The first single to come from shadowy Brooklyn production duo Creep, “Days” (featuring Romy Madley-Croft of The xx), has been making the rounds on the internet since it first premiered in early December, and it’s all in anticipation of the track’s forthcoming physical release. But while the song itself is a tastefully, uh, creepy tune with a solid groove, we find ourselves gravitating a bit more towards the remixes it’s yielded. The Soul Clap version we shared just before Christmas certainly kicked the energy of “Days” up a notch, but it’s this high-octane rendition by Toronto’s Azari & III (pictured above) that really got us moving. Basically, the outfit’s remix commandeers Creep’s brooding soundscape and Madley-Croft’s breathy vocal performance, and re-applies them to a serious club production propelled by tumbling sub-bass tones, churning dance rhythms, and arpeggiated synth melodies. You can nab this one along with UK producer Deadboy’s take on “Days,” not to mention the original track, when Creep’s 12″ drops on January 25 via Young Turks.
For a label that’s only been around for a year, Night Slugs already feels like a proud institution of London-centric dance music. Not content with being London’s rave kingpins, the collective headed up by Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 made its own entire scene. Taking the splintered ends of dubstep, bassline, and UK funky, they soldered the frayed wires together for a powerful charge that revived the corpse of early grime. Mated with the spirit of classic ’80s and ’90s house, Night Slugs was born. The label’s sound is ineffable but remarkably consistent, its releases bolstered with the low-end of dubstep, spoken in gruff, dry grime tones, and touched with a hint of friendly and rambunctious exuberance. Its roster spans two continents and each member of the stable has his own unique sound, yet each remains loosely tied together by a joint commitment to springy textures and exaggerated neon melodies.
Allstars Volume 1 is the label’s first CD release and it’s appropriately monumental, featuring a smattering of past tracks, remixes, and new originals. It’s a breathlessly exciting listen as ingenious rhythms whiz by each other in smooth and fluid motions. The previously unreleased Bok Bok remix of Girl Unit’s hyper-dramatic banger “I.R.L.” lurches with a muscular eski screwface that drains the quirky track of its color, while the label’s nascent classics are also out in full force. There’s the fussy, grime-streaked funky of Lil Silva’s “Golds to Get”; Kingdom’s throbbing jock jam, “Bust Broke”; the sleazy, sexed-up boogie of Velour’s “Booty Slammer”; and some smug decadence with Girl Unit’s Southern hip-hop dubstep anthem, “Wut,” which closes the album.
The new originals paint a future as bright as the past: L-Vis 1990 teams up with Deep Teknologi’s T. Williams for a piece of cartoon dread with pistons for kicks on “Stand Up,” while Bok Bok & Cubic Zirconia unleash an unhealthy amount of handclaps for the storming fidget house of “Reclash (Dub).” Night Slugs rookies provide exciting new directions for the label, as Optimum’s “Broken Embrace” glides with liquid tech-house grace and Jacques Greene’s “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want” takes inspiration from classic house and smoulders with an intense, midnight-blue R&B flame. But it’s Toronto native Egyptrixx who provides the compilation’s most assured and idiosyncratic moment with “Liberation Front.” Synths roll up and down like marbles in a halfpipe, leaving behind trails of dissolute low frequencies that lend it an oddly bottom-heavy quality. The song serves as a convenient manifesto for one of Night Slugs’ most unique producers, whose quirky beats perfectly embody the label’s ethos.
After years of releases under various pseudonyms and musical styles, Jay Haze will release his last record, Love=Evolution, on his own Contexterrior label in February. Produced largely in South America, where he currently lives, the album highlights Haze’s longheld interest in different sounds and cultures, and is ultimately a culmination of the many projects and ideas he has explored in the past. The end of Haze’s musical career may come as a surprise to his fans, though they may be comforted to know that a new chapter to Haze’s life will include more time spent with the various humanitarian projects he is involved with including DJs for DRC. Check out the album’s sleeve below.
Delivered quite unassumingly on his Tumblr page, “Callers” is a fresh, beat-centric single from South Carolina producer Noah Smith (a.k.a. Hard Mix), which apparently won’t be featured on the forthcoming split 7″ he’s dropping with fellow beat maker Star Slinger via Double Denim. Not unlike his partner-in-crime-to-be, Smith’s tune appropriates some uncredited source material—mostly vocal clips, which are promptly warped into oblivion—and applies those sounds to skittering hip-hop beats that are simultaneously head-knocking and poignant. And he does it well, too, so if “Callers” won’t be found on Hard Mix’s first physical release, we can only imagine the caliber of the tracks he’s saving for his auspicious first record. (via Gorilla vs. Bear)
Most people know Will Wiesenfeld as Baths, one of the litany of young scamps that emerged from LA’s exploding beat scene in 2010. But Wiesenfeld is a man of many talents and many projects, including a more ambient outing known as Geotic. Over the weekend, a new Geotic album, Mend, was made available for free download. Breaking from the hip-hop beats and emotive vocals of Baths, the music of Geotic is serene and even involves mellowly plucked guitars. It’ll be interesting to see how this one goes down with the Low End Theory crowd but hey, it’s a free album, right? Can anyone be that upset? The Mend artwork is above and the album can be downloaded here. The complete tracklist is below.
1. Unwind 2. Beaming Husband 3. Find Your Peace 4. Time Passes In a Slow Sundown 5. Disrobe and Come to Bed 6. Get Held 7. Sleep and We’ll Transition 8. Into Some Spirit World 9. Our Awe 10. The Sprawling, Glorious Newness 11. I’ll Have Come and Gone With You 12. Through the Lush and Undiscovered 13. And Upon Awakening 14. We’ve Mended
Normally we’d put some witty banter in this space, but it’s our first morning back in the office after more than a week off and things are getting off to a sluggish start at XLR8R HQ. Let’s just keep this simple. We like Roska. We like cartoons. That makes posting this animated clip for his song “Jackpot” a real no-brainer. No word yet on a release date, but it’s a pretty safe bet that the prolific London producer will be dropping plenty of tunes in 2011.
Only a few weeks removed from their stellar XLR8R Podcast, London grime upstarts Elijah & Skilliam are ringing in 2011 with a brand-new mix. Originally posted on the Blackdown blog, the 01012011 mix features the young spinners ripping through a set of high-energy grime offerings and basically doing more of exactly what made them so lovable in the first place. Download the mix here and peep the full tracklist below.
TRC – Into Sync (Unsigned) S-X – Woooo Riddim (DJ Q Remix) (Butterz) Morgan Zarate – Hooo Kid (Hyperdub) Swindle – Mood Swings (Butterz) Becoming Real – Like Me (Not Even) D.O.K – West Coast (Hyperdub) JME – Hench (SRC Remix) (Unsigned) Darq E Freaker – Cherryade (Oil Gang) Spooky – Over Capacity (Oil Gang) Mr Mitch – Centre Court (Fortified) J Sweet v Alias – Untitled (Earth 616) DVA – Still Born (DVA Music) Admiral Bailey – Jump Up (Terror Danjah Remix) (Greensleeves) J Sweet – Kerb (Starkey Remix) (Unsigned) Natalie Storm – Boys For Breakfast (Prodigal Ent) Wiley – Its Wiley (Royal T Remix) (Prodigal Ent) Nu Klear – Annealing (Earth 616) Swindle, Wizzy Wow, Rude Kid & Terror Danjah – Tag (Butterz Dub) Royal T – Orangeade VIP (Butterz) Emvee – Powerful Leg (Flush Media) D.O.K – Day (Unsigned) Teddy – Falling In Love (Unsigned) D.O.K – Chemical Planet (DarkToneSound Remix) (Butterz) Mr Mitch & Darkos – Station Square (Unsigned) ????? – ?????? TRC – Oo Aa Ee (D.O.K Remix) (Butterz) Illmana & Terror Danjah – Screama (Hardrive) TRC & Miss Fire – Drive Me (Unsigned) Mr Mitch – Skittles (Rampz Remix) (Butterz) DJ Q – Idea 4 (Unsigned) ????? – ????????
Whenever brick-and-mortar record shops resemble endangered, tusk-less elephants displayed in zoo cages for hipsters and mourners to feed handfuls of peanuts to every National Record Store Day, and whenever indie labels seem to be nothing more than cute names attached to stolen downloads, Honest Jon’s is there to smack one upside the head. For nearly a decade, the record shop on West London’s Portobello Road and its record label led by Blur/Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn have unearthed criminally unheard music from across Africa, the Middle East, and their fair city’s own post-war immigrant history. This year was no exception. South African electro-funk caught many Western ears when Honest Jon’s released the groundbreaking Shangaan Electro compilation this past summer. The Shangaan vibe takes no cues from Planet Rock but rather twitches about to simple, sped-up MIDI synth beats that drive caffeinated vocals as best heard on Zinja Hlungwani’s “N’wagezani My Love.” The label’s embrace of the vintage and the futuristic shined bright when Berliner Torsten Profrock (a.k.a. T++) had samples of 1930s East African singer Ssekinomu’s vocals haunt distorted, night-stalking techno breakbeats on his Wireless record. If fourth-world music indeed exists, Honest Jon’s wrote the book on it.
Zinja Hlungwani – “N’wagezani My Love”
“I think [Honest Jon’s] is one of the most interesting labels,” says Moritz Von Oswald, co-founder of iconic Berlin dub-techno imprints Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound. “[They’re] supporting something that’s not supported at all.” Von Oswald connected with the label through his friend and Honest Jon’s co-founder Mark Ainley, and earlier this year, the imprint released an EP and a live album by Oswald’s abstract dub project, the Moritz Von Oswald Trio (featuring Vladislav Delay and Sun Electric’s Max Loderbauer). On the Vertical Ascent EP, the trio builds headphone dub for 1 a.m. strolls through streets fogged by steaming gutters where clanging metal percussion hits and swooning, gaseous synth drones all thicken the air. House and techno legends François Kevorkian and Carl Craig later mixed the Trio’s improvised jams into fine bloodstream flows for Live In New York. “What [Honest Jon’s] does for different people regarding music, I think, is amazing and admirable,” he reflects.
Moritz Von Oswald Trio – “Pattern 1”
Such thoughts about how the label covers “different people” brings to mind a peculiar record that Honest Jon’s released this year between reissues of early 20th century Turkish folk and ’50s Latin-Congolese pop. Darren “Actress” Cunningham unleashed Splazsh, a welcome throwback to post-techno’s glory days in the early ’00s when artists threw ideas, breakbeats, and sampled vocals against walls and Scotch-taped their shattered pieces into grooves both genuinely psychedelic and freakish. Tracks like “Always Human” and “Senorita” are vintage micro-house while Cunningham indulges in grimy, hungover 8-bit funk on “Maze” and “Bubble Butts and Equations.” Yet, in the Honest Jon’s universe, such sounds still make comfy connections with the generational traditions and third-world grace in the label’s catalog. Cunningham kept his words simple for Honest Jon’s: “Good people with a strong passion for challenging music with a heart placed in the community.”
Actress – “Hubble”
Maria Topley Bird‘s Some Place Simple is Honest Jon’s newest LP release.
London’s West Norwood Cassette Library (a.k.a. Bob Bhamra) isn’t a producer that we shined a big light on in 2010, but we couldn’t help but notice that his tracks kept popping up in the sets of many of our favorite DJs, most notably the stellar XLR8R podcast from Ben UFO. (Side note: that mix was included in our 10 Best Podcasts of 2010 list, which is well worth taking a look at.) As it turns out, the track that Ben UFO employed, “Blonde on Blonde,” is finally seeing a proper release on a new Copenhagen-based label called TEAL Recordings. Even better, it’s backed with a remix from Ramadanman, operating under his Pearson Sound alias. The vinyl came out last week—cop that here—and the single will be released digitally on January 3. In the meantime, the folks at TEAL have passed along both tunes for us to stream here on XLR8R.com. Peep the artwork and give the songs a listen below.
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