Barcelona-based street artist Miss Van, a painter whose doe-eyed, full-lipped figures have provided the graffiti world with a much needed feminine edge, has curated a new solo show for London gallery StolenSpace serving as a retrospective for her 13-plus years as an artist while also unveiling her new work. The exhibition, Miss Van’s largest show to date entitled Lovestain, opens today and will run through Oct 18.
Anyone who’s read our current cover story knows that we here at XLR8R are digging the underground sounds of London and all the ways that UK funky is intermingling with dubstep, house, and other genres. Leading the way are artists like Cooly G, Geeneus, and the author of this week’s podcast, Roska. In the span of just a handful of releases and remixes, many on his own Roska Kicks & Snares imprint, the man born Wayne Goodlitt has developed a trademark sound, highlighted by hard-hitting, syncopated drum beats and a proclivity toward upfront percussion. This mix finds Roska combining many of his own creations with a mixture of unreleased heaters and a few of this nascent scene’s biggest tunes.
01 Roska “The Sheppard” (Roska Kicks & Snares)
02 Poxymusic feat. Gina Mitchell “War Paint (Claude VonStroke Remix)” (Hussle)
03 Roska & Jamie George “Love 2 Nite (Roska Dub Mix)” (Roska Kicks & Snares)
04 Cooly G “Love Dub Refix” (Hyperdub)
05 Geeneus “Yellowtail VIP” (Rinse)
06 DVA “Nasty Nasty Nasty (Roska Remix)” (DVA)
07 The Dark House Project “Ruckas” (Kenzo)
08 Roska & Jamie George “Wonderful Day” (Roska Kicks & Snares)
09 Roska “Holograph” (Fantastic 4)
10 Shortstuff “Tripped Up” (Ramp)
11 Roska “Gone To A Better Place (Malice Deepstramental Mix)” (Roska Kicks & Snares)
12 OB “ER” (Invasion)
13 Ill Blu “Blu Magic” (Ill Blu)
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Italian club lover Congorock has always promoted the more playful side of electro, in contrast to his more sinister peers like The Bloody Beetroots or, in this case, Fukkk Offf. On his remix of the second single from Fukkk Offf’s Love Me, Hate Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me Congorock uses a blown-out, four-on-the-floor beat to carry the track’s hyperactive synths, choppy vocal loops, and frantic percussion into a raved-up oblivion.
Disco-house mutations from a Brooklyn-via-Toronto Arthur Russell obsessive.
Brennan Green’s latest single, ?“My First House,” actually sat on his shelf for 12 years before it was released. It was the first track that the Brooklyn-via-Toronto producer crafted after selling his guitar and buying an old Roland sequencer. “You can imagine what I’ve learned since then,” he says with a laugh.?
“My First House” hovers in a traffic jam where Norwegian space-disco harmonies float like Northern Lights above a hypnotic, stylus-scraped groove straight from the basement. Every now and then, a classic snare roll reminiscent of countless ’90s house tunes carries the music forward. “I didn’t want it to be a nostalgic tune,” Green comments. “I wanted it to have some balls—to be able to stand up and say, ‘I’m from back then, but you can still hear me loud and clear.’”?
Before moving to New York a decade ago, Green started DJing around Toronto, where he enjoyed being caught in the middle of Detroit’s, Chicago’s, and New York’s house scenes. But once he ended up in NYC, he soon felt the sting of Mayor Giuliani’s anti-dancing policies. Rather than put up too much of a fight, he took his sets abroad to Japan, Australia, and Scandinavia, where he really began to earn his stripes. “I started playing in proper clubs where people are up for it, screaming, staying all night, and just being super, super into it,” Green recalls. “It’s sort of hard to get that out of New York these days.”
Green essentially dwells in underground disco, where experimentalism runs rampant and Carter-era kitsch never seems to surface. He’s remixed the likes of space-disco maven Lindstrøm, NYC avant-funk icons Liquid Liquid, and bump ‘n’ grinders Crazy Penis, and his meticulously placed synth melodies most often recall the hand of comrade and nu-disco mastermind Daniel Wang. Like Wang, Green strives to create the “voice” of a song, pointing to the lack of memorable melodies he hears in house. “I have floor-to-ceiling [house] records in my apartment that I’ve been buying forever,” Green says. “I’m sure there are only a handful that I can hum or whistle to you.”
But for the self-described “dancing fool,” disco is a much more open field. “I just think of disco as being live and experimental, where you’re taking any influence and putting it to a dance beat,” he says. “You can’t make disco exclusively on a computer—you really need to have people playing off each other at some point in the recording for it to be disco.” Arthur’s Landing, a tribute band that pays homage to late NYC cellist/avant-disco icon Arthur Russell, recorded a jam of his dancefloor masterwork, Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face,” in Green’s tiny Brooklyn apartment. The result will end up on a future single on Green’s Chinatown label. “It’s so organic and so amazing to hear these guys play off of each other,” he says. “It doesn’t really need that much editing.”?
Asked if a solo album is coming soon, Green quickly replies: “I keep telling people that. I’m trying to, man. I have it in my head; I got three or four ideas for three different albums and I just have to get around to doing it!”
Brennan Green’s My First House EP is out now on Wurst Music.
Check out Brennan Green’s exclusive podcast for XLR8R here.
There’s one major problem with Crown City Rockers’ The Day After Forever—it should have dropped at the beginning of summer. The Bay Area group’s third full-length is full of quality grooves perfect for backyard barbecues and sunny summer parties. Translating their stellar live show into song, “Break” sets things off with its raucous, crashing cymbals and commanding chorus. An eclectic mix of feel-good hip-hop, “Soul” pays tribute to soul legends over Kat O1O’s funky synths and Headnodic’s upright bass, while “Kiss,” an uptempo disco-funk jam, is guaranteed to make girlies wiggle their backsides. CCR is often called a Cali version of The Roots, but The Day After Forever proves that they are way funkier than that.
Listen: “Soul”
Fans of Toronto’s gamer-geek-with-a-violin Final Fantasy (a.k.a. Owen Pallett) can expect a new, third LP, Heartland, via Domino in January of next year. Started in November of last year, Heartland saw Pallett collaborating with Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara at Reykjavik, Iceland’s Greenhouse studio. They recorded the album’s orchestrations in Prague a few months later with the Czech Symphony, and The Present’s Rusty Santo (a frequent Animal Collective production collaborator) mixed the record with Pallett.
“The album was compositionally modeled upon the principles of electronic music,” says Pallett in a press release. “The principles of analog synthesis informing symphonic writing, like an inversion of a Tomita record. These songs, too, were designed to be as dense with polyphony as the Final Fantasy live shows can become. While writing it, I kept an image in my head of putting so many notes on the page that the paper turned black.” Check out the tracklist below, and be wowed by his simple but stunning live show at one of the following dates with The Mountain Goats.
Heartland tracklist:
1. Midnight Directives
2. Keep The Dog Quiet
3. Mount Alpentine
4. Red Sun No. 5
5. Lewis Takes Action
6. The Great Elsewhere
7. Oh Heartland, Up Yours!
8. Lewis Takes Off His Shirt
9. Flare Gun
10. E Is For Estranged
11. Tryst With Mephistopheles
12. What Do You Think Will Happen Now?
On tour with The Mountain Goats:
11/04 Grand Rapids, MI – Ladies Literary Club – Calvin College
11/05 Chicago, IL – The Metro
11/06 Madison, WI – High Noon Saloon
11/07 Minneapolis, MN – Cedar Cultural Centre
11/10 Seattle, WA – The Showbox
11/11 Portland, OR – The Wonder Ballroom
11/14 San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
11/15 Los Angeles, CA – Henry Fonda Theatre
11/18 Austin, TX – Antone’s
11/19 Dallas, TX – Granada Theater
11/20 Nashville, TN – Mercy Lounge
11/21 Atlanta, GA – The Variety Playhouse
11/23 Orlando, FL – The Social
11/24 St. Augustine, FL – Cafe Eleven
11/27 Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
11/28 Philadelphia, PA – Theater of Living Art
11/29 Boston, MA – Wilbur Theater
12/01 New York, NY – Webster Hall
12/02 Brooklyn, NY – The Bell House
Apparently the robot baby from Daft Punk’s “Technologic” has found itself a full-fledged singing career, as it croons the chorus for Dre Skull‘s latest single, the shimmering club ballad “I Want You.” On his remix, Brooklyn’s AC Slater turns the track on its head and cranks the hype to eleven with a plethora of cut-up vocal work, breakbeats, and swelling bass lines. Slater’s offering isn’t even the best of the single’s remixes—he’s got plenty of competition from Alex Gopher, Bok Bok, Bobmo, and Dre Skull himself—but it’s certainly the most energetic. The original version’s not-to-be-missed, Tron-inspired music video is below.
The UK’s Rival Consoles reminds us of another time in electronic music, when Ableton wasn’t an option and hardware was an absolute necessity. Taken from his debut full-length album, the favorably reviewedIO, “1985” is a darkly anthemic piece of antique-sounding electro that slowly rises, falls, and twists upon itself while always harkening to a simpler time in dance music history.
Cumbia is a hot sound right now, so Chico Sonido could have easily turned out a blogger-friendly album of bass-heavy refixes and cumbia-meets-hip-hop mash-ups. But on his self-titled debut full-length, the Mexican-born producer—who currently resides in Los Angeles—has decided to dig a whole lot deeper, specifically into crates of psychedelic rock, funk, soul, and a myriad of Latin beats. Slow burners like “Antes Que Nadie” and “En Mis Sueños” recall mid-’90s Mo’ Wax, but Chico Sonido is much more than an exercise in vintage breaks worship. “Bikinis y Rock” is a wah-wah guitar workout, while “Más Discotheque” and “Loverboy” resuscitate the uptempo party stylings of big beat, albeit with some distinctive Latin flair.
Listen: “Antes Que Nadie”
The defunct Birmingham-based electronic-pop trio Plone has been remixed by London’s Plaid for the just-released Warp20 (Recreated) compilation, which features 21 Warp artists remixing tracks from the storied label’s past. The duo of Plaid changes the bright melodies of Plone’s “On My Bus” into something of a pop mix between Javanese gamelan music and Harry Partch—foreboding gongs resonate behind harmonic runs in the middle register, while seemingly off-key elements weave in and out in a trance. Though some electronic alterations are easy to pick out, the remix has a very organic feel, and would not be out of place on a world-music radio show. The exclusive stream is available below.
Plaid “On My Bus (Original by Plone)”
