Podcast 815: Damar Davis

Damar Davis is a house producer and DJ from Cypress park, California. He’s also the host of Say Less on dublab Radio and the founder of Salon Recordings, a label where he’s put out the work of Jay Sound and DJ Born Again Virgin. He connected through music through his family, all of whom play music either professionally or at church, before becoming involved into bands through high school. Electronic music touched him like nothing else because of the drums. “I was always told to play the part [the drums] straight. Don’t play too groovy, don’t play it like this or don’t play like that,” he recalls. “So it really stood out that the drums are always going nuts and the drums are kind of the lead as a singer is to a band.”

In 2010, Davis moved out to Los Angeles to attend music school, aiming to become a touring drummer, but pursued DJing and production because he wanted to own his own music. In 2018, he launched Salon and began releasing his own music: SUSTAIN ME, Native Son, Kinfolk, and Dance Season Vol. 3, all landed in reasonably quick succession. Last week, he released Percussion in hi- fi, a collection of 10 slick deep house racks. (The release followed Bobby Cabbagestalk’s AQUA on the LA label). Coinciding with its release, he’s delivered an XLR8R podcast of the laidback, groovy house and electronica that he’s been playing out over the summer.

01. What have you been up to lately?
Life has been super hectic. I recently played Boiler Room. I’ve really been focusing on establishing the sound of Salon Recordings. As a label we have a lot of cool releases coming out. Artists that are from Los Angeles and some that are not. I’ve been trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, so you know working out, eating well, and trying to live happily.

02. So what have you been listening to lately?
I normally start my day by listening to some jazz. Then by the middle part of my day I’m going heavy on old-school hip-hop, R&B and depending on how much coffee I’m drinking that day I’ll gradually get into like some house music.

03. When and where did you record this mix?
I recorded this mix in my studio in Cypress Park, Los Angeles.

04. What setup did you use?
CDJs.

05. How did you choose the tracks for this mix?
I didn’t want it to feel like the dancefloor. I wanted it to be a little bit easier for the listener. I tried to pick things that were a little bit more full and then I also made sure to put breaks in there so it can live longer in a work or home environment.

06. How does it compare to some thing you would play out?
I feel like there’s a deep-rooted Damar Davis sound when it comes to selecting tracks, so it does sound very similar to what I would play live, just not as aggressive.

07. What’s next on your horizon?
I’m really just establishing the fact that Los Angeles dance music deserves a little bit more light on it. I feel like every year when I look at the publications and see who is being nominated and see who’s winning these awards I rarely see people that are native to Los Angeles. There’s so much great music coming out of LA outside of Salon Recordings along with DJs that are really (really, really) good that I feel like these big publications don’t necessarily put us in the running. Outside of that, I’m going to continue to put out good music, play fun shows, create fun parties, play and dabble inside of the merchandise world and then I would like to do some more scoring. I would like to do more movies and commercials like I’ve done in the past. Yeah, so shit like that!

Tracklisting

01. Javanntte “These words” (NDATL Muzik)
02. Kyle Hall “4wrd Motion” (Wild Oats)
03. Patrice Scott “Feels So Good” (Sistrum Recordings)
04. 1471 “Phlash” (Loaded Records Limited)
05. KMFH “Crushed” (Wild Oats)
06. Kali “Rough Times” (thatmanmonkz Remix) (Shadeleaf Music)
07. Sykodelik “Restless Soul” (Basement 282)
08. Waajeed “Through It All” (Tresor)
09. JUST IN: BSTC “Venus & Mars” (Jamie 3:26 Edit) (The Orchard Music)
10. Kerri Chandler “Time is destiny” (Large Records)

XLR8R Subscribers can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

Brainfeeder Signs Los Angeles Composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson

Brainfeeder has released a new single from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and educator based in Los Angeles, California.

“Airavata” is composed, produced, and arranged by Atwood-Ferguson, who plays electric guitar (reversed) and acoustic violin, while Gabe Noel and Peter Jacobson join on acoustic bass and cello respectively. It’s the first taste of an upcoming album.

“The spiritual and emotional intention of the music is to empower, encourage, and awaken those that hear it,” says Atwood-Ferguson. “The goal has been to create the most authentic music that I can with the determination that its quality is good enough to be riveting and relevant for many,
many years to come.”

Atwood-Ferguson has been a pillar of the Brainfeeder family since the label’s inception in 2008, contributing to countless recordings for artists on the label including Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote, Kamasi Washington, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Brandon Coleman, Teebs, and The Gaslamp Killer. It is, then, fitting that he should himself sign to his friend and regular collaborator Flying Lotus’ label to release his own “magnum opus,” he says, which has been 12 years in the making.

Tracklisting

01. Airavata

“Airavata” is out now on Brainfeeder Records.

Photo: Hannah Arista

Chicago Trio Purelink Next on Los Angeles’ Peak Oil

Chicago trio Purelink will release an album on Los Angeles label Peak Oil.

Since forming in 2020, the group—which comprises Tommy Paslaski (a.k.a Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (a.k.a kindtree), and Akeem Asani (a.k.a Millia)—have convened regularly in a shared studio to workshop, swap samples, and hone their collective muse via “the endless possibilities of a laptop,” seeking “something different than we would make on our own.”

Signs, their first full-length effort, is distilled from extended compositions prepared and performed across 2022 in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Los Angeles.

We’re told that it “captures their chemistry at its most liquid and immaterial, mapped in mutating systems of glitch, glass, rhythm, and space.”

The release follows a mini-album on UwU and a four-track release called To / Deep on NAFF.

Tracklisting

01. In Circuits
02. 4k Murmurs feat. J
03. Stadium Drive
04. Pinned
05. Blue
06. We Should Keep Going

Signs LP is scheduled for September 15 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “4k Murmurs” feat. J in full via the player below and pre-order here.

Oneohtrix Point Never Next on Warp with New Album

Daniel Lopatin, better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, will release a new album via Warp.

Again follows on from 2020’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. In Lopatin’s words, it’s a “speculative autobiography” with his “trademark melodic touch.”

Much like 2015’s Garden of Delete, Again germinated as a collaboration between Lopatin’s current and younger selves, but this time it’s a meditation on his musical identity during young adulthood from the perspective of middle age.

“The album imagines what might have been, as the musician made his music through space and time,” we’re told. “Which decisions foreclosed some realities? What might those other worlds have sounded like?”

The album’s artwork features an original sculpture by Matias Falkbakken, photographed by Vegard Kleven.

Tracklisting

01. Elseware
02. Again
03. World Outside
04. Krumville
05. Locrian Midwest
06. Plastic Antique
07. Gray Subviolet
08. The Body Trail
09. Nightmare Paint
10. Memories Of Music
11. On An Axis
12. Ubiquity Road
13. A Barely Lit Path

Again LP is scheduled for September 29 release. You can watch an album trailer below and pre-order here.

Photo: Andrew Strasser & Shawn Lovejoy / Joe Perri

KMRU Launches Label with New Album

Joseph Kamaru, better known as KMRU, will release a new album to launch his own OFNOT imprint.

Dissolution Grip emerged from Kamaru’s studies at Berlin’s Universität der Künste.

The Kenyan composer and sound artist is best known for his field recording work, and as he traveled across Europe and the wider world for regular live performances, he made a point to snapshot each city.

But the more he studied and the more he examined his practice, the more Kamaru began to wonder what the purpose of these recordings were. Simultaneously, he’d begun to dive more wholeheartedly into the world of synthesis, and he started to wonder not just how he could harness these sounds but how he might be able to more dynamically combine them with field recordings.

Guided by Jasmine Guffond at UDK, Kamaru looked at waveforms—the visual representation of sound itself—and embarked on a process where he would write scores from the shapes, gradually turning the scores into raw synth sounds. Instead of using environmental recordings as an aesthetic marker, he would use these captured moments to guide the waveforms. So each sound is birthed from a field recording, but none of those recordings are audible in their original form.

On the digital bonus track called “Along A Wall,” for example, KMRU recorded in an old shack on his family’s compound in Nairobi, where wind was shaking the building to its foundations. Listening to the finished piece, we can hear subtle electronic tones that rub and vibrate against each other, slowly saturating and mimicking the erratic motion of the wind. The original recording has been removed, but the feeling remains.

For more information on KMRU, check out his XLR8R podcast here and his Artist Tips feature here.

Tracklisting

01. Till Hurricane Bisect
02. Dissolution Grip
03. Along A Wall (digital bonus)

Dissolution Grip LP is scheduled for September 29 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Along A Wall” in full via the player below and pre-order here.

Warp Welcomes Slauson Malone 1

Slauson Malone 1, the solo project of Jasper Marsalis, has signed to Warp Records with a new single.

Voyager chronicles Marsalis’ move from New York to Los Angeles in a period of doubt and aimlessness following the release of his 2019 full-length, A Quiet Farwell, 2016​–​2018 (Crater Speak). It comes paired with a music video directed by Ryosuke Tanzania, which speaks to overwhelming feelings of anxiety and melancholy experienced by Marsalis, and by extension, a desire for a new sense of belonging.

“I wanted to write something in the state of being sick of being sick, annoyed with being annoyed,” Marsalis says of the single. “This verse documents my first steps of refusing the indulgence of trauma and grief. With each movement, the feeling returns but different, weirder.”

The project forms part of a partnership between Warp and jMedia, which you can read more about here.

Tracklisting

01. Voyager

Voyager is available now, with a stream below.

Bufiman Next on Cómeme

Matias Aguayo‘s Cómeme will release a new EP from Bufiman, the German artist born Jan Schulte.

For over 15 years, Schulte has been a a resident at Düsseldorf’s Salon des Amateurs venue. You can hear his music on labels including Safe Trip Records and Dekmantel, and as Wolf Müller on Themes for Great Cities and International Feel.

The Switch Beats EP is filled with organic grooves and invigorating sounds—it’s “original, modern, and irresistibly danceable,” the label says, and it features “Bboy rhythms, outer space fantasy, and dancefloor utopia.”

For more information on Aguayo, check out his XLR8R mix here.

Tracklisting

01. Neue Wellen
02. Hard Timez (Lexus Or Justice)
03. Ntndo Pitch
04. Hard Timez (Just Ice)
05. Wärmewellen

Switch Beats EP is scheduled for September 15 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Neue Wellen” in full via the player below.

Podcast 814: Lusine

In September, Jeff McIlwain, who is better known as Lusine, will put out his latest record, Long Light—and the album will mark two decades since the Seattle-based producer first released on Ghostly International. Between those two points, McIlwain has put out four full-length albums of visceral, kinetically-curious music that broadly fuses techno, pop, and experimental composition on the Brooklyn, New York label. (He’s released several others elsewhere.) The journey began with Serial Hodgepodge, a release of stuttering beats and fluttering melodies, but over more recent years, beginning with 2009’s A Certain Distance, and continuing through 2013’s The Waiting Room and 2017’s Sensorimotor, McIlwain has moved to collaborative, song-forward work and Long Light is the culmination of this process. Yes, you can expect 11 tracks of McIlwain’s signature and dynamic signature looping patterns and textures, but it’s also rich in human vocals and pop structures, hooks, and melodies. Ahead of the release, McIlwain has crafted a similarly rich and delicate XLR8R podcast, which he has filled with tracks from some of our favorite artists: Shlohmo, Ital Tek, Teebs, Weval, and more.

01. What have you been up to recently?
Just prepping for the release of the album, and preparing a couple live sets to take on the road.

02. What have you been listening to?
I’ve really been liking the new Clark album, Weval‘s new album, anything by Teebs and Dorian Concept, and I really like Hana Vu’s stuff on Ghostly. I’m also digging a few tracks from Elsa Hewitt. Interested to see what she does next.

03. Tell me about your new album. What can we expect?
I was kind of a little more into the idea of slightly more minimal songwriting and focusing on repetition and sound design on a few of my tracks, although it might come across as tiny tweaks to the listener. Maybe a bit less overtly synth-heavy, trying to get back into sample-based stuff. I worked a bit with some live drum material from my friend Trent Moorman. I love working with vocalists, it’s just where my head is at, but I also really like to marry an ambient and experimental style with a more song-based structure. I like stuff that’s hooky, but unique, and I’m hoping that comes across on this one.

04. Where and when did you record this mix?
Just at home, in my family room, over the past few weeks.

05. What setup did you use?
I use Traktor and a cheap controller. Nothing special. Someday I will upgrade my setup.

06. How did you choose the tracks that you’ve included?
It’s just a deep dive into artists, labels, and similar artists etc.. Some of them are artists I fall back on, and tracks I was already into, and some are tracks that I discover in the process of digging.

07. Where do you imagine it being listened to?
In the car or at home. Not party music!

08. What’s next on your horizon?
Right now I’m anticipating and gearing up for live shows, so working a lot on my live material. But I want to jump right back into making music because it takes me a long time to write, and I want to get right back into it. Writing in the studio is the thing I enjoy the most.

XLR8R Subscribers can download the podcast below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

Tracklisting

01. Elsa Hewitt “Massive Charade” (ERH)
02. Ital Tek “Staggered” (Planet Mu)
03. Lusine “Tropopause (Loscil remix)” (Ghostly International)
04. Lukid “End Melody” (Glum)
05. Populous “Azul Oro feat. Ela Minus” (Wonderwheel Recordings)
06. Lusine “Zero to Sixty” feat. Sarah Jaffe (Ghostly International)
07. Luke Abbott “Brazil” (Border Community)
08. Shlohmo “Wen UUU” (Friends of Friends)
09. Teebs “NES” (Brainfeeder)
10. Weval “Should be Fine” (Technicolour)
11. Letherette “Green” (Wulf Records)
12. Baril “Take Your Time” (Intercept)
13. Ford. “The Pace” (Foreign Family Collective)
14. Clark “Dolgoch Tape” (Throttle Records)
15. Lusine “Transonic” (Ghostly International)
16. Louf “Eulers Disc” (Cross Country)
17. Brokenchord “Door Shutter” (Black Acre Records)
18. Tor “Inkeri (Aparde remix)” (Eleuthra Music)
19. Moderat “COPY COPY (Logic1000 & Big Ever remix)” (Monkeytown Records)
20. Koreless “Shellshock” (Young)

Octo Octa Delivers New EP

Octo Octa, born Maya Bouldry-Morrison, will release a new EP on her own T4T LUV NRG label.

Bouldry-Morrison has spent spent the last three years “perfecting her engineering” on these three “sensual, beautiful, and enveloping” songs, we’re told.

For the opening track, “Late Night Love,” Bouldry-Morrison aims to capture not just the subjective experience of dancing together, but also what happens after the party, making love and holding her partner close.

The second track ‘Let Yourself Go!’ raises the tempo but maintains the mood of the record. We’re told to expect a “classic Octo Octa ecstatic breakbeat acid jam” written for building heat in the body.

The EP closer, “Come Here, Let’s Commune,” is an invitation to explore togetherness. The essence of the track is a gorgeous piano theme, grounded in Bouldry-Morrison’s belief that the dancefloor experience can be not only exciting and ecstatic, but also deeply moving and generative.

Bouldry-Morrison released Resonant Body, her latest album, in 2019.

Tracklisting

01. Late Night Love
02. Let Yourself Go!
03. Come Here, Let’s Commune

Dreams of a Dancefloor EP is scheduled for September 15 release. Meanwhile, you can stream clips below and pre-order here.

Download One Hour of John Dimas at Strichka Festival, Ukraine

John Dimas has shared with XLR8R a recording of a recent set at Strichka Festival in Ukraine, which took place in May.

Influenced by the underground clubs of Thessaloniki, where he started DJing as a teenager after moving from his native country Albania, Dimas has established himself as a highly respected DJ-producer known for his deep knowledge of music.

On a release front, he’s maintained a steady output since his 2010 debut, pushing a futuristic fusion of techno and house that is clever, energetic, and infectious—released on DJ Hell’s International Deejay Gigolo, Bass Culture, One Records, Half Baked, and most recently on Francesco Del Garda’s Timeless imprint.

Dimas also runs Elephant Moon, a record label with which he aims to support new talent. The label does not accept demos; instead Dimas searches for young, emerging artists himself and mentors them throughout the process. In 2020, he launched a second imprint called SYNQ as well as Intermission Records with Voigtmann to release their debut album, Internal Transmission, for their collaboration VO1GT.M4S.

As you’d expect from Dimas, this mix is full of playful minimal house cuts, intricate drum patterns, and wonky basslines. This is what Dimas had to say about it.

“Deciding to perform in Kyiv during the war was no easy choice, but I am so glad I said yes.
The journey there was quite a challenge as currently the only way possible is via a 19-hour sleeper train from Warsaw but it was also part of the experience and I will always remember it fondly.

“The resilience and determination of the Ukrainian people was incredibly inspiring. Being one of a small number of international artists there, it was an honor to come together in our shared love for music in such difficult circumstances. Shout outs to all other artists from abroad that also made the trip; it was a real bonding experience for us all!

“The performances of local artists and their brave stories deeply touched me and I want to thank everyone who joined for my set, dancing and sharing their energy. My heart overflowed with both love and sadness: love for the incredible people I had the pleasure of meeting, and sadness for what is happening in their beloved homeland.

“This is why I am sharing part of the recording of my set. To give those who were unable to attend the festival due to the circumstances a sense of being there, and for those who did attend, a chance to relive the experience when music connected us all and nothing but the present moment seemed to matter.”

XLR8R Subscribers can download the mix below. If you’re not an XLR8R subscriber, you can read more about it and subscribe here.

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