackles, but then Brackles [himself] came to us with a deal. It was going to be a split 12″ as well.
CA: It was going to be a split 12″ with a remix and b-sides, but…
Matt Benyayer: I didn’t let that happen. I was like, “Come on guys, let’s dig deep.”
CA: Originally, I don’t think “Armour” [the b-side] would have come out.
MB: It was that pressure to make another tune that led to “Armour” being made.
XLR8R: And 50Weapons?
CA: That was nuts. It was SBTRKT. He went on tour in America with Modeselektor, and he passed a load of our tunes on to them while they were on tour.
TE: We’ve seen videos on YouTube of Modeselektor dropping our track “Reflex.” Then SBTRKT introduced us to Gernot [from Modeselektor] on email, and he asked us just to keep him updated with our stuff. Then we were going to do a split 12″ with SBTRKT for 50Weapons, but this was just before his album was coming out, so he didn’t have any time.
CA: It was going to be “Speeding Blue” with SBTRKT doing another track.
TE: Then he said he couldn’t do it, so it was going to be one [Dark Sky] 12″, and then it became a four-track EP.
CA: It just kept developing. It was quite nice the way that worked.
XLR8R: Moving ahead, do you guys plan to keep jumping around with labels?
TE: We’re just about to finish an EP for Black Acre, which will hopefully come out early next year. We’ve got plans to do another EP for 50Weapons. But we’re not set into one label at the moment.
CA: Eventually I think we’ll find a home for the majority of our stuff. We’ll still do stuff with other labels, but all the labels we’ve worked with so far have been absolutely fantastic. They’ve all done a really good job and we’ve felt very at home with all of them. Each label we’ve released with has felt like a bit of a family kind of vibe.
XLR8R: How do you guys feel about the scene in London?
TE: I think it’s very interesting. It’s always been quite interesting, but the way how it’s sort of evolved form dubstep into a whole house and techno influence. People like Boddika are a massive influence on us. You can get lineups with dubstep producers billed with house producers.
CA: It’s been mad the way it’s happened. Every few weeks there’s a new subgenre thrown out there and it’s hard to keep up. There are so many different influences going on, from techno to house to garage, classic dubstep—it’s all very mixed up at the moment.
XLR8R: Growing up, were you guys listening to mostly UK music—grime, dubstep, etc.?
TE: I was never really a fan of grime when I was growing up. I would hear really bad grime. I didn’t know about the instrumental stuff until I started getting into dubstep. I was never really listening to pirate radio stations, either, or garage. When I was growing up, garage developed this really bad image about it, being in the club, champagne, and all that.
CA: There were a lot of shootings as well at garage nights, so it got a really dirty name at one point.
TE: I was mainly just into hip-hop.
CA: I did the whole US hip-hop kind of phase, and I kind of grew into drum & bass. I was really stuck on that until about four years ago, when Tom kept on playing me dubstep. I was like, “No, I hate it. It’s terrible. I an’t stand it.” He’d play me a track and I’d be like, “Yeeeeah, not that great.” Then I heard “Oskillatah” by Skream and it completely changed my mind. I grew from there and slowly started getting into it. If it wasn’t for Tom, I probably wouldn’t be listening to dubstep.
XLR8R: You guys are here in Berlin for Berlin Music Days. Is this your first time playing in Berlin?
TE: Yeah.
XLR8R: I realize you’ve only been here for a handful of hours, but what are your impressions of the city?
CA: I really like it.
TE: I love it.
CA: Everything is kind of stripped back and minimal. Everything is kind of straight to the point, there’s no pissing about.
TE: You hear so much about Berlin, so we’re quite excited to be here, really happy to be here.
While “Yellow Warrior” is a solid stand-alone track, Russian producer Unquote (a.k.a. Vsevolod Ermakov) didn’t want to create just a collection of singles for his first full-length album. Reverberation Box came out via London imprint Med School in October and contains 15 tracks of moving soundscapes that range from deep dubstep to high-energy drum & bass, all of which flow seamlessly into one another during the hour-long sonic adventure. “Yellow Warrior” blasts off with a rumbling bassline and reaches cruising altitude when the retro-futuristic laser synths mesh with the song’s churning low end. The complete tracklist and album artwork for Reverberation Box can be found after the jump.
01. Hide Your Tears Because We Are In Heaven 02. Reverberation Box 03. Cut Off The Past 04. Dopamine 05. Heavy Rain 06. Blind Jealousy 07. Metro Dreaming* 08. Cold Tenderness 09. Spectacle 10. Memories Fade Away (featuring Grimm) 11. Lubov Moya (featuring Molecular Structures) 12. Paint My Wings (featuring Grimm) 13. Yellow Warrior (featuring Lung) [digital exclusive] 14. Delusion (featuring Mr Sizef) [digital exclusive] 15. Grief Will Never Descend From Her Face [digital exclusive]
In a recent interview with Altered Zones co-editor Emilie Friedlander, Brooklyn-based musician Daniel Lopatin elaborated on the mindset he was in when selecting the source materials for his latest LP as Oneohtrix Point Never, saying, “[It reveals] that we’re not in a perfect system though we want to be. We want to believe that we’re efficient and perfect, but things are totally out of control and chaotic, like the way we speak and the way we think.” He’s referring to the audio recordings of decades-old commercials that he hacked into fragmented gulps, hiccups, exhalations, and various sonic ephemera to weave into his usual glacial drifts of Juno 60 synth tones. These kinds of dismantled phrases do help illuminate elements of the underbelly of collective consciousness, in a sense, but they do something even more important and direct, too. When warped and sequenced into disjointed juxtapositions, they make up a large portion of Oneohtrix Point Never’s newest asset and Replica‘s strongest element: rhythm.
“Andro” opens Lopatin’s new record with a mix of his past and present sounds, as if the artist is descending from the stars on a nebula of synthesized melodies, ultimately touching down on the terra firma of jumbled percussion, looped instrumentation, and half-utterances. That’s not to say he never ascends into the clouds again—both “Power of Persuasion” and “Remember,” among others, feature healthy offerings of formless analog warmth—but Replica is, for the most part, Oneohtrix’s most physical record yet.
The gritty, animalistic qualities of compositions like the surreal “Sleep Dealer,” the frantic “Nassau,” and the claustrophobic “Child Soldier” are the backbone around which Oneohtrix wraps his sparse melodies and disparate sound bytes. While blips of, say, a piano passage fold into drum-beat fractions and mid-syllables to flesh out an unnatural-but-oddly human groove, the core is adorned with maybe a lush string sample, a synth preset lilting in the background, and an audio clip of a pack of braying hounds. It creates the effect of simultaneously listening to any number of radio stations—all from distant eras and locales, none of which transmit their broadcast as a whole without interruptions. The music is at once disorienting, entrancing, confounding, and uniquely beautiful—all qualities that could accurately describe the entirety of Replica.
During his LP’s title track, Lopatin unlocks the perfect balance between his subconscious galactic travels and his earthly ruminations. The song brings to mind Antony Hegarty’s version of the “Returnal” single from Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2010 album of the same name, as it relies heavily on repeating piano melodies that brood with discontent and desire. But instead of Hegarty’s inimitable voice coloring in the edges of the piece, it is doused with washes of humming static, low-end rumble, and floating Juno 60 themes. The combination seems basic enough, but Lopatin uses those subtle intricacies and atonal nuances to further prove his original point. Even while he attempts to deliver a lovely and simple piano suite, a miasma of errant and tumultuous noise does its best to derail his efforts at sublimity. And yet despite its seemingly uncontrolled nature, “Replica” is an arresting piece deliberately written by a gifted musician. That ability to present such harnessed disarray through fresh and exciting music makes Replica a compelling listen from start to finish and a brilliant new direction for Oneohtrix Point Never’s sound.
British producer Beacon released a free EP via his Facebook page just the other day. The quasi-anonymous musician has been prolific in recent months, the free EP serving as the latest precursor to Beacon’s proper debut offering, “Storm Dub.” The single, which is set to drop via Sei A and Logan‘s Seinan Music label, will feature one original track along with remixes from Sei A and Rooflight, and is slated for a December 5 release. Beacon has also shared “Zatelite,” a previously unreleased track, as a free download. From the track’s crisp percussion and woozy lead melody, it would seem that Beacon is the latest in a growing line of producers toying with shades of UK funky and garage to create music that is both noteworthy and somewhat difficult to classify.
