London photographer-turned-producer Steve Braiden (better known simply as Braiden) has been making waves in the future-house/post-dubstep scene in the UK with a host of impressive DJ sets, including his regular show on Rinse FM and, recently, a well-received and now sold-out single from Joy Orbison’s Doldrums imprint. Online music publication The Quietus, in collaboration with Sonic Router, recently posted an extensive interview with Braiden in which the producer discusses a variety of topics including his start in the scene, his music’s aesthetic philosophy, and the success of his newest single, “The Alps” (the video for which you can watch here). To read the extensive and rather insightful interview, head over to The Quietussite.
Though the track didn’t make it on Caribou‘s official album of remixes for what was easily one of 2010’s top musical highlights, Swim, this version of “Bowls” by UK electronic duo Icarus (pictured above) received a sort of honorable mention yesterday when it was posted on Caribou’s SoundCloud for free download. We’re happy to hear more interpretations of Caribou’s various forays into beat-centric music, especially a flip as intricate and surprising as this one. For its remix, Icarus strips “Bowls” of its propulsive thump, catchy synth hook, and sporadic string flourishes, instead placing the focus directly on the moody sub melodies, droning bowl sounds, and the pair’s own glitched-out rhythms. Sounds twist and turn, swell and crash, and generally seem to have a life of their own on “Bowls (Icarus Remix),” as though Icarus’ only job was to make sure no noise flew too far out of earshot whilst flitting about.
Berlin’s party-oriented minimal techno outfit Mobilee has announced the release of the fifth edition in its Back to Back series, to be available February 28. The series has in the past served as an avenue for Mobilee-associated artists (such as Anja Schneider and And.Id) to explore their favorite cuts from the label’s output, mixing and remixing to their hearts’ desire. The newest edition of the series, presented by Polish minimal producer/DJ Marcin Czubala (picture above), will be special in that it comes with the traditional Back to Back mix of Mobilee tracks as well as a second CD with 10 new Czubala originals. The tracklist for both CDs, artwork, and a stream of And.Id’s contribution to the comp, “Erotica,” can be found below.
CD1 – (Favourite Mobilee 2010) 1. Dan Curtin – Free 2. Vincenzo – Young Mountain edit 3. Miss Kittin – All You Need 4. Anja Schneider – Pushin 5. And.Id – Erotica 6. Rodriguez Jr. – Okra Carnival edit 7. Pan-Pot – Captain My Captain 8. Czubala & Hugo – Zoo Comunale 9. Daniel Stefanik – Tripiando Los Colores 10. Sebo K – Spirits (Drum Version)
CD 2 – (Marcin Czubala Exclusives & Collaborations) 1. Marcin Czubala feat. Catz’n’Dogz – Never Give It Up 2. Marcin Czubala feat. Metrobox – Anna In Red 3. Marcin Czubala feat. Novika – Stay Close 4. Marcin Czubala – Loose The Man (jozif remix) 5. Marcin Czubala feat. Affkt – Soso 6. Marcin Czubala – Mountain Village 7. Marcin Czubala – Tamarind 8. Marcin Czubala – Spinning The Roulette 9. Marcin Czubala – Borobudur 10. Marcin Czubala – Loose The Man
Netherlands’ Dave Huismans, better known as 2562, recently announced he will be launching his own label, When In Doubt, with its first release being a two-track 10″ from the label-head himself. “Aquatic Family Affair” b/w “This Is Hardcore” marks the newest output from Huisman’s 2562 handle in over a year, and will only be limited to 300 copies (complete with blue vinyl and hand-printed sleeves) with no digital version or repressing planned for the future. Which can only mean that if you’re looking to get a copy, you better be on top of it when the 10″ hits stores February 7. Snippets of both tracks are available for preview here. (via Resident Advisor)
As the post-rock legends in Mogwai continue to riddle their once pristine discography with album after album of bombastic mediocrity, a vacant slot has opened in the music world—one that begs to be filled by tasteful musicians as interested in subtlety and nuance as they are grit and distortion. Certainly a prime candidate to fill such a void is the Irish duo Solar Bears (pictured above), and the more we hear from the instrumental outfit, the more they seem to lead the pack. This remix of “Clears Throat,” a tune originally by Denton, Texas-based FUR, speaks more to the Bears’ soft side, as they layer pattering rhythms, warbling synth ambiance, moody bass tones, and preciously plucked guitar notes to craft a touching soundscape that’ll likely entrance you while it tugs ever so softly at your heartstrings.
Hype Williams is not the electronic side-project of the well-known music video director of the same name but actually a mysteriously elusive “Anglo-Russian” duo that has been building a reputation with their brand of lo-fi dub/avant-pop/beat music over the last year. Now the duo has officially announced that a new LP, One Nation, will be released March 15 via the Hippos In Tanks imprint. Not much info is available on the upcoming release other than an extremely vague memo from the group to its label and an accompanying incomprehensible promo video. What can we decipher from these messages? Not much, except that they seem to be rather fond of pot and were most likely really high while making the 13 tracks that make up their new LP. For now, we’ll have to scratch our heads and wait for whatever they’ve got planned next. One Nation‘s tracklist, some extremely-hard-to-see album art, and a video for “Rescue Dawn” from their 2010 LP, Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, and Start Gettin Reel, can be found below.
Tracklist: 1. ital 2. untitled 3. william, shotgun sprayer 4. businessline 5. warlord 6. dragon stout 7. homegrown 8. your girl smells chung when she wears dior 9. unfaithful 10. MITSUBISHI 11. jah 12. break4love 13. untitled (and your batty’s so round)
Leave it to Warp’s flagship beatsmith Flying Lotus to not only help revolutionize the music we listen to, but also how we obtain the music we listen to. With a brand-new web app called Trigger, fans of FlyLo can download what are called the Cosmogramma Alt Takes, but there’s a catch: You have to prove you actually purchased the Cosmogramma album. How do you do that? Well, if you bought the CD, you hold up the print side of the disc to your webcam while the Trigger application is running; if you bought the vinyl version then you do the same with the C-side label; and if you legally downloaded the record, you have to print out the PDF version of the booklet and flash that at your computer. You can learn more details and give the whole thing a try over on FlyLo’s website, here. (via Pitchfork)
Brooklyn-based avant hip-hopper Kotchy (pictured above) is getting set to release his latest album, Two, on February 1. Back in November, he gave us a sneak peek in the form of a trippy video for album opener “Sometimes I Get Down.” Now the song has been remixed by Irish-born, NYC-based producer Mike Slott, who has basically extracted almost all of Kotchy’s distinctive flow. Gone are the laid-back talk-raps and noodling acoustic guitar loop, as Slott has picked up the tempo and assembled a playful little number full of swirling keys, melodic whimsy, and bouncy, chopped-up beats. Think of it as the original’s hyperactive younger brother.
Coming soon on DJ/producer Robert Hood’s own label, M-Plant, is a two-song 12″ record featuring both the Detroit techno veteran (pictured above) and UK producer James Ruskin. While Ruskin delivers a solid remix of the lead single from Hood’s Omega LP, “Alpha,” the label head offers a brand-new track of ominous, hypnotic dance music, simply called “The Family.” The new single will drop in vinyl and digital formats on February 14, and feel free to check out the original version of “Alpha,” embedded for you below.
David Kennedy seems perfectly positioned for the new millennium. His recollection of the 20th century is a bit vague. The future is far away and up for grabs. His professional creative trajectory, which began rather suddenly in the mid-’00s when he stumbled upon a low-pressure sound community growing in London, is all happening in the present.
“I just started hanging out at these parties and becoming exposed to a developing scene like nothing I’d ever experienced before,” he says. “I threw myself into it. My mates at school thought I went bonkers. The direction of my life, all my friends, completely shifted due to dubstep.”
It shifted so dramatically, in fact, that Kennedy began to disappear behind a moniker called Ramadanman—chosen for how it looks and rolls off the tongue rather than as any personal relationship to Islam—that he’d thought up when he was about 13. That was just after the ’90s became the aughts, when he was getting over listening to “pop rubbish” and turning on to something deeper and darker. “I liked how the name sounded then.” And we like how it sounds now. It’s one of the smartest and most distinctive aliases of any artist at work in the 21st century.
Ramadanman is on Skype, talking from London, telling me about this transfiguration from impressionable club kid to confident and versatile bass producer. The most significant changes seemed to come about when he was preparing to head north to study English and French at Leeds University.
“I wasn’t even of legal age when I began going to FWD>> in spring of 2006,” he says of the influential weekly that helped put dubstep on the map. “It was grime and garage that held my interest before that. But not like this, which was the new, exciting sound of right now. I became insanely passionate about it.”
Passion begets passion in any music scene. But the burst of raw energy generated by the forward thinkers and doers of the first wave of dubstep—in London and Bristol primarily, though a number of key players were found in some northern UK regional centers and peppered across the European continent—was a real fire starter.
Around the time Kennedy bounced into the party, DMZ (the label run by Coki, Loefah, and Mala) had been around for a couple of years, Steve Goodman (a.k.a. Kode9) was less than a year into Hyperdub, Burial had not yet been outed, Rob Ellis (a.k.a. Pinch) had launched Tectonic, and Skull Disco was becoming a double-barreled platform for the rapidly ascending Appleblim and Shackleton. Then there was Paul Rose (a.k.a. Scuba), who was building Hotflush Recordings into a crossover power center in London and later Berlin, while in The Netherlands, Martyn was undergoing a transformation from Dutch D&B promoter to brave-new-world dub producer in American suburbia.
At FWD >>, Kennedy, now 22, met the slightly older Ben Thomson and Kevin McAuley—a.k.a. Ben UFO and Pangaea, respectively—who were also students at Leeds. The trio began putting their passions together and started the Hessle Audio label in 2007. It provided a significant new gateway into dubstep for artists that were still keeping the bass crunch of the music intact, though gradually losing the wobble that had been a signature element of the style.
In its place, the Hessle kids brought to the table a distilled but intuitive reading of soul, funk, and jazz—largely via an apparent love of house and jungle that had been produced a full generation before. There were also traces of techno, especially the dub stylings of Berlin’s Basic Channel, and hybrid features that stacked up nicely against freaky Detroit Afrofuturists Moodymann, Theo Parrish, and Omar S.
Kennedy says, for him, the house influence came from frequent visits at age 14 to the Vinyl Junkies record shop in London’s Soho. “I listened to a few things, I bought a few things,” he says, but when he began to fool around with FruityLoops at 15, it was grime—not house—he tried to make. “But people started saying it sounded to them like dubstep, which I hadn’t really heard of before then,” Kennedy says. The more he got into his own music as a writer and producer, the more left of center his tracks became, effectively bending and shaping a genre he knew little about into something, well, not quite like anything else.
In 2006, he made some digital tracks that he offered up to DJs, and put out a side called “Response” on a split 10-inch (with Conquest) on the Bare Dubs label. It was also his first year at university. “I was going to school, making music, starting up a record label. It was quite a busy year,” he recalls. But it got even busier in 2007, when Thomson, McAuley, and Kennedy issued Hessle Audio 001, TRG’s “Put You Down” b/w “Broken Heart.” Both sides were killer, garage-like blues jams that got the attention of DJs and clubbers across the UK and the continent and made their way to discerning ears in North America. Pangaea’s three-track EP, Coiled, followed later the same year, and Untold’s “Kingdom” 12-inch and TRG’s originals, with remixes from Martyn and Ramadanman, were released early in 2008.
“Put You Down (Refix)” was the first transmission by Kennedy on Hessle Audio. He didn’t do much with it, frankly, except to strip it of most of its gloss and sheen. It was already a tight, lean track, rough around the edges and dancefloor-ready. Ramadanman just made it edgier, leaner, and, yes, grimier. But it was his next release that hit the bullseye full-on.
Hearing “Blimey” for the first time was like being shocked to attention by one of those illuminated skeletons that comes out of nowhere and quivers and shakes in the dark. It’s all drums and texture, with a subtle bassline that rises and falls, introducing a chorus of kids’ voices backed by a barely audible melancholy melody, all engineered for maximum dub impact.
It certainly made an impression on minimal techno star Ricardo Villalobos, who took to opening his typically trippy marathon sets with it. So what did Ramadanman think about that? “I was tremendously flattered, of course. But I have to admit I didn’t even know who Villalobos was at the time.”
In a digitized, instant-information century, where everyone can claim to know anyone via social networks, his comment seems entirely refreshing. So is this: his admission that he needs to catch up with the music of Carl Craig, who re-edited his 2010 collab with Appleblim, “Void 23,” on Aus. “He was given the track and did amazing work on it,” Kennedy says. “I never met him—except we Tweeted each other after the track was done… He said it was a nice track. I said, ‘Cool!’ That was about it.”
Humility, talent, and ambition seldom align as they appear to with Ramadanman. It’s probably a good reason why he’s part of a solid team at Hessle Audio, and why he has developed a strong working relationship with Appleblim. “He comes up from Bristol and we just spend hours and hours in the studio,” says Kennedy. “I’m more of a technical producer whereas [Appleblim] just throws something out there and sees what sticks.”
In 2009, the pair produced two memorable tracks: “Sous le Sable,” a 10-minute tech-house jam included on the Aus EP series and comp All Night Long, and the buoyant “Justify,” an infectious, shuffling power dub that defies easy categorization. There’s a little bit of everything in there—with Berlin and Detroit squeezing out the UK influences by a nose.
Ramadanman has also split production duties with Midland—his housemate—on the funky-house-inspired “Your Words Matter” b/w “More Than You Know,” which borrows from Chicago- and New York-style grooves without sounding like either.
His other credits packed into a career now entering its fifth year are equally impressive. Ramandanman shared a Dubstep Allstars mix CD (with Chef) on Tempa that Kennedy calls “a snapshot of where I was at the time [in 2008-09], playing the new stuff, vinyl, and dubplates, along with a few classics.”
He released the “Humber” 12-inch on Apple Pips, “Revenue” on 2nd Drop, and remixed “Epilogue” for the French producer F. He’s also put out music on Soul Jazz: “Carla” and “Core” b/w “Dayrider” as Ramadanman, and “Gambetta” in his (slightly more) tech-house guise Pearson Sound. As the latter, he’s also released “PLSN” b/w “WAD” in 2009 and “Blanked” b/w “Blue Eyes” late last year, both for Hessle Audio.
But 2010 also saw Kennedy quicken the pulse on several Ramadanman productions: the six-track, self-titled EP on Hessle Audio hints at the shape of new directions to come, especially on “A Couple More Years” and “Don’t Change For Me,” which mines UK hardcore and jungle and adds more juice and swagger than on previous efforts; the “Glut” b/w “Tempest” sides for Untold’s Hemlock imprint, where he inserts cut-up vocal edits and fires up the 808-influenced drum programming even more; and the “Fall Short” b/w “Work Them” EP (Swamp 81), which recombines all his inspirations into an acid-funk-Chicago-juke-B-more-club-groove thang that sounds like no one else working at the moment.
While there is a reductive sonic architecture detectable across his body of work, none of the tracks really sound alike. There is subtle variation in all of them. That’s a neat trick that can only come from a rare, unique talent. Is it pure instinct or is the work part of a conscious process?
“I’m never content to do the same thing twice, so my music is always evolving, moving forward,” Kennedy says. “It’s hard to judge it chronologically from 2006 to this point, but it’s all been a conscious attempt to not clone any of my tunes, to always break through to something new. Otherwise, it’s just not interesting.”
The fact is, Ramadanman, Pearson Sound, and Hessle Audio’s product has been far more than interesting. It may be too early to call, but the guess here is that history will offer kind rewards for all of the above projects. From day one, Kennedy and crew have been competitive with the best of their bass music contemporaries, carving out a niche and owning a funky corner of the dubstep sub-world.
Ramadanman has beefed up his tour schedule and is in greater demand for DJ gigs (“I did support for Modeselektor [in late 2010] and it was my first time doing a kinda rock-star thing on a tour bus. Wicked!”) and started his own weekly, an all-vinyl night in Leeds called Acetate. He’s just finished a FabricLive mix to be released in March in Europe and April in the US.
So where does Ramadanman see his life and artistry heading over the next five years?
“I don’t think about it, really. I just plan on making music,” he says. “Just a few years ago I was going nuts in the club, probably just acting like some totally annoying kid. Now I run a record label, make sure all the tracks are mastered properly, listen to the test pressings, and put them out when they’re ready. It’s pretty boring stuff, really. It’s who I am. I can’t see myself in the future any other way.”
Ramadanman’s FabricLive mix will be released in April on Fabric.
