Not even a month ago, the Brothers Black released their first album in five years, Tiefschwarz‘s Chocolate, on their own imprint, Souvenir. We’re still hosting a full stream of that album here, which should hopefully tide you over until the playful German house/techno duo give us More Chocolate. July 12 sees the release of that addendum, also via Souvenir, which features seven extra tunes not included on last month’s full-length. Check out the artwork, tracklist, and a long string of tour dates below.
01 Phiba 02 Palast 03 Oberton 04 Give It To Me 05 Hornet 06 Release 07 Great Plains
18.06.10 – Sonar@THE ONE, Barcelona (ES) live 19.06.10 – Chlorophilla, Ancona (IT) (Basti) 19.06.10 – Echoes, Riccione (Ali) 20.06.10 – Playkula&Wilde Boatparty, Barcelona (ES) 20.06.10 – Get Physical Beachparty, Barcelona 25.06.10 – Cocoon, Frankfurt am Main (DE) live 26.06.10 – Extrema Festival Norway (NO) 26.06.10 – Neidklub, Hamburg (DE) 27.06.10 – c/o Pop Pollerwiese, Köln (DE) 03.07.10 – A day@the beach, Wien (AT) 03.07.10 – Hafen, Innsbruck (AT) 04.07.10 – La Terassa, Paris (FR) (Ali) 07.07-10 – Space, Ibiza (ES) 08.07.10 – Watergate, Berlin (DE) 10.07.10 – Fabric, London (UK) live 17.07.10 – Sea of Love Festival, Freiburg (DE) 17.07.10 – Melt, Gräfenhainichen (DE) 23.07.10 – 10 days off, Ghent (BE) live 24.07.10 – Love Parade, Duisburg (DE) 24.07.10 – Opernzelt, München (DE) 28.07.10 – Space, Ibiza (ES) 07.08.10 – Sonne, Mond & Sterne Festival, Saalburg (DE) 14.08.10 – Space Birthday, Ibiza (ES) 17.08.10 – Les Plaques Eléctroniqués, Cannes (FR) live 18.08.10 – Space, Ibiza (ES) 22.08.10 – Nightpark@Frequency Festival St. Pölten (AT) 28.08.10 – Mysteryland Festival, Amsterdam (NL) live 04.09.10 – SEMF Festival, Esslingen (DE) 05.09.10 – Showboxx, Dresden (DE) 06.09.10 – Cocoon @ Amnesia, Ibiza (ES) 17.09.10 – Robert Johnson, Frankfurt (DE) 18.09.10 – Fabric, London (UK) 22.09.10 – Space, Ibiza (ES) 24.09.10 – D! Club, Lausanne (CH) 03.10.10 – Space Closing, Ibiza (ES)
We’ve posted a small handful of tunes from Canadian producer Teen Daze as of late, but this easily the most straightforward we’ve heard of his hazy, electronic pop tunes. Hell, you can even make out most of what dude is singing on “Saviour,” as his soft voice reaches higher above the thick fog of melody floating over the top of this track. Even the production is a bit more pristine this time around; you can actually make out the shape of the bouncing bassline, the drum sounds have a high-enough frequency to stand apart from the rest of the production, and the layers of synths just sound a bit more crisp than before. If he follows the same trajectory, Teen Daze may eventually move himself from psuedo-chillwave territory into the realms harboring fellow ’80s-philes like M83. (via Pitchfork)
Idiot Box is the debut full-length album coming from producer P.U.D.G.E and UK label Ramp. The new release follows about six years of the producer’s integration within the fertile LA beat scene—sharing beat tapes, playing the infamous Low End Theory party, and being featured in All-City‘s SoCal-centric split 10″ series with Dibiase. July 26 sees the release of Idiot Box. Check out the artwork and tracklist below.
01 Elektric Werdz 02 Everything To Me 03 Merci Mercy Me 04 Whut Happened 05 The Price Is Wrong B… 06 Wholehearted 07 Lost AngeLA 08 Insensitivity 09 Don’t Get Too Huxtable 10 The Way I Feelately 11 Still Love Lost… 12 Allow Me To Waste Time
Before the massive electronic music festival known as Decibel overtakes the city of Seattle this September, the folks organizing the whole shebang are putting on a couple of one-off concerts about town. San Francisco expats and now-resident Baltimoreans Matmos will perform tonight, June 17, at The Triple Door alongside recent musical collaborators So Percussion and opening act Lexie Mountain Boys. Check out info for that show here. A little more than a week later, veteran DJ/producer John Tejada (pictured above) will perform a headlining DJ set at See Sound Lounge on June 26, with Nordic Soul opening. Check out that show’s details here.
Gyptian‘s “Hold Yuh” is arguably the biggest dancehall tune of 2010, so the recent rash of reworks isn’t exactly surprising. A few weeks back we posted a bumping tropical bass version courtesy of Los Rakas and Uproot Andy, and now we’ve got our mitts on this Major Lazer remix. It appears that Diplo and Switch have taken the song’s infectious piano melodies and run them through the Robin S. “Show Me Love” machine. The result definitely skews toward the heyday of girls in bicycle shorts shaking it on MTV’s The Grind, not that we’re mad at that. Speaking of mad, Diplo was a little perturbed by our recent commentary on his collaboration with Tiësto. Can we just hug it out dude? Don’t you see? We like you, we really like you! (via Pitchfork)
In a small detour from his work as a solo producer, San Francisco producer Dave Aju adopted a group of similarly talented musicians and vocalists to join him as the Sol Percussion Ensemble. The group convened on two tracks, “Flexa” and “Vibra,” for a new EP called Two Tone. Both songs are their own kind of warped techno-and-jazz-inspired musique concrète, each with its own focus on a single percussion instrument. As the titles infer, “Flexa” features the flexatone, and the vibratone is the centerpiece of “Vibra.” Two Tone comes out physically on June 28, and July 5 on digital formats, via Circus Company.
After 16 years of broadcasting illegally as a pirate radio station, London’s Rinse FM has finally secured an FM radio license. For those of you thinking it will change the forward-thinking station’s style or format, the crew announced in their press release, “the license will allow us to continue our mission, broadcasting in the pirate format that we and our listeners know and love.” As the primary source for new dubstep, grime, drum & bass, garage, and more, not to mention a top-notch team of DJs and MCs, Rinse will continue as the pulse of London’s underground urban music scene, let’s hope for at least another 16 years.
On the phone from London, producer James Blake emits a calmness and an intense, focused passion for his craft that belies his 21 years of age. Part of a new breed of musicians making richly complex tracks under the ever-widening label of dubstep, Blake’s take on the genre is utterly unique. Lurching, stuttering, and always saturated with harmonies (both sampled and created by his own voice), his tunes have strong R&B and classical elements without really sounding like either. With just a handful of songs under his belt, his buzz is palpable, and XLR8R took a few moments to catch up with him on his way from class to the practice rooms at London’s Goldsmiths University, where he’s finishing his degree.
Tell me about your musical background. I started producing at university, so I’ve only been doing it for two years, but in terms of music in general, I’ve been playing piano and singing since I was five or six. I learned piano classically, and that really shaped me, because when you study classically you see things quite a different way—I took ideas from classical that I didn’t really appreciate at the time, but now I see it as invaluable. Even though, alongside all of that, I was improvising and singing and listening to all sorts of music.
Your tracks are remarkable because of the vocal elements in them that act as musical anchors. Can you tell us more about how you use vocals? Vocals have sentimental value—they always do with me—and I’ve always wanted to sample things that I already love. [Even the] R&B samples, they’re not just any songs—they’re still songs I loved when they came out, probably quite embarrassingly, I would have been afraid to admit it at the time, but nowadays those vocals really sit in your subconscious. And I think using them taps into a massive subconscious in our generation. But people don’t just want to hear them straight; they want to hear echoes of them in their dance music.
Echoes? I’ve always been a bit sensitive about sampling. I’ve heard lots of records where people just sample old funk records directly and they don’t really change [the sample] at all, and for me I think I’d get the same vibe off of just listening to the original. It doesn’t give you any sense of uniqueness. So I quite like to mask the identity of those samples, because otherwise I think, “Well, that would be too obvious.” So, like, pitching vocals to sing new melodies, that’s something that I always found fascinating, a sort of a Burial-esque technique—he was a massive inspiration. But also by juxtaposing my vocals with something like that, I’m sort of bringing myself closer to the original. I can almost feel like I’m singing with them.
“CMYK”
Your music is very hard to classify. Do you think of it as dubstep? I came from a completely different musical place before I started producing dubstep, but I did get heavily into it for a couple of years. And I think I’ll always have one foot inside the dubstep scene even just through being influenced by certain artists, in the same way that I’ll always be influenced by D’Angelo or Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell. A lot of people are quite sensitive to the use of the word “dubstep,” and for a while I thought, “I’m really glad to be breaking out of this sound.” But now I quite like being bundled in with it because when I think about the people that have gone before me and are making incredible music, like Mala… I still listen to his records… then great! I mean, I don’t get associated with the massive tear-out wobble end of dubstep, I sort of get the nicer end of dubstep, so I’m happy with that.
What’s in the works for you? I’ve got two EPs coming on R&S. The first will focus on sampling R&B vocals that were buried deep in my subconscious. It’s got a dancefloor feel, and there’s a collab with Mount Kimbie on there, too. The second will draw from recordings I did recently of myself singing and playing piano—more introspective and personal. I’m also working on a vocal album of electronic production but of my (unadulterated) voice. It’s pretty minimalist in vocal arrangement, and the production serves the voice, not the other way round.
James Blake’s CMYK EP is out now on R&S. His debut LP is expected by the year’s end.
London duo Allez-Allez are getting ready to release the Hideous Racket EP later this month, so they slid us this “Weird Science” remix as a little teaser. While the original version—the video for which stars the freakiest mannequins ever—is fueled by filtered guitar tones and pulsing keys over a slow-motion disco beat, Wesley Matsell takes things in an even spacier direction. One of the stable of melodically minded acts on James Holden’s Border Community label, Matsell makes the melodies extra bright, leaning hard on some wonderfully warm, arpeggiating synths. It’s a trippy journey we’re more than happy to take.
Although it’s been quite some time since trance resembled anything even somewhat creatively viable, James Holden has never been the average trance artist. Even when he burst onto to the scene in 1999 at age 19, his music contained a more thoughtful, melodic approach than that of his big-room counterparts. In the decade that has followed, Holden has only dug deeper, both with his own music and via his Border Community label, home to similarly interesting acts such as Nathan Fake. And while his remix credits include Top-40 staples like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Depeche Mode, Holden’s output remains undeniably progressive—and we mean progressive as in ‘genuinely forward-thinking,’ not progressive as in ‘slighty less obnoxious trance that pays lip service to house and techno but generally still sucks.’ Last month, he unveiled his contribution to !K7’s vaunted DJ-KiCKS mix series, so we figured he might be game to also put together an exclusive mix for the XLR8R podcast. It’s definitely got us thinking that if more artists followed Holden’s lead, maybe the dreaded t-word wouldn’t be such an electronic-music slur.
01 Luke Abbott “We Are Made of Glass” (Border Community) 02 Margot “H2” (Border Community) 03 Sonic Assassins “Robbing Bristle” 04 Lucky Dragons “Traveling Song” 05 Etienne Jaumet “Entropy” (Versatile) 06 Caribou “Bowls (Holden Remix)” (City Slang) 07 Washed Out “New Theory” (Mexican Summer) 08 Avus “Wide Mouthed Frog” (Border Community) 09 Death in Vegas “Reigen” (Drone) 10 Fuck Buttons “Rough Steez (White Hot Heat Remix)” (ATP) 11 Luke Abbott “Holkham Drones” (Border Community) 12 James Holden “Triangle Folds Inside Out” (!K7) 13 The Horrors “Sea Within a Sea” (XL) 14 Four Tet “unknown” (Soul Jazz) 15 Jon Hopkins “unknown (Nathan Fake Remix)” (Warp) 16 Caribou “Jamelia” (City Slang)
