London’s Intruders.tv got a chance to sit down and talk with post-dubstep poster boys Mount Kimbie shortly after their US tour. The duo discusses its recent touring experiences, including the difference between playing more traditional “band venues” and clubs. They also share some insight into how they adapt their songs to achieve their live show and some thoughts regarding the upcoming release, the Blind Night Errand EP. If you’ve got about nine minutes to spare and can hang with some pretty heavy British accents (at least for us US people) then we suggest you watch the video below:
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Last month, Flying Lotus‘ Brainfeeder imprint released an album that has seemed to strike a chord with lovers of experimental, innovative beat music, not unlike the way Lotus himself splashed onto the electronic music scene years ago. But while producer Steven Ellison (and the string of wannabes that soon followed him) relied heavily on blown-out bass tones, cosmic soundscapes, and off-kilter rhythms, burgeoning producer Mtendere Mandowa (a.k.a. Teebs) offers music that’s more down to earth and organic, though still enchanting and quite beautiful. We were able to take some time out of Mandowa’s schedule at this year’s Decibel Festival to touch on a few subjects surrounding his brand-new Ardour album. You can read our conversation, which delves into his work as a painter, the creation of his debut record, and how living with Flying Lotus inspired him in many ways, after the jump.
XLR8R: Your sound is a bit different from a good lot of the beat scene crowd. Was that something you sought to do? Teebs: It’s a natural thing to want to do your own thing. After seeing so many kids bite and do the same thing after [Flying] Lotus came out, I don’t want to hear that again. I want to bring something different to the plate. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but there’s a very dark, heavy sound happening. A lot of artists have a similar approach to [making] it, so it’s like, ‘Why would I want to do that too?’ So, I decided to really flip it, and do that kind of record.
You lived in the same apartment complex as Flying Lotus while making a lot of Ardour. Did he influence your production of that record much? We never really talked too much about that kind of stuff, but just being around each other definitely helped me. I’d wake up every day, and he’d be making music. I’d just be upstairs hearing this new Lotus music playing at 9 a.m., and I’d ask myself, ‘What am I doing right now? Just standing around? I should probably go back and make music. I’m inspired.’ And it would be the same thing at night time, playing a new track or something else. That kind of focus. He had this great movie collection. It was like my personal Blockbuster. I’d go there, grab a new film, watch movies, and make music. I learned how to focus, I guess.
Did movies have a lot of influence on the creation of your album? I think so, yeah. I watched a lot of films when I was living with those guys. I like the idea of how film scores work.
Any movies in particular? Not sound-wise, but maybe just on a visual level. I liked a lot of the animes I was watching, like Paprika. [FlyLo] had a lot of sci-fi and Japanese films.
Now, you took a break while making the record after your father passed away. What was it that finally drove you to finish it? Well, I wasn’t really doing anything at the time. I wasn’t making music, I wasn’t going out, and having that absence really helped. And talking to Lotus, he had lost his mother the year previously, and we talked about that. And I don’t know…I think, randomly, I was walking around, and I went into this music store in Fairmont near where I live in Chino. I just bought some random stuff, but just after seeing that music store, I thought I should try it again. I made a track that day, and it became one of the songs on the record.
Which one? It’s “Burner.” That’s the first track I made getting back into it.
Is your creative process usually quick like that? It’s weird. It’s like a quick and slow process. I’ll make a track pretty quickly once it’s going, but the gaps between tracks that I like that get made is just a long build-up of staring at a computer and machinery for days. Then finally, it’ll click in my head, and I’ll make something.
You pretty much do all of your own artwork. Do those paintings usually come before you make the record or after? The painting on the [Tropics EP] with Jackhigh came after the music. Ardour‘s cover was before. Well, some of it was before and some of it was after. Usually, I try to do stuff after. If I make art for music I really try to feel the music out over and over again, and make something that kind of fits to it.
So what made you want to pick that painting as the cover for Ardour? I was at this 420/dublab/Cosmogramma radio party. There were a lot of friends, like 20 musicians there, and I drew it just for the hell of it. I had made this other piece that I originally wanted to be the cover, but it’s actually on the inside of the gatefold now. It’s a lot more obscure. So, I was talking to Steve [Ellison a.k.a. Flying Lotus] and a few other people, not telling them what it was for, but asking them which they liked out of those two. A lot more people gravitated towards the painting on the cover now.
Do your techniques as a painter correlate with your production work at all? I definitely think the way I make music stems from the way I make art. It has the same structure to it. A simpler approach. It all comes from the same place in my head, I guess. I get the same feeling when I’m making music or something. I dunno… I guess that’s all I can really say about it, to be honest. It all just feels like I’m doing the same thing, just different mediums.
And what is that “same thing”? That feeling of creative expression, I guess. Being able to do your thing.
If you ever needed any more reassurance that the future is already here, we present to you Ruckazoid‘s new track, “Crush.” The track begins with a loop that sounds like the warning tone on a spaceship notifying the crew it’s time to “man their battle stations,” an apt intro to the spacey pads and lazer-arps that get transformed throughout “Crush.” The fuzzy bass and boom-bap drums give the track an aggressive edge, making it the ideal soundtrack to the future gang wars and lazer-gun drive-bys that will surely become a reality when we start colonizing other planets and such. “Crush” is one side of the “Crush” b/w “All City” 12″ available November 8 from Ireland’s All City Records. And for those who need more Ruckazoid than one track can offer, check out his site/digital music club Listen + Compute where members get full digital access to over 200 songs along with instrumentals, accapellas, stems, and remixes. Told you the future was here.
Brooklyn’s jack of all trades producer/drummer/vocalist Kotchy has released a video for “Sometimes I Get Down,” the lead-off track from his forthcoming album, Two. For most of the video, directed by Jared Mezzocchi, Kotchy sings directly into the camera while an array of images (including more shots of himself) and patterns are projected and overlayed on top of his face. The track, “Sometimes I Get Down,” is all over the map, combining some underground hip-hop-style samples, Bibio-esque guitar, and modern R&B drums into a glitchy-futuristic-ADD-pop song. If Kotchy can fluidly jump through this many styles on one track then who’s to say what an entire album will encompass? We’ll have to wait until February of next year to find out when Two comes out on Done Right Records. Check the video and tracklist below.
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Tracklist: 1. Sometimes I Get Down 2. Getaway 3. Good Luck 4. I Left New York 5. Helicopter 6. Coffee Breath Kisses 7. Anywhere 8. Don’t Go 9. Work It Out 10. What Have I Done With My Life 11. Coin Collectors 12. Bandwagon 13. New Addiction 14. Care Free 15. We Don’t Need A Crowd
In celebration of the release of his debut album, Ghostly International has made available a podcast from Brooklyn/Ann Arbor’s Shigeto entitled Old Tress and Young Seeds. The podcast is a 40-minute-plus journey through the music that inspires Shigeto’s dense and ethereal instrumental beat compositions and features music from “young seed” contemporaries like Shlohmo and Samiyam as well as tracks from some of the “old trees” of beat music like Dabrye and DJ Krush. The mostly instrumental affair delves into a diverse range of beat music moving from the spacey to the funky to the jazzy in an effortless manner, keeping the head-nodding to a maximum. Some standouts include Dabrye’s 2006 remix of Some Water n’ Sun’s “Snowbreaker,” an unreleased Mux Mool track, and a Slum Village tack to remind you where this beat stuff all started. You can stream the podcast below or download for free from iTunes. Shigeto’s new album, Full Circle, is available on November 9 from Ghostly International.
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Next week, on November 9, James Murphy and the cast of his LCD Soundsystem band will release a “John Peel session style” album for digital download, called The London Sessions. The nine-song, live-in-the-studio record features renditions of a handful of hits and fan favorites taken from all three LCD Soundsystem albums, including “All My Friends,” “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” “Us v. Them,” “Drunk Girls,” and more. After the band recorded all tracks in one day at the Pool/Miloco studios in South London on June 29, Murphy went on to mix the record at his DFA studio in NYC before mastering it with Shellac’s Bob Weston in Chicago. The London Sessions will be available exclusively through iTunes until December 6. You can check out the full tracklist below.
01 Us V Them 02 All I Want 03 Drunk Girls 04 Get Innocuous 05 Daft Punk Is Playing at My House 06 All My Friends 07 Pow Pow 08 I Can Change 09 Yr City’s a Sucker
We haven’t heard much from Denmark’s Under Byen since their 2006 record Samme Stof Som Stof brought their adventurous brand of art-pop to our attention. Now Under Byen (Danish for “under the city”) has a new record and with it a new remix of the title track “Alt Er Tabt” from fellow Danish producer Kasper Bjørke (pictured above). From the onset of the remix, it is clear that Bjørke is not trying to be subtle—this is a house track through and through. A driving bassline is shortly followed by a cowbell, and accompanying percussion carry Under Byen’s sparse Danish lyrics. After sticking with the lyrics for about a minute and a half, Bjørke brings in a fat, meaty synth line, breaks the track down, and then gives you what you’ve been waiting for: some funky Danish instrumental house.
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Stepping out from behind the shadow of producer Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair ensemble, singer Kim Ann Foxman presents herself as a solo artist here on the video for her debut single, “Creature” (you can catch a stream of the tune here). And while her disco- and house-loving partner-in-crime Butler still holds the Executive Producer title and half of the writing/production credit, it’s Foxman who remains the focus on this slick music video—well, Foxman and a handful of creatively dressed dancers. Altogether, the troupe executes interesting body movements, looking like some exaggerated Tae Kwan Do exercises, Foxman fervently sings her hushed vocal melodies over the retro-futuristic house production, and director Jonathan Turner makes his black-and-white piece look a bit like an extended CK One commercial, a fitting vibe for the era that “Creature” recalls.
It was just the beginning of this week when we first caught wind of a new album coming from Mark Fell (of SND) on December 7 via Raster-Noton, but now, we’ve discovered a second record bearing Fell’s name ready to drop the following week through Editions Mego. The label—which is also home to other electronic experimentalists like Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds—will release UL8, a 20-track excursion into Fell’s world of immaculately rendered audio studies (a.k.a. brain-twisting minimalist tracks), on December 15. UL8‘s title comes from a specific kind of Celestion speaker that the sound artist first came to love as a child. Shares Fell, “Finally, my brother gave in to [my] demands, and let me have the speakers, which now sit in my front room. Although these are of little use in a studio context, they still provide an adequate and often rewarding listening experience. The tracks here replicate the simple monosynth and drum-machine equation [used in my early production days]; and have, to a large extent, been made with and for the UL8.” You can get into the forthcoming album’s nitty-gritty details (there’s a bunch), and check out its first track, here. The album artwork and tracklist are below.
1. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273 – 1 2. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273 – 2 3. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273 – 3 4. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273 – 4 5. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273 – 5 6. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 1 7. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 2 8. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 3 9. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 4 10. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 5 11. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 6 12. Part 2: Vortex Studies – 7 13. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 1 14. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 2 15. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 3 16. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 4 17. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 5 18. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 6 19. Part 3: Acids In The Style of Rian Treanor – 7 20. Death of Loved One
From the eclectic dance-pop sensibilities of Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, along with friend and collaborator Raf Daddy, comes a new musical endeavor, The 2 Bears. The duo’s second record is the four-song Curious Nature EP (out now on Southern Fried Records), an exhibition of sounds ranging from electro-tinged house jams to gospel-leaning ballads. The EP’s lead track, “Church,” gets a dub treatment here by Goddard himself. Explaining how his tweaked version of 2 Bears’ poignant tune came about, the producer says, “At the end of mixing ‘Church,’ we spent an hour just doing passes through the [mixing] desk with various outputs to outboard delays, echo boxes, and other magic boxes. From these takes I pieced together this dubbed-out version of ‘Church.'” We’re pretty happy he took the time to play with this one.
