Podcast 156: Girl Unit

It may be a little early to start handing out Label of the Year nominations, but as it stands now, it would be hard to omit London’s Night Slugs imprint from serious consideration. Label bosses Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 may get the lion’s share of the attention, but the artist roster they’ve assembled is just as impressive, perhaps none more so than 24-year-old DJ, producer, and recent Bubblin’ subject Girl Unit. With only one official release and a smattering of remixes and other tracks to his name, he nonetheless displays a keen ear for US street sounds, whether it be ghettotech and juke or radio-ready hip-hop and R&B. This week, the London-based artist is embarking on his first US tour, during which he’ll hopefully be able to take in some of these sounds first-hand while playing a smattering of dates on both coasts. To celebrate, he’s put together this mix for the XLR8R podcast series, which literally came in at the last minute because he wanted to make extra sure to fill it with the latest dubplates and unreleased tunes.

01 DJ Pierre “Feeling On Me”
02 Bok Bok “Say Stupid Things” (Monkeytown)
03 Ramadanman “Grab Somebody” (white)
04 Damu “Mermaid” (Local Action)
05 Velour “Booty Slammer” (Night Slugs)
06 Jam City “Shut The Lights Off (Devil Mix)” (Night Slugs)
07 Nguzunguzu “Rec Loose” (Silverback)
08 Kingdom “Bust Broke” (Night Slugs)
09 C.R.S.T. “The Bells (Girl Unit Remix)” (Car Crash Set)
10 Melanie Fiona “It Kills Me (Breakage Remix)” (Universal Motown)
11 Jacques Greene “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want” (Night Slugs)
12 Johnny Moog “Fantastic Lover (Girl Unit VIP)”
13 Optimum “Max Power” (Planet Mu)
14 Addison Groove “Work It” (Swamp 81)
15 Terror Danjah “Menace” (Planet Mu)
16 Bobby Valentino “Anonymous Instrumental (Prod. Timbaland)” (Def Jam)
17 Ikonika “Millie” (Hyperdub)
18 Girl Unit “Every Time” (Night Slugs)
19 Cedaa “Justine”
20 Mr De’ “Whonleeone” (Electrofunk)
21 DJ Nate “Find Your Dreams”

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XLR8R_Podcast_Girl_Unit_2010_08_17

Ost & Kjex Cajun Lunch

Obsessed with the cheese on their plates and the cheese on their turntables, Petter Haavik and Tore Gjedrem (plus recurrent guest vocalist Tracee Meyn) forego the usual expectations of cool to create joyful music that is both frequently ridiculous and frequently ridiculously good. The oddball Norwegian production duo has claimed that their debut, Some But Not All Cheese Comes From the Moon, was, implausibly, based on a Matthew Herbert-style appropriation of cheese and biscuits (as the band name translates) as its sound source. The fromage fascination continues on their debut for the Hamburg-based Diynamic imprint—”The Yellow Man” appears to consider the place of their favorite food product in a relationship, while the guitar-deploying “Bluecheeseblues” warrants parts one and two. Yet somehow, the occasional Solomun and Jamie Jones collaborators manage to avoid the ghastliness often associated with forced wackiness. Rather, the (really rather fun) mucking about is cut through with loss and loneliness: “I feel I have to tell it’s over,” regrets “Mosambiqeutravelplan”; the cast of “Continental Lover” are all “by themselves,” even the gigolo who spends his summer in Monaco; the finest track, “Bluebird,” ponders simply, “You know those times you feel alone?”; even “Bluecheeseblues” is more somber than silly, with regret flowing through its (blue) veins. Like their French equivalent, Nôze, Ost and Kjex disarm with a manic grin, a stupid lyric, and a ludicrous vocal, but really Cajun Lunch is a fine, fine feast of wonky, off-kilter house that makes you hanker to be invited to their party. Glorious stuff.

Copy “Breakfast”

The Pacific Northwest’s synth-pop maestro extraordinaire, Copy, is back with a brand-new album of romantically charged music made in the bedroom for the dancefloor. Before Hard Dream hits retailers, we’ve got an exclusive first taste of the forthcoming record with the track “Breakfast.” The shimmering instrumental showcases producer Marius Libman continuing work with his brand of playful-yet-somber electronic music, crafting the song’s solid backbone with a poignant bassline and straightforward dance beat before adorning the rest of its five minutes with a number of melodic, analog tones. If you spent endless hours of your youth parked in front of side-scrolling adventures games on your NES, then this song will definitely light up your brain’s nostalgia region. It should be safe to assume the rest of Copy’s ten-track third album will follow suit, but we’ll just have to patiently wait for September 21 to roll around to find out.

Breakfast

Listen to XLR8R’s Celebration of Curation Mix

All month long, the people at online mix hub Mixcloud have been hosting a series they’ve dubbed Celebration of Curation. Each day in August, they’ve enlisted a different website, radio station, online store, or other sort of cultural outpost to assemble an exclusive mix and guess what? Today belongs to XLR8R. We thought about putting together a proper DJ mix for our installment of Celebration of Curation, but we quickly realized that a cohesive DJ session wouldn’t really be representative of the many sounds, styles, and genres that we’re currently getting behind. So we opted for more of a mixtape format, and put together this sampling of songs—many of which have been offered for free download right here on XLR8R.com—that represents most (but not all) of what’s been bumping in our office as of late. The Mixcloud player and the full tracklist are below.

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Tracklist:

01 Oneohtrix Point Never “Returnal” (Editions Mego)
02 We Are Standard “Don’t Give Up (John Talabot Slow It Down Remix)”
03 Letherette “Blad” (Brownswood)
04 Wise Blood “STRT SRNS”
05 How to Dress Well “Take It On” (Transparent)
06 Sepalcure “Feeling That I Know So Well”
07 DJ Elmoe “Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man”
08 C.R.S.T. “The Bells (Girl Unit Remix)” (Car Crash Set)
09 Kanji Kinetic “Thrill Seeka (Kingdom Remix)” (Sleazetone)
10 Azari & III “Indigo” (Turbo)
11 Wafa “Pop Up (Canblaster Remix)” (Grizzly)
12 Teengirl Fantasy “Cheaters” (True Panther)
13 matthewdavid “Trusss”

Kanji Kinetic “Thrill Seeka”

Bristol-based DJ/producer Kanji Kinetic just dropped the Thrill Seeka EP, a fresh release of club-appropriate bass music on Chrissy Murderbot‘s Sleazetone label. The record’s title track is an energetic future-house tune with all the fixins; a skittering dance beat, pitch-shifted vocal samples, super-juiced basslines, and just the slightest touch of synth melody. For the most part, “Thrill Seeka” is a pretty atonal number that relies more on various sound effects to color in the parts where many producer’s would place melodic elements. So the few times Kinetic does drop in the song’s rave-y synth hook, it adds a completely unexpected and welcome layer to an already great dance track. You can hear more of the five-song EP, including the Kingdom and Krazy Fiesta remixes of this tune, over on the Sleazetone Soundcloud page.

Thrill Seeka

Rustie’s Debut For Warp Revealed; Check Out His New Mini-Mix

Talk of the first release for Warp from Glaswegian wonky beat maker Rustie has been floating about for quite some time now, and finally, information of substance has been released on the topic. On October 5, a five-song record by producer Russel Whyte, called Sunburst, will be released, marking the third EP in his discography. There’s still no talk of a full-length album, but these brand-new numbers should work well to whet the appetite of Rustie fans everywhere. You can check out the artwork and tracklist, and stream snippets of each song from the EP, below.

01. Neko
02. Dragonfly
03. Beast Nite
04. Chew
05. Hyperthrust

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Svpreme Fiend “Heartache VIP”

Today, one of our favorite new labels, Local Action, dropped the debut effort from NY tunesmith Svpreme Fiend, the Killer EP. (You can actually purchase the vinyl here.) Though this track isn’t from that hotly tipped release, “Heartache VIP” holds the same cold, lovelorn aesthetic as the four songs that did make it onto the record. Comparisons to Burial, Zomby, or Joy Orbison may have reached levels of redundancy at this point, but for Svpreme Fiend, they remain apt. As this track and the new EP show, the elusive producer has quite effortlessly joined the ranks of post-garage music’s finest.

Heartache VIP

Heartache VIP

Listen to Drowned In Sound’s Chronological Dubstep Mix

This week, music and culture website Drowned in Sound is running a load of exclusive content based around the decade-plus milestone of the existence of dubstep and post-garage music. The whole thing is called Subliminal Transmissions and kicked off today with this interesting and well-conceived mix chronicling the bass-laden arc of dubstep and its various permutations. Entitled 25 Tracks: A Dubstep Chronology, the mix starts with Groove Chronicles’ (pictured above) soulful tune “Stone Cold,” ends with Joy Orbison’s most recent track, “So Derobe,” and features loads of the genre’s heavy hitters, like Skream, 2562, Appleblim, Untold, Ikonika, Benga, Skream, Burial, Kode9, Ramadanman, and many more. You can read about the mix and each of its hand-picked tunes here, and stream the whole thing via the player embedded below.

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Bubblin’: Supra1

Who:Supra1
Where: Krakow, Poland

Remix contests often seem like cheap promotional gimmicks, but every once in awhile, they do unearth something special. Tomek Urbanowicz and Thomas Wirski came together in late 2008 when NY’s Trouble & Bass held a Little Jinder remix contest, and the pair’s epic, wobbling rework of “Polyhedron” became an unexpected dancefloor monster. A number of remixes have followed (more are on the way), but now Supra1 has unveiled its first official release, the Still Believe EP on Trouble & Bass, which contains not only a ridiculous remix package from heavyweights like Brackles, L-Vis 1990—download that here—and Gucci Vump, but another surprise smash in the form of b-side “Ghoster.”

Listen: Little Jinder “Polyhedron”

Listen: Supra1 “Ghoster”

Listen: Supra1 Podcast for Trouble & Bass

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yuk. “adept-ation for Dev”

What’s most exciting about the LA-based artists, like Oscar McClure, matthewdavid, and others, on the Leaving Records roster is their seemingly insatiable urge to turn their hometown’s electronic music scene on its head. While McClure focuses primarily on the textures of his beat music and label head David writes tunes sounding like an R&B hit submerged underwater, yuk. takes a more straightforward route with his compositions, but he makes them sound like they come from a time and place you’ve never even heard of. In the same vein as Flying Lotus or Shlohmo, “adept-ation for Dev”—and the rest of the album it comes from, A D W A—is a Dilla-referencing beat suite set among birdsong, inundated with vinyl crackle, washed over with lo-fi fuzz, and compressed into oblivion. This production doesn’t just sound like it came from another era; it might have been made on another planet.

04 adept-ation for Dev

04 adept-ation for Dev

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