He might have included the word “riot” in it’s title, but this track, off über-prolific producer Andreas Tilliander‘s forthcoming full-length Show, is a rather elegant affair in which techno, house, dub, and a little pop congregate peacefully.
Show is due for release in May 2009. Photo by Daniel Karlsson.
German DJ/producer Stefan Goldmann begins The Empty Foxhole with his own “Five Boroughs,” an eerie, post-industrial soundscape embellished with a melismatic keyboard motif. It merges into Mathew Jonson’s subtly pumping tech-house track “Symphony for the Apocalypse,” setting a cerebral, dark tone equally adept at moving bodies and emotions. Throughout Foxhole, Goldmann deftly blends tracks, allowing selections to ebb and flow with a dramatic sense of purpose rather than simply dropping a one-dimensional stream of clones. The disc’s 17 tracks—including those by Villalobos, Plastikman, Joel Mull, and Petre Inspirescu—rarely dip from the thrumming summits of deep headiness. The mix peaks with “Wolverine,” Goldmann’s adrenalized, spring-loaded tech-funk, which showboats to the finish line like Usain Bolt.
Who:Jahdan Blakkamoore
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn may be littered with aspiring reggae and dancehall MCs, but few of them have collaborated with Modeselektor. Originally coming up in the Boot Camp Clique, Jahdan’s career took a pretty radical left turn when he collaborated with 77Klash on the Matt Shadetek-produced “Brooklyn Anthem.” The viral success of that tune led to further collaboration with Shadetek and his Dutty Artz partner DJ/Rupture, who decided to tap Jahdan’s melodic dancehall croon for their label’s first release. The resulting EP, We Are Raiders, features grime-influenced production from Shadetek and even a cumbia beat courtesy of Chancha Vía Circuito of Buenos Aires’ Zizek crew; it will soon be followed by a proper artist album with more all-star production from Maga Bo and Modeselektor, not to mention guest vocals from U.K. grime king Durrty Goodz. When it comes to NYC’s buregeoning tropical bass sound, Jahdan is pretty much runnin’ tings.
Podcast: Jahdan Blakkamoore Full Hundred Mixed by Matt Shadetek
Watch: “Out of the Slaughter”
With his fourth album, Broken Spindles (a.k.a. Joel Petersen) is finally coming into his own. Evolving from the ambient, glitchy electro (with obvious ties to his other band The Faint’s chilly neo-new wave) that marked Petersen’s earlier work, Kiss/Kick instead emphasizes the analog over the digital, combining guitar riffs and live drumming with catchy synth hooks to create songs that are better built for bedroom parties than writhing on the dancefloor. Although drum machines and looped samples make occasional appearances, Petersen is clearly trying to rediscover his roots as a songwriter and composer, with an emphasis on a lyrics-driven, lo-fi approach that draws comparison to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and other indie keyboard rockers.
Long Beach, CA-based outfit (and one of XLR8R‘s recent Artist to Watch bands) Crystal Antlers has a new offering for the music masses, in the form of this soulful psych-punk jam. “Andrew” is off the band’s forthcoming debut full-length, set for release April 7 via Touch and Go.
With this year’s Winter Music Conference about to kick off, plenty of international electronic musicians are getting ready to head Stateside. Dumb-Unit founder Jeremy P Caulfield is one of them, but the Germany-based producer will stay in the U.S. post-conference and take his neuro-minimal techno to other places while he’s here. He’ll hit major U.S. cities in March and April (as well as a couple unlikely places), and for those not living in New York, Los Angeles, or El Paso, the entire tour will be documented in detail at his blog.
Catch the mayhem in one of these cities:
03/21 New York, NY – reSOULUTE
03/26 Miami, FL – WMC
03/27 El Paso, TX – D Club
03/28 Los Angeles, CA – Emulate Warehouse Party
04/02 Washington, DC – Muse
04/04 San Francisco, CA – The Endup
04/10 Omaha, NE – TBA
As previously reported, Adam “Doseone” Drucker and Jeffrey “Jel” Logan have returned after a six-year hiatus and are ready to release TheFREEhoudini mixtape under their Themselves guise.
The boys have been leaking snippets of the mixtape around the web in the last week, and today, laced XLR8R with an exclusive preview that features Buck 65 and Lionesque. This should tide us over until the full, 45-minute-long release drops. Grab it here.
“Long Time Coming Feat. Lionesque”
“Roman is as Roman Does”
“Kick the Ball Feat. Buck 65”
“Rappers is Geese”
“Swarm of BeeII”
Brooklyn-based Jahdan is a man currently smack in the center of our radar (and in the Artists to Watch section of our March issue). The MC—who got his start with the Boot Camp Clique—originally hooked up with Dutty Artz’ Matt Shadetek on the track “Brooklyn Anthem,” and since then, he’s stayed in good company with both Shadetek and the label (co-owned by DJ/ rupture).
Shadetek gathered numerous tracks featuring Jahdan’s fine lyrcial flow and mashed them into Jahdan Blakkamoore Full Hundred for the XLR8R Podcast. It’s a mere 22 minutes long, but Shadetek packed an impressive amount of music into that time, and if you had musings over just what tropical bass mashed into melodic dancehall and hard-hitting dubstep sounded like, here’s your mix.
Jahdan Blakkamoore Full Hundred
01 Jahdan – “Full Hundred Intro”
02 Jahdan Blakkamoore – “The General” (Produced by Matt Shadetek & Liondub)
03 Jahdan Blakkamoore – “Long Road” (Produced by Liondub, rmx by Matt Shadetek & Liondub)
04 Noble Society – “How We Gonna Get There” (Produced by Ovaground)
05 Iron Shirt – “Gave You All My Love (Zomby Bassline Remix)”
06 Iron Shirt – “Gave You All My Love (Cauto Dubstep Remix)”
07 Iron Shirt – “Gave You All My Love (Matt Shadetek Gave You All My Dub Remix)”
08 Jahdan Blakkamoore – “Fever” (Produced by Peter Gunn)
09 Jahdan Blakkamoore – “Nice Green (Ghost Library Riddim Mashup by Matt Shadetek)”
10 Noble Society – “Mama So Divine (Marcus Visionary Sub Soca Mix)”
11 Team Shadetek – “Brooklyn Anthem Feat. 77Klash & Jahdan (Ghislain Poirier Remix)”
12 Team Shadetek – “Brooklyn Anthem Feat. 77Klash & Jahdan (Scatta Riddim Mashup by Matt Shadetek)”
13 Team Shadetek – “Brooklyn Anthem Feat. 77Klash & Jahdan (Marcus Visionary Remix)”
14 Noble Society – She Told Me Feat. 77Klash (Cassava Riddim by Nokea, Mashup by Matt Shadetek)”
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Alberta, Canada is hardly known for its indie rock, but that’s changing with the emergence of bands like Women, Azeda Booth, and Faunts. The latter five-piece, based in Edmonton, has been crafting spacious, airy soundscapes since 2000. Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., their second full-length, builds retro synth-pop from shimmering guitars and fluttery keys; like M83’s latest, the songs are worthy of a John Hughes soundtrack. While the title track’s hammering beats and vocoders raise a red flag, “It Hurts Me All the Time” is all heartfelt pop and gloomy melody, and syncopated instrumentals like “Das Malefitz” are filled with echoing guitars and chiming synths. Instead of hiding shitty songs behind bleeps and retro futurism, Faunts delivers a diverse and, more importantly, memorable album.
Tech-house producer Butch is into simple pleasures: South Park, nice cars, eating sweets, and taking a good shit before a gig. “It’s horrible to DJ with a full stomach,” the producer, born Bülent Gürler, offers via email from a hotel somewhere in the heart of Deutschland. It might be Essen, Bingen, Bochum, or Lindau—a look at his DJ diary reveals plenty of stops in the German-speaking world and no sleep until late July at least.
Butch’s music has caught on like wildfire in the last two years, with a slew of 12-inches on Craft Music, Kontor, and Trapez painting him as one of the most playful names in techno. While minimal continues its slow descent into the K-hole of clicks ‘n’ cuts and trad house strokes its own idiom, Gürler rides a nice, smooth tech-house wave that’s neither predictable nor overly thought-out. “I’m open-minded in every musical direction,” says Gürler, who is of Turkish descent but was born and raised in Mainz, Germany. “I even used a classical German carnival sample in one of my tracks.”
His recent album for Great Stuff, Papillon, further reveals Gürler’s ear for melodic synths and ebbing grooves designed to slowly drive dancefloors to climax. Don’t be fooled by his overly masculine alias—Butch tracks like “Amelie” and “Jazzy Belle” have a flirtatious quality that most overly macho machine techno does not. Meanwhile, numbers like “Bad Weed,” “Ein-E,” and his popular “Mushroom Man” (the AFU single that samples Super Mario) hint at the narcotic culture that fuels all these late nights. Although Gürler claims to identify with Spanky Ham, the loud and obnoxious party pig from Comedy Central series Drawn Together, he ultimately appears to prefer studio time to drug-fueled antics.
Though Gürler’s popularity is relatively recent, he’s been dabbling in music for the last 15 years. “In the early ’90s it was hip-hop that started me off,” explains this child of the ’80s, who also used to be involved in BMX bikes and graffiti. “As you grow older, your horizon broadens a little, and other music also started to interest me. The first electronic music record I ever bought was [Armand Van Helden’s] ‘Funk Phenomenon’ in the ’90s. Back then, I also often went to a club named Prodo-X where many trance greats played, and producers like Kai Tracid and Silent Breed (a.k.a. Thomas P. Heckmann) really fascinated me.”
Eventually, he decided to channel all his energies into tech-house, and adopted an alias that was easier to pronounce than his real name. “I remembered a scene from Pulp Fiction where Butch (Bruce Willis) was asked by a taxi driver (with the last name Villalobos, by the way) what the meaning of his name was,” recalls Gürler. “He answered, ‘Names don’t mean shit.’ That’s basically what was on my mind. I just wanted to let the music speak for itself.”
