Building off the success of his recent Fabric47 mix, Fuckpony (a.k.a. Jay Haze) drops Let the Love Flow, a house album built from the ground up by his own playing—there are no samples here. From the drums to the horns, Haze builds a record as much about sounds and performance as it is about memorable tracks. The music is at its best on “I Know It Happened” and “Fall Into Me,” as guest vocalists Chela Simone and Laila Tov deliver memorable performances that give focus to Haze’s often minimal arrangements. Although ambitious, Let the Love Flow feels more like Haze’s sketchbook than a proper LP, but his sketches hint at a pop prowess that ultimately leaves listeners anxious for a more developed album.
Since dropping his punk band and getting his BFA in graphic design, South Carolina native Chaz Bundick (a.k.a. Toro Y Moi) has holed up in his hometown of Columbia, spending his time focused on remixes for artists the likes of Washed Out and Beach House while also crafting his debut full-length, Causers of This. Bundick’s new record will hit retailers February 23 on Carpark with a couple of choice tour dates to precede. Check out the album’s tracklist and the dates after the jump.
Buenos Aires cumbia mastermind El Remolón rubs up against a Latin classic, transforming it into a glitchy, delay-driven piece of hallucinogenic dance music. The vocals of Alcides are chopped significantly, and with monstrous bass along with a wobbling squelch approximation of the original’s melodic line, the piece is a surefire floor-filler. The slice was taken from the Pibe Cosmo B-Sides album, which drops today and features a collection of new versions, mash-ups, and remixes from the depths of El Remolón’s hard drive. The entire album is available now for free download and includes El Remolón’s bootleg re-works of artists like Animal Collective, Modeselektor, Matías Aguayo, Daft Punk, and more.
Word on the street these days is that Oliver Ackermann’s group, A Place to Bury Strangers, is the loudest band in New York. And one can only assume that that’s due to singer/guitarist Ackermann’s uniquely fuzzy, noisy ax sounds, which he crafts with his own line of pedals under the company name Death By Audio. We talked tech with the Brooklyn band leader and got the lowdown on how he makes his custom effects boxes.
The first steps in creating an effect that sounds really cool are research and experimentation. I will read chip documents, use knowledge from previous designs I’ve come up with, and experiment with the design on a solderless breadboard. Swapping out components and trying some things that are not suggested are sometimes the keys to getting really good results.
Once the design is complete and sounding sweet on the breadboard, all of the controls are mapped out on an aluminum die-cast enclosure. I have to make sure everything will fit and interact with the foot and hand in the best way possible, as well as be durable and held together to withstand being thrown around. The enclosure is then drilled, powder-coated, and silkscreened so it’s all ready to have the guts and brain put in.
The circuit boards are made to fit in with as many components connected directly to it so it will be stable and hold everything together. It is drilled, etched, and then cut out on a bandsaw to be the right size for all of the parts to fit around it.
Next, the components are placed into the pedal and all of the initial wiring is done. The circuit board is populated with the resistors, caps, transistors, and other pieces of color-coded candy, and then soldered together. It is dropped in and hardwired to the parts on the inside. Then all the traces are triple-checked and it is tested with a multimeter to ensure all connections are good and the transistors are all biased correctly.
All of the knobs are put on, a battery is put in, the back plate screwed on, and little rubber feet glued to the bottom. All that’s left is picking up a guitar and it’s time for a little fun with this Supersonic Fuzz Gun!
It seems about time that a serious acid revival should happen; after all, we’ve seen disco and early house sounds come back into fashion, so why not acid? Yeah, no one can afford a 303, but even so, Chicago’s Thunderous Olympian manages to craft a somewhat squelchy, truly jacking slice on “Jack (The Movie).” Hardfloor meets the builds of “Full Clip” meets mid-career Carl Craig on the track, which is replete with vocal samples, high-frequency synth flourishes, and thunderous kicks. And with Thunderous Olympian being only 22 years old, there’s a lot more to look forward to from this young buck.
Sometimes, a vocalist can sound sexy even when singing totally laughable lyrics. Luckily, most disco isn’t eloquent about anything except a desire to screw, so Le Le‘s “Disco Monster” isn’t brought down by lines like “I’m a disco monster/A glitter hitter/I hit her, hit her/I’m a glitz dance-mitter”. Instead, the track is a Morgan Geist-like run through late-disco synth sounds and a truly fat bass sound. Though the group’s sound is most certainly a French thing more appropriate for Kitsuné, it wouldn’t be surprising to find the DFA putting out a Le Le record in the future.
Life isn’t always easy for pop princesses. Sure, some become international megastars, but legions more simply fade away, or even worse, get stuck in label purgatory. Such was the fate of Annie, which is why it feels like a millenium or two has passed since songs like “Chewing Gum” and “Heartbeat” were being hailed as works of electro-pop genius. Now that her label drama has passed, Annie is back with her sophomore effort. Where her debut, Anniemal, harkened back to the Tom Tom Club’s ’80s funk-pop bounce, Don’t Stop is at its best when channeling Hi-NRG—”Bad Times” and “Songs Remind Me of You” are practically 2009 versions of Stacey Q’s “Two of Hearts.” The album’s second half seriously drags, but the sticky pop stylings of the title track, “Hey Annie,” and “My Love Is Better” are deliciously fun—not to mention respectable—alternatives to the Lady Gagas and Kylies of the world.
There’s something pleasantly scrappy about the frenetically paced tracks that comprise Munich trio Schlachthofbronx’s self-titled debut. “We’ve got a shitload of unfinished stuff on our hard drives,” says Benedikt, one half of the group’s primary production core, and who prefers to go without a last name. “When we realize it takes us too long to get something straight, we just switch to another session.” It’s hardly surprising for anyone who’s given the group’s Belly Full of Pills mixtape, which made the rounds on the ‘net this past year, a quick listen. Mixed from their first EP of the same name, Belly Full of Pills’ ADD-addled aesthetic threw more ideas into 13 minutes of dancefloor-friendly bass than many producers will generate in a career. Miami bass, reggaeton, techno, hip-hop, kuduro, dancehall, and even bouncy, polka-esque deutsche schlager all converge in a way that’s so smooth and sensible that you hardly notice the beat you were dancing to at the beginning rides on an entirely different time signature and tempo by its end. Punctuated with “silly lazers, sirens, and bomboclaats,” Pills (and Schlachthofbronx’s recently released LP) also features vocals from South Africa’s Slush Puppy Kids, who chant raunchy AutoTuned lines like “Too much girl under that costume/Ass big enough to eclipse the moon” and lend tracks such as “Too High” and “Holdin’ That Dick” even more live energy.
In fact, the group’s tracks all seem so destined to be mixed together that the band didn’t even want to put out a full-length in the first place. “But [our label] Disko B was like, ‘C’mon, make an album,’ so they convinced us,” admits Jakob, Benedikt’s partner-in-crime. (They also count friend Christoph as a “phantom” member of the trio.)
Like their fellow countrymen Jahcoozi and Modeselektor, Schlachthofbronx (whose name tips a hat to their Schlachthof meat-packing-district neighborhood and their New York hip-hop influence) are part of a new cadre of dance music producers that are noisily sidestepping the stereotypical ideas of Teutonic precision—and they’re doing it with glee. As if the airhorn that adorns the cover of Schlachthofbronx weren’t enough of an indication, the heaving bass, hard bounce, over-the-top synth lines, and dutty rap vocals that pour forth from its insides just scream “party!”
“We wanted to make something different and more diverse,” says Jakob.
“We were kind of bored by the way German techno or minimal developed,” Benedikt continues. “And I think many people who make that kind of music felt like that, too… We want to make functional club music in the first place. We want people to have fun and dance, stagedive, and scream! I don’t want to be at a party and wait an hour for one cool, punchy bassline.”
Future-jazz DJ/producer Domu has decided to quit making music. As posted on his personal blog this past weekend, the London-based producer known as Dominic Stanton is “no longer Domu. He is a character, always has been, and as of Friday 13th November 2009, he no longer exists. Neither does Umod, Sonar Circle, Bakura, Yotoko, Rima, Zoltar, Blue Monkeys, Realside or any of the other names I put out music under. I am cancelling [sic] all my gigs and not taking any more. My Hotmail is closed, my Twitter is closed and my Facebook is closed.” Read the full diatribe here.
Taken from the debut album, Enchanted, by A Bridge Far Away, “Drift feat. Indi Kaur” gets a makeover from fellow UK-based producer Grievous Angel. What was once meandering and atmospheric trip-hop is now a bass-heavy and crunchy dubstep track with Kaur’s chopped, sliced, and pitched vocals crawling all over it. Grievous Angel’s remix pays tribute to the original song when the elements expand into spacier regions, but its core always remains punchy and solid.
