CLP “Spaceballs feat. Spoek, Damaged Good$, Cerebral Vortex”

CLP (formerly known as Chris de Luca vs. Phon.o) has brought together a solid mix of guest artists for their upcoming full-length hip-hop release, Supercontinental, including Yo Majesty, Rayzaflo, Zion I, Data MC, Tunde Olaniran, Kovas, among others. The album doesn’t drop until November, but you can sample the first single here. “Spaceballs,” which features Damaged Good$, Cerebral Vortex, and Swedish ethno-techno specialist Spoek, sounds like CLP and crew took their synthesizer and beat box and launched them into deep space before recording. The alternately gruff and laidback delivery gives some needed gravity to the slow downbeat nuanced with whirring galactic tweaks and rich, vibrating, Dirty South synths. Lulu McAllister

Spaceballs feat. Spoek, Damaged Good$, Cerebral Vortex

Spaceballs feat. Spoek Damaged Goods Cerebral Vortex

ANAVAN Plots Fall Tour

ANAVAN may have been birthed from the scene surrounding L.A.’s legendary institution, The Smell, but it’s time for these three synth-punkers to leave the nest and venture out into the big, wide world. In other words, they’re going on tour.

The band will play one show in California on Saturday, before crossing the Atlantic later this month to make a big boom around Europe with their punk-meets-pop arsenal of songs. While they’re out and about, Slanty Shanty records will release the band’s sophomore album, Cover Story, on November 11. An album release party is set for October 24, appropriately at The Smell in Los Angeles.

10/11 Ocean Beach, CA – Portugalia
10/24 Los Angeles, CA – The Smell*
10/30 Heidelberg, Germany – Zum Teufel
10/31 Liege, Belgium – Inside Out Club
11/01 Utrecht, The Netherlands – DBs
11/02 Hamburg, Germany – Astrastube
11/03 Poznan, Poland – Kisielice Poznan
11/04 Berlin, Germany – Lokal
11/05 Prague, Czech Republic – Klub 007
11/06 Frankfurt, Germany – Elfer music club
11/08 Carpi – Italy – Mattatoio Club
11/09 Geneva, Switzerland – L’Usine
11/13 Bordeaux, France – Heretic
11/14 Paris, France – Fleche Dor
11/15 Karlsruhe, Germany – KOHI
11/16 Trier, Germany – Ex-Haus
11/17 Potsdam, Germany – Black Fleck
11/18 Hannover, Germany – Cafe Glocksee
11/20 Denmark, Aalborg – 1000 Fryd
11/21 Oslo, Norway – Radio Nova @ Klubbscenen, Chateau Neuf
11/22 Stockholm, Sweden – Fritz’s Corner
11/26 Brighton,U.K. – Freebutt
11/27 Cardiff, U.K. – Club Ifor Bach
11/28 Birmingham, U.K. – The Institute
11/29 Manchester, U.K. – The Deaf Institute
11/30 Liverpool, U.K. – Jammfactory
12/01 Southhampton, U.K. – The Joiners
12/02 London, U.K. – The Dome

* with Captain Ahab, Hearts of Darkness, Grand Buffet, and Kyle H. Mabson

Defined by Resistance: The Portland Sound

Outside of Portland, the city’s indie-rock scene gets most of the press love. But the city’s music fans know there’s plenty more on offer here. For all the attempts to create a singular Portland sound, the city’s musical signature is mostly a lack of one.

Take PDX Pop Now! Best known as a free, all-ages, non-profit summer music festival, PPN also puts out an annual two-disc compilation, a slice of the city’s many scenes. Yes, the comp weights toward indie–this year’s offering features tracks from soul punkers New Bloods, electronic spazster Yacht, critical darlings Blitzen Trapper, and electro-acoustic pop duo Talkdemonic–but makes space for other genres. For 2008, Copacrescent, Braille, Sandpeople, and Living Proof (with soul singer Liv Warfield) all showcased hip-hop, a style that doesn’t always get much cred in Portland. Hurricane Katrina evacuee Devin Phillips, now a Portlander, shows off the sax playing that made him the poster boy (literally) for the Portland Jazz Festival in 2007. Folk (Horse Feathers, Heather Broderick with the Portland Cello Project) and global lounge retro-chic (Pink Martini) show up as well. The PDX Pop Now! comp has become influential in Portland, where PPN organizers have proven themselves by tapping both big names as well as next big things for their festivals and compilations.

Having said that, yes, there is a lot of indie rock in PDX, a city that prides itself on an anti-corporate, DIY aesthetic (even if it is lousy with Starbuckses). The jangly indie rock of The Shaky Hands got enough attention in 2007 to win them the coveted title of Best New Band from alt-weekly Willamette Week; their debut album was a sunny, happy affair. Now they’ve signed to the newly-relocated-to-Portland Kill Rock Stars label. The songs on the band’s sophomore LP are as loosely constructed as ever, but there’s more darkness here. The crashing “No Say” is as aware of human shortcomings as anything by Bob Dylan (a clear inspiration for the band), and “Love All of” stands out for its lovely sparseness. There’s a more mature sound on this album, with less of the insularity that Portland can sometimes breed in its artists.

Musée Mécanique’s Hold This Ghost is the band’s first full-length, but it shows another strength of the Portland music world: Its artists love collaboration. Hold This Ghost includes contributions from wintry folk singer Laura Gibson, cellist Douglas Jenkins, and John Adam Weinland Shearer of folk-rock band Weinland, among others. The result is a layered, delicate take on folk, meticulously arranged with an ear for atmosphere and texture, with surprises unfolding every moment. There’s an eerie, melancholy sense of memory underlying these songs, even if pinning those memories down through the gauzy ebbs and tides is impossible. Electronic and acoustic sounds blend smoothly as a dream, with that same intangible sense of meaning.

More theatrical are Parenthetical Girls, with what they call an orchestral song cycle­–not a bad description, either, of the lush arrangements and emotion-soaked vocals on their latest, Entanglements. The album is saturated with sound, with whiffs of Van Dyke Parks- and Patrick Wolf-style songwriting. The narrative threading all these songs together feels a little musical theater-ish, sometimes bordering on overwrought, sometimes endearing, but never lacking in ambition. Much like Portland itself.

In The Studio: Johnny Jewel

From his initial compositions as a noise producer to his post-glam work as half of Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre (Glass Candy’s earliest, semi-No Wave incarnation) to his newfound space-disco guru status (he’s one of the men behind the Italians Do It Better label), Portland veteran Johnny Jewel has put in work.

While journalists and bloggers often reduce Jewel’s semi-lo-fi productions to a form of retro Italo-disco worship, there’s a lot more to the experienced engineer’s sound palette than a few Giorgio Moroder tricks and and some trendy synths. Responsible for the post-goth vibes of Glass Candy, Farah, the recently disbanded and soon-to-be reformed Chromatics, and a bounty of other “top secret” projects set to emerge from the Italians label, Jewel has set the precedent for producers using their own favorite tools (either analog or digital) to create what sounds right to them. We called Jewel to talk moody melodies, MIDI, and what’s up with Portland pedal jockeys.

XLR8R: How did you first start producing?

Johnny Jewel: When I first started writing in high school, I was super into Sonic Youth and Velvet Underground. After I got a bit older, I got really, really into Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, and sound art. That’s how I first got drawn to synthesizers, through noise–or back then it was called “experimental music,” as there really wasn’t a noise movement yet. I never played in any bands before Glass Candy–I only produced noise records, like, along the lines of Forced Exposure, The Dead Sea, and that kind of scene. I feel like I’ve always been producing, even though I really didn’t know what it was called.

Are you involved with any of the new wave of Portland noise bands?

Portland’s small, so everyone knows each other, but I’m kind of an asshole on the subject because I’m not really a pedal freak. I’m much more into the John Cage approach–where you extract the sound through experimental application [and] it’s not just pedal loops and stuff like that. It’s cool, but I just like theme and composition with a little bit of improvisation. I like noise as an extension of music. I feel like noise was a necessary statement that needed to be made, but once it’s been made, it’s like, “Okay, let’s move on.” I don’t subscribe to any one genre and I feel like the noise scene, like hardcore in the ’90s, has become really dogmatic. I’m trying not to sound like a dick, but with a lot of noise stuff these days, there seems to be a superiority complex that exists. I was doing noise records in the mid-’90s that nobody knows about. It’s pretty funny to me, but music is music and I’m glad people are doing shit.

Is there any piece of gear that is essential to the Italians sound?

Everything that I’m drawn to is really moody and emotional. I’m going to naturally search out new projects and progress along those lines. Any instrument in the right hands can be really hot and any instrument can produce any moods. Most of the recordings that I produce involve a couple keyboards, from the ’70s. I’m really superstitious about them and I’ve had them since 1991–I’ve been doing this for a long time. I do not like preset sounds and I don’t have a drum kit that I use for every recording. I just have pads and old drum machines. Everything is played by hand, in real time–there’s no sound that’s identical in any particular song.

What are your thoughts on MIDI and digital recording techniques?

I don’t use MIDI–I don’t even know how to connect anything at all. I always listened to old records and most of the electronic stuff I liked was from the late ’70s and early ’80s, which was right on the threshold of MIDI really kicking in. The flow and the swagger of that era of electronic music is way looser and less uptight. I’m not hating on MIDI, I just come at production from a raw, live-musician angle and until I hit a wall doing what I do, I’m going to keep on doing that.

What sort of studio setting do you work in?

I have a studio in an old industrial building from the 1900s, located in a warehouse by the river. Apparently they used to make signs in it and now it’s converted into art spaces. I keep everything there and I don’t have any musical instruments at home. If I had a studio where I lived, I would never get anything done.

MP3: “Ssion (Glass Candy Remix)”
Feature: Glass Candy: After Dark

Favorite Portland artist:
There’s a lot of hot shit simmering in Portland, be it musicians, DJs, designers, or artists. The city is reaching a boiling point and it’s great to
be a part of it.

Murs Murs for President

One of the West Coast’s best respected indie MCs, Murs delivers on his first commercial hip-hop album. Musically, Murs for President’s radio-friendly production moves smoothly through several different accessible sounds, from catchy and bouncy vibes (“Road Is My Religion”) to a clear homage to Native Tongue stylings (check the jazz-tipped riffs on the cerebral, politically charged “Science”). As always, it’s Murs’ nimble lyrical prowess that surges to the forefront: Expect his usual doses of cutting social commentary and humor, which go lock-step together as surefootedly as his razor-sharp flow. Check the hilarious “Looking Fly,” which satirizes one of today’s celebrity norms–the unseemly quest for fame and its accompanying ugliness. At your service, Mr. President.

Shedding the Past Shed

Just like his album title’s awful pun suggests, Shed desires to set forth techno that retains the “purity” and energy of the music’s past without presenting a nostalgia trip. Our avatar often fails that lofty goal but he still produces decent rhythms to fade into any desktop DJ’s minimal techno mix. “Boose-Sweep” skids to an agile groove of shoe-brushing hi-hats, and “That Beats Everything!” (whose title probably reads better in German) stomps at a Red Army parade pace. More ambient tracks are needed since our man has a sharp ear for vivid, gaseous synth textures on “Slow Motion Replay,” which is a fine relief from the fireside yuppie-pop of “Estrange.”

Windy & Carl “My Love”

Having been together for 19 years, couple and music-making duo Windy & Carl are well acquainted with the spectrum of emotion experienced in the world of love. Musically, they construct luscious, meandering soundscapes and blossoming tones that express both enchanting beauty and heart-wrenching despair. Due out on October 13, Songs For The Broken Hearted, the duo’s fourth album on kranky, is a collection of love songs transmitting the highs and lows encountered during the wild ride. A song about revitalization of devotion and hope, “My Love” elicits thoughts of cuddling up with a warm, fuzzy blanket for an afternoon nap on a rainy day.

My Love

Podcast 58: All Things Matthew Dear by Derek Plaslaiko

Matthew Dear is a man of many talents and personalities. Over the past decade he has assembled an impressive discography of top-shelf techno, microhouse, electronic pop, and more. After operating for years under a variety of different pseudonyms (Matthew Dear, Audion, False, Jabberjaw), he unveiled a live incarnation called Matthew Dear’s Big Hands last year. With the band prepared to embark on a string of live dates across North America, the folks at Ghostly International have commissioned a mix highlighting Dear’s catalog.

Given that the man himself is constantly overloaded with everything from production work to DJ gigs, Ghostly was left with the difficult task of enlisting someone who could properly represent Dear’s music for the XLR8R podcast. It quickly became clear that Derek Plaslaiko was the right man for the job, as the Michigan native came up in the same Midwestern techno scene as Dear and has since relocated to New York and become one of Gotham’s most in-demand techno DJs. Utilizing everything from obscure cuts and remixes to certified dancefloor anthems (not to mention a couple of exclusive, unreleased Audion tracks), Plaslaiko has crafted an homage suitable for both hardcore fans and listeners simply looking to get acquainted with the sounds of Matthew Dear.

Tracklisting
01 Matthew Dear “Don’t Go This Way” (Ghostly)
02 Matthew Dear “Fleece On Brain” (Ghostly)
03 False “Sink The Ship” (Minus)
04 Hot Chip “No Fit State” (Audion Remix) (EMI)
05 Ellen Allien “Out (Audion’s Out For Infants Mix)” (Bpitch Control)
06 Matthew Dear “Hammers” (Spectral)
07 Matthew Dear “Pinch & Pillage” (Spectral)
08 Matthew Dear “Dog Days” (Spectral)
09 Matthew Dear “Stealing Moves” (Spectral)
10 Audion “Snap Into It” (Spectral)
11 Audion “Bees Please” (Spectral/Unreleased)
12 Audion “OWT” (Spectral/Unreleased)
13 False “You Wouldn’t” (Minus)
14 Matthew Dear “Anger Management” (Spectral)
15 Audion “Kisses” (Spectral)
16 Matthew John “Olga Dancekowski (Audion’s Paradise Cafe Mix)” (Trampolin)
17 Matthew Dear “It’s Over Now” (Spectral)

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Podcast_Mix_2008_10_09

Mad Again (Whoa)

Brooklyn-based mic-slayer/producer, 77klash, took the drum and bass-induced, post-genre rhythm, Skallawa, back to his homeland of Jamaica in 2005. Now, he’s teamed up with warm-voiced reggae and dancehall mainstay, Johnny Osbourne, to produce a genre-advancing dancehall banger, “Mad Again (Whoa).” The video, directed by John Fine, features dancers from Ground Zero and Dancerz Blvd getting down to the minimalistic, low-end heavy, electro and hip hop-impelled track. The hipster-garbed move-makers and ’80s throwback, yet oh-so in the now, florescent effects and filters create a modern electro sense, while the classic vocal stylings of Johnny Osbourne keeps it grounded in dancehall anthem territory.

Fredrik “Black Fur”

Sweden’s got another fresh import, in the form of the two-woman, four-man outfit going by the name of Fredrik. Hard to know what to call this band’s music, though it’s clear the six members are more than up for experimenting with traditional pop’s sound structure. Members cite everyone from The Fairport Convention to ~scape label boss Barbara Morgenstern as influences, and have leaked this track to give us a taste of the multi-instrumental, harmony-laden songs we can expect when the band releases Na Na Ni on October 28. Further listening opportunities can be found at the band’s MySpace page.

Na Na Ni
01 Black Fur
02 Alina’s Place
03 Hei Hei
04 1986
05 Evil and I
06 Ninkon Loops
07 Angora Sleepwalking
08 Na Na Ni
09 11 Years
10 Morr

Fredrik – Black Fur

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