Mix one part new wave, one part krautrock, one part post-punk, and one part Lower East Side psychedelia and you’ll get Swedish septet Ikons. Mix one part Balearic disco, one part analog-synth wizardry, and one part epic space journey and you’ll get this remix of Ikons’ track “Honey,” by UK production duo Coyote. Timm Sure and Amp, the fellas behind the Is it Balearic? imprint and mixes for Cool in the Pool, seem to ditch almost everything but Ikons’ vocal track, which is merely a baritone utterance of the song’s title. The focus of the original “Honey”—its bouncing drum beat, its monotonous bassline, and its driving guitar riff—is nowhere to be heard, and Coyote takes the opportunity to push the song’s meandering synth tones up to the front alongside a pulsing disco-house rhythm and bass melody.
We’ve been keeping tabs on MC/producers The Alchemist and Oh No for quite some time now (even some of their unconventional endeavors), so getting word that the two hip-hop mainstays were gearing up to work on an album together was—literally—music to our ears. Furthermore, it’s no surprise that the first taste from the duo, calling itself Gangrene, and its forthcoming debut album, Gutter Water, is an excellently produced piece of gritty, head-knocking beat work and smoothly executed dual-vocal attacks. If the old-school essence of “Chain Swinging” isn’t enough to pique your interest in the new project, maybe the album’s guest appearances from Raekwon, MED, Guilty Simpson, and Planet Asia will do the trick.
Parisian DJ, producer, performer, and world-record holder Chilly Gonzales has embarked on a brand-new creative outlet, writing, producing, and starring in a full-length feature film. The movie is called Ivory Tower, and, along with Gonzo himself, stars Tiga and Peaches in roles you might not expect from the sexed-up dance music icons. Tiga and Gonzales are two chess champions who also happen to be brothers and are both in love with the same woman, Peaches’ character Marsha (pictured above). On the forthcoming film, director Adam Traynor said, “Ivory Tower is a tour de force, a series of set pieces performed with simple gestures in modulating forms. It’s a Rocky-inspired sports parody; a Sirkean melodrama; a nouvelle nouvelle vague; free-jazz riff; a music video; a YouTube bricolage; a silent-era pastiche; a commercial.” An album corresponding with the film—written by Gonzales and produced by Boys Noize—will be released September 12 via Arts & Crafts. You can watch the Ivory Tower trailer, which doubles as a music video for Gonzales’ “I Am Europe,” below.
Is there some kind of remix album in the works for The xx that we haven’t heard about? Between the new Jamie Jonesremix we posted a few days ago, the news we caught of Hercules & Love Affair covering one of the UK trio’s tunes, and now, Barcelona producer John Talabot (pictured above) hooking up the internet with this remix of The xx’s “Shelter,” something’s got to be brewing. The tropically influenced producer did a bang-up job with his track, and was kind enough to post it on his Soundcloud page with a small blurb that says “Released by: Young Turks/XL Recordings.” So it seems our suspicions may be true. You can stream “Shelter (John Talabot Remix)” below.
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Canadian tunesmith Dan Snaith has released what still stands as one of our favorite longplayers to be heard from this year, Caribou‘s Swim. Many months after that record hit shelves, we’re treated to a new video for the hypnotically psychedelic “Sun.” Snaith’s video isn’t a piece meant for analysis—just uninquisitive observation and enjoyment, which suits the track equally well. A group of women who vary in both age and ethnicity are filmed in a small room all together, getting down to the Caribou track with a variety of different dances, many of which seem Native American in origin. Clips of the room’s overhead lighting (their ‘sun’?) are spliced into the footage of dance moves, and at one point a trio of three young men join the women in their revelry. Though, the fellas disappear quickly, and leave the ladies to bask in the glow of electric light and interpretive dance.
Back in 2005, Def Jux label head and beat-making mastermind El-P paired his productions with the vocal talents of Camu Tao on a project called Central Services. The duo wrote an eight-song EP, entitled Forever Frozen in Television Time, but never got a chance to officially release the record. Sadly, Forever Frozen would stand as Central Services’ only recorded material, as Tao died three years later after a long battle with lung cancer. Now, weeks before the posthumous release of Tao’s first and only solo record, King of Hearts, Def Jux is giving away the duo’s EP for the first time as a free download. You can find out more about the forthcoming new album and download the Central Services EP here.
If you’ll remember back to another time—say, the mid-’90s—when contemporary electronic music was still growing legs and labels like Warp pushed a burgeoning sound (debatably) called IDM, there was another style of more pop-influenced electronic music growing in popularity thanks to groups like Stereolab, Portishead, and Seefeel. Well, Stereolab never really called it quits, Portishead already delivered the brilliant Third a couple years ago, and now, London’s experimental pop quartet Seefeel is returning to once again show the world how well electronic timbres, haunting ambience, and sugary sweet vocal hooks work towards making innovatively infectious songs. September 21 marks the release of Faults, the first release from Seefeel in over 14 years, which will be delivered via Warp. The EP features four songs from the band, one of which is available to hear now. Listen to Faults‘ title track, and check out the artwork and tracklist, below.
01 Faults 02 Crowded 03 Folds 04 Clouded
“Faults”
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Philadelphia bass fiend, Nightshifters associate, and Subdivision crew member Rx just slipped us this exclusive track, so we wanted to share it with the masses as soon as possible because a) it’s rad and b) the horn blasts remind us of the badass score from Inception. And while the song doesn’t have any brain-melting dream-within-a-dream scenarios or zero-gravity combat involving the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun, it does have some nice plinky synths and shuffling, dubsteppy beats. Grab it now and if you’re hungry for some more Rx-related tuneage, peep his Soundcloud and check out the new video for “Bronson,” taken from the freshly released Kaleidoscope Island EP. The clip was put together by Greg Zifcak of Eats Tapes.
The Music of London-based duo Mount Kimbie, whose unique homespun style incorporates ambient, techno, dubstep, and found sounds, is so difficult to pin down, that when they sent out their first demo, “Paul [Rose, a.k.a. Scuba] was the only person who got back to us,” Dom Maker, one half of the band, informs. But because of that sound, the band seems like a prime candidate to cross over from the dubsteppy associations of their label, the Scuba-run Hotflush Recordings, to broader, more accessible places.
Before they sent off that fateful demo, Maker and his studio partner Kai Campos were making music for years, together and separately. “We started chatting about tracks and music, and I found out Kai was producing music on his computer,” say Maker, who met Campos at university in London. “When I heard what could be done with software musically, I just felt like I wanted to have a go myself.”
“Mayor”
Their debut EP, last year’s Maybes, was the end result of the duo’s correspondence with Paul Rose, and received massive attention in the dubstep world. However, Mount Kimbie’s sound is no paint-by-numbers dubstep affair; it’s deceptively complex, with a sense of floating formlessness akin to the gentler side of ’90s-era British IDM. But to call it formless would be to miss the point, as their bite-sized songs are painstakingly detailed—and their influences predictably varied: “I remember listening to Bass Clef, Burial, and Loefah a lot at the time, but we had both come from different musical backgrounds, and both loved material like Xiu Xiu and Steve Reich,” offers Maker.
Those touchstones come through in their intriguingly microscopic music, where washes of sound are dotted with delicate beats. The anchor of the duo’s aesthetic is ambiguous—many of the sounds vaguely resemble household noises or accidental bleed-through from other sources. To achieve that aesthetic, “We recorded two to three hours of natural sound, singing, guitar, and throwing stones against the walls in this 50-meter wind tunnel that leads onto the sea in my home village of Saltdean near Brighton,” Maker explains. “I sampled five minutes of the recording and made two tracks out of it!” Of course, Kimbie’s music isn’t all field recordings. “We use a lot of drum machines… the hip-hop drum pack on Fruity Loops is rinsed in nearly every track I have ever worked on in that program,” Maker reveals.
Equally simplistic is their working method. “So far everything has been finished on Fruity Loops, with a couple of exceptions,” Campos explains. You’d never be able to tell from the band’s organic and diverse soundscapes, but their use of hardware is spare (“We don’t use a lot of synths,” says Campos). However, he does profess his love for loop pedals and the Korg Kaoss Pad, which they use extensively in their live show.
The Maybes EP showcased Mount Kimbie’s almost rustic sound, with its majestic title track’s gently descending riff lurching to life with a heaving-forward beat, and detached, pitched-up vocals sounding off in stirring fashion. It was followed up by the Sketch On Glass EP, which floated into funkier waters, employing a more colorful and playful palette of sounds. But July’s Crooks and Lovers, the duo’s debut LP, is a more realized statement of what Mount Kimbie is, in the holistic sense. Making the full-length “was a completely different and very challenging process,” says Maker. “The EPs came together very easily… I feel like I’ve learned a lot putting this one together.” Campos is quick to chime in, though: “I kind of want to write another one straight away.” While the record took somewhere in the neighborhood of a year, Maker says he’d like to take longer still on the next one. Adds Campos: “There were a couple of moments when I was feeling very intimidated by the process, where I had to come to certain realizations or places in my mind. I really didn’t write a single thing for about six months, which was difficult but a really good thing to deal with and get over.”
“Before I Move Off”
This time around they have a better grasp of what they’re going for, and have packed even more into those tiny songs. Crooks and Lovers features their typical assortment of chopped vocals, miniscule bleeps, queasy circular rhythms, and heavily manipulated live instruments, but it oozes with a fluidity lacking in their early material. They exude a new confidence, as witnessed by the silky guitar riffs of “Before I Move Off” or the slick liquid funk of “Mayor,” and tracks like “Carbonated” and “Ruby” sound comfortably lived-in; the band admits that in terms of recording, these songs were not approached much differently than their EP counterparts, so it’s no shock that they sound like an improvement rather than a reinvention.
They’ve also expanded their set of influences, loosening dubstep’s grip and truly rising to the rare plateau of transcendence that has been ascribed to them since the beginning. “For me, going to Berlin was important—going out there and hearing and seeing this incredible techno sound,” says Maker. “That trip made me respect and understand the hypnosis of just keeping a loop playing. That aspect has definitely rubbed off on this album.”
The tempos are more varied than ever, as are the moods. “Blind Night Errand” dabbles in swollen acid sounds, while “Field” is like a strings-heavy Raster-Noton track, as electronics burst out into sunburnt guitar. “‘Field’ was certainly a kind of distilled and exaggerated response to a lot of Basic Channel stuff I was listening to,” says Maker. Serendipitously, “A lot of techno people have been really into our stuff,” Campos points out, reflecting the duo’s broad appeal.
However much techno they might be listening to these days, the band is still rooted in UK bass music. They have a growing partnership with rising fellow Londoner James Blake, whose dramatically swooning electronics and distinctively distorted vocals seem like a natural couple with Mount Kimbie’s twisted chipmunk voices. His influence is inescapable on Crooks and Lovers as vocals become more prominent (“Mayor” is a dead-ringer for Blake), which is appropriate as he’s joined the band’s live show as a sort of honorary third member. Campos happily agrees, calling James “a brilliant artist—someone who I can take ideas to and really engage with.”
And in terms of engaging with others in the dubstep community, Mount Kimbie still has much reverence for the rapidly mutating genre. “This record wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for dubstep,” Campos says matter-of-factly. “I really don’t mind whatever people want to call it. I feel grateful to be considered alongside some of the artists we get mentioned with. It seems like an incredibly interesting and fertile time for UK dance-influenced music at the moment.” Ironically, Maker admits that their initial intention was to make straightforward dubstep—”but [we] couldn’t really do it.” Luckily, what they’ve created instead is so much more—and entirely their own.
Norweigan electro-pop sweetheart Annie released Don’t Stop late last year, and although the record didn’t really, as the kids say, ‘blow up,’ it still had some serious jams that made us want to invent some kind of rollerskate-powered time machine that exclusively stopped in mid- to late-’80s dance clubs. “Songs Remind Me of You” was definitely one of our favorites, and now it’s been revived on this remix by Australian outfit The Swiss. The guys have stretched out the song’s sticky hooks over nearly six minutes, and steered things in a disco direction without slipping into cornball territory. If you like the results, you might want to check out The Swiss on their first US tour, as the band will be playing live in select cities later this month—check their MySpace page for all the details.
