Animal Collective Releases Strawberry Jam

Friends since the second grade, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin (a.k.a. Animal Collective) have been recording tracks together for nearly as long as that, each living in separate time zones, writing individually, yet remaining one of the most intimate acts around. The band has cycled through experimental phases that range from choppy noise to freak-folk to tribal drum escapades, garnering a new army of devout followers with every release. But the Collective’s newest gem, Strawberry Jam, exceeds any experimental expectations–this is pop!

While most of the band’s releases contain hints of pop melodies, Strawberry Jam sees Animal Collective embracing the form’s catchy hooks, à la the Beach Boys (“Desert Oddities” is cited as an influence for the new release), while remaining as genuinely expressive and experimental as ever. Falsetto vocals clash over the clinking of poppy percussion, digital noise paces over guitar squeals, and somehow an album emerges that’s both chaotic and accessible.

Those quick to hate on AC’s “all over the map” style may find themselves in a world of pain, because Strawberry Jam will likely suck anyone into the new pop vortex.

Strawberry Jam is out in September on Domino.

Tracklisting
1. Peacebone
2. Unsolved Mysteries
3. Chores
4. For Reverend Green
5. Fireworks
6. #1
7. Winter Wonder Land
8. Cuckoo Cuckoo
9. Derek

Daily Download: Amir Sulaiman “I Love You”

Amir Sulaiman is an MC who has merged the fierce raps à la Chuck D and urgent lyrics akin to KRS-1 into a single ball of poetic fire. His latest release, Like A Thief In the Night, summons traditional boom-bap and conscious lyrics that never impede into preachy territory. “I Love You” may be Sulaiman’s entrance into the underground elite.

Download this song as an MP3, or preview a week’s worth of tracks at the XLR8R Podcast. Subscribe using iTunes, or with an RSS reader of your choice.

Zeb Stop The Earth, I Want To Get Off

That Italian Moreno Visini was born into a Gypsy household and dubbed Zeb by some British friends reveals something about his worldly influences. Similarly, Stop the Earth captures the West Indian, South Asian, and Arabic sounds he experienced in his early 20s in Ladbroke Grove, London. Now based in New York, the multi-instrumentalist traces trans-global latitudes from Middle Eastern dub to Afrobeat disco and funky Brazilian beats. Visini’s stringed instrumentation adds refinement to the mostly downtempo dance grooves, but he goes beyond bland polyrhythmic jams on “Bauls of New York,” which pays tribute to mystic minstrels from Bengal. If only the rest of the world were as unified and harmonious as Zeb’s music!

Klute The Emperor’s New Clothes

Tom Withers must be damn near the most prolific drum & bass artist in the United Kingdom. When not releasing inspired and imaginative double albums (Emperor is his third since 2003), he creates a forum for similarly punk-and techno-informed artists like Amit and Break on his Commercial Suicide label, and writes b-sides like “Most People Are Dicks” in the meantime. A degree of misanthropy may drive this busybody, whose voice is vital in more than one scene. “Learning Curve” seems to slow and alter a riff from the defunct, bad-ass band Refused, where its flipside, “Hell Hath No Fury,” is nine minutes of sun and glitter. Breakbeat and downtempo tracks share space with songs like “Come Back 2 Me,” as deep and emotional as a drum & bass tune can get. Withers’ restlessness has produced another long-player of staggering diversity. It’s not necessarily to be swallowed whole, but there’s something here for everyone to chew on.

Musab The Slick’s Box

Before Atmosphere became a known quantity, it was Musab who helped set things off for Rhymesayers and put Minnesota on the hip-hop map. While no longer rolling with the RSE family that he helped cultivate, this smooth-talking MC, also known as Minnesota Slicks, is still dropping gems. On his Hiero Imperium debut, Musab often plays the role of the street-wise pimp, and he does so pretty well. “My team took all the clientele from Heidi Fleiss,” he boasts on the standout, Superfly-inspired “Please Do Not Assume.” Sab does successfully step out of mack mode from time to time, but he and his producer King Karnov shine most when their beats and rhymes are larger-than-life.

The Week In Music, June 1

Though there’s plenty of room to be proven wrong, it’s possible R. Kelly just released the greatest album of 2007 (or at least, the most compelling). Somewhat surprisingly, his long-awaited Double Up LP shows that Kelly has actually escalated his sexually tinged lyrics (see “Sex Planet,” “Get Dirty,” and “Havin’ a Baby”), rather than toning them down. Sure, you might not find Double Up in the reviews section of XLR8R, but everyone needs a slick album of sensual contemporary soul, and the king of R&B has served it up–doubly.

If you ever have a hunch that a piece of music may be legitimate, check London-based archival label Soul Jazz’s catalog. If it’s there, you know you’re safe. The label’s newest release, Box of Dub, is a collection of dubstep that features Kode9, Burial, and Paul St. Hilaire. It is now official: dubstep has been redefined.

Police drummer Stewart Copeland finally realized that his band is terrible. Well, he was upset enough about the second stop of the band’s world tour to let everyone know via his blog. Copeland said that Sting looked “like a petulant pansy” when leaping in the air to signal a transition between songs, and further commented that the show was “unbelievably lame,” which seems obvious even if you don’t consider the series of blunders he outlines.

Gang of Four, garage rock, and writer Charles Bukowski may sound like a college freshman’s narrow range of interests, but they are also the influences of Strokes’ guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. Hammond has recently finished a screenplay adaptation of Bukowski’s Pulp, which is being shopped around Hollywood. Bukoski’s wife has approved the script, and Hammond is hoping to have a hand in casting. This should be interesting.

Previous Week In Music Entries
May 25

May 18

Digitalism: Signal to Noise

Little-to-no lighting or ventilation. Borrowed gear. Sensitive circuit breakers. A sketchy, ex-con landlord. A five-dollar strobe light. Welcome to Digitalism‘s first fully functioning but decidedly low-budget studio, a converted World War II bunker right in the middle of a retirement community in Hamburg, Germany. In other words: a suffocating, isolationist environment better suited for a one-man doomcore band than a pair of club-trotting, night-crawling DJs/producers. Or so it seems.

“You can definitely get pretty depressed in the bunker,” says Jens “Jence” Moelle, one-half of Digitalism, along with longtime friend Ismail “Isi” Tuefekci. “It feels like a world on its own–like eternal night. On the other hand, we love the night. Like, this one time we were sitting in the dark ‘n’ naked bunker/studio and came up with this hook–’I have an idea that you are here’–because we were thinking of our friends outside and felt we could sense [their presence] in a way.”

That line eventually evolved into the hands-in-the-air hook of “Idealistic,” Digitalism’s first official single and a popular inclusion in the crates of everyone from Miss Kittin to Erol Alkan since its first pressing in 2004. Walk into an electro-house party today and you’ll probably hear it dropped at some point, along with other popular Digitalism singles of the past couple years such as “Zdarlight,” “Jupiter Room,” and the recent Rapture-esque jam “Pogo” (co-written by The Presets’ drummer/keyboardist Kim Moyes), all of which were released through Paris’ trusted tastemakers Kitsuné Music.

“I first heard them on a local radio station when I was driving to the airport in Sydney,” says Moyes. “It was ‘Zdarlight,’ and I thought it was amazing. They are more like an indie or punk band in an electronic format–much heavier and more musical [than other producers], with a great sense of harmonies.”

Moyes first crossed creative paths with Digitalism soon after stumbling upon their single. Turns out Moelle had become an instant fan of the Presets track “Down Down Down” after hearing it on a friend’s MySpace page and was hell-bent on remixing it. Of the final mix, Moyes says, “I thought it was an epic rock-rave anthem! I was dumbstruck, really, especially at how loud it was.”

The bomb-squad nature of Digitalism’s music is especially apparent during their knob-tweaking, synth-pad-slamming live sets and the greater whole of Idealism, their debut album for Kitsuné/Astralwerks. A banger right from the start (the crunchy, never-ending climax of “Magnets”), it feels less like a collection of proven singles padded with filler–which, given the strength of their 12″s, they easily could have gotten away with–than a well-sequenced DJ set somewhere between Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem, and the Joy Division days of Factory Records. (Think the floor-rushing seamlessness of Soulwax’s Nite Versions, only not as homogenous.)

“We wanted the album to be a complete first insight into the Digitalism universe–something that feels like a book or a movie with different chapters,” explains Moelle. “We didn’t want to do just a compilation of tracks or build some useless material around the singles that we’ve released so far just to have an album. We want to be a band, not just producers, you know?”

The House That Paris Built
While Digitalism’s music certainly stands on its own in the increasingly crowded realm of electro-house/synths-as-guitars singles (see Boys Noize, Justice, Surkin), the duo’s back-story is quite typical. It goes a little something like this: A couple of teenagers forge a friendship while working amid elder DJ statesmen at a record shop and distro company specializing in house–music they first heard in 1993 on a weekly radio show simply called The Dance Charts. (Moelle and Tuefekci were 11 and 14, respectively, at the time.)

“That record store was one of the most chaotic, yet human, spaces we’ve ever seen,” explains Moelle. “It was located underneath the main railroad tracks in Hamburg, so every few seconds the whole thing felt like an earthquake; the front door was made of old metal, so it expanded during the summer and shrank a bit during the winter; and the big house legends from those days performed right in the store–in a booth where I usually dumped empty pizza boxes–like Dimitri From Paris, the Basement Boys, and Sandy Rivera.”

Stellar, intimate DJ sets weren’t the only thing Digitalism soaked up while working at the store. They also amassed stacks of white labels and soon-to-be-hot filtered and French singles to spin around Hamburg. Once their selections ceased to be challenging, the pair broadened their playlist with raw edits of songs like The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (later pressed as a now out-of-print 12-inch)–edits somehow pulled off on a computer with a 133 MhZ processor and basic, WAV-based Music Maker software. (Moelle’s father actually worked for a major IT company when he was a kid, meaning the family owned a massive laptop years before the general public knew what such a thing looked like. It’s also a major reason why he’s Digitalism’s resident tech geek.)

After the whole editing routine ran its course, Moelle and Tuefecki built Digitalism’s aforementioned bunker studio with the help of a friend, and started turning some of Moelle’s homemade beats and synth lines into actual songs, aided in part by Tuefekci’s own self-proclaimed “ear for the dance floor.”

“All we wanted to do at first was get one piece of vinyl out,” says Moelle, referring to their tweaked White Stripes track.

I ask him how well that first single did and the mostly mute Tuefecki cracks a smile. “We pressed a lot; don’t ask,” he says. “We meant it mostly as a move of, ‘Hello, we are here. Pay attention!'”

Dirty Deeds
Kitsuné’s ears were pricked immediately. They signed Digitalism soon after their official formation, releasing “Idealistic” and “Zdarlight” on pricey, appropriately loud import platters in 2005.

“People went crazy the first time [Masaya Kuroki and I] played ‘Idealistic,’ so I immediately told their manager I wanted to work with Digitalism,” says Gildas Loaëc, Kitsuné’s main A&R man and a former artistic director for Daft Punk. “Jens and Isi are genius producers–they have the energy of dance music with the strong writing and emotion of pop, which helps them stand out from every other act around.”

One of the main reasons why Digitalism’s music sounds like such a strong fusion of dance and pop aesthetics is the duo’s blatant dismissal of house–easily their favorite genre during the ’90s–right after Y2K hit. “House became boring,” Moelle bluntly states. “It was so hi-fi and flawless, which has never been our thing, so that’s when we started looking for different stuff that would suit our need for freaky, rough stuff better.”

Digitalism found hope in everything from RZA’s “very edgy and dirty” early productions for the Wu-Tang Clan to The Rapture’s pivotal dance/rock tipping point, “House of Jealous Lovers.” They were even inspired by the stronger side of electroclash, which, like it or not, got cool kids to uncross their arms and dance like complete buffoons well before Ed Banger and Kitsuné cemented their crossover status.

Speaking of being ahead of the curve, much of their debut Idealism was also written years before Justice and MSTRKRFT set dancefloors and rock-show after-parties ablaze. Digitalism insists they won’t change their sound to counteract what’s fast becoming the trendiest genre since, well, electroclash, because doing so would be “dishonest.” It’s hard to imagine why they would need to, what with the way Idealism references everything from New Order to Underground Resistance to Alan Braxe.

“Of course we’re excited that one of our favorite electronic sub-genres just reappeared,” says Moelle. “It’s that old sound but advanced–very futuristic, melodic, and stompy–yet sometimes it can be a bit too much. People often tend to rape a genre to death by denying there’s other great sounds in the musical spectrum as well. So, it’s an exciting sound, but don’t jump with your whole body into it”

Mission Accomplished
Take a quick look at the song titles on Idealism‘s sleeve (sci-fi nonsense like “Jupiter Room,” “Apollo Gize,” and “Moonlight”) and it’s easy to assume that Digitalism set out to record nothing but a memorable, intro-to-out indie-dance album. Ask them about the ideology behind Idealism, though, and you’ll get a carefully cultivated mission statement that’s quite serious and deliberate.

“Digitalism seeks the great, yet exciting unknown,” explains Moelle. “We want to encourage people to head for ideals and goals in life. It’s like a mood of departure and launch. Digitalism means ones and zeroes, all or nothing, so we don’t feel comfortable with average stuff. People shouldn’t either. Idealism can sometimes be hard but very honest, whether it’s love and friendship or just ideal food.”

To achieve the best possible album, Digitalism was heavily involved in every step of the process, right down to a painstaking photography and painting process for Idealism‘s cover earlier this year.

“We met with a photographer and the Kitsuné artwork team from London to paint the tracklisting in our usual way of writing onto a large canvas–to take pictures of it and use it for the flipside of the album artwork,” says Moelle. “It’s a pity we just changed the whole tracklisting a few weeks later for the last time.

“So we had to do all this again,” he adds. “As we didn’t have much time, we had to do it in London’s Fabric club between other bands’ soundchecks–on the floor and in socks so the canvas wouldn’t get dirty. It was very funny though.”

Sounds of Summer 2007
Digitalism’s top space-disco and dance-rock jams for diamond nights.

1. Digitalism “Pogo” (Astralwerks/Kitsuné)
This song just means a lot to us at the moment.

2. Poni Hoax “Involutive Star” (Tigersushi)
Amazing guitar riff and vocals.

3. Feist “Sea Lion (Chromeo Rmx)” (Universal)
Nice groove and melody.

4. Jence “Wired” (Kitsuné)
Since WMC, we know that people want to get “Wired.”

5. Hadouken “That Boy That Girl” (Kitsuné)
Rolling Stones meets The Prodigy!

6. Hystereo “Gonna Love You” (Soma)
Ear candy from our Irish friends.

7. Eyerer & Chopstick Feat. Zdar “Make my Day (Isi-E. Edit)” (CD-R)
Old Crydamoure style.

8. Escort “Bright New Life (Morgan Geist re-edit)” (Escort)
Wonderful, smooth groove music.

9. Does It Offend You Yeah “Weird Science” (Virgin)
Go nuts.

10. Jesse Rose “Everything Standard (Mustapha 3000 remix)” (Dubsided)
A body-killer.

The Field: Pop-Ambient Perfection

Despite his penchant for crafting hazy, atmospheric suites of ambient techno, The Field‘s sole member, Axel Willner (who also records as Cordouan and Lars Blek), is a pop music specialist. His debut LP, From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt), is a 10-track interpretation of pop’s past, with major-label samples painstakingly edited for maximum dancefloor efficiency and minimum recognizability. Even when he won’t admit it, the Stockholm native knows his stuff, musically. Sure, he’s entrenched in the Swedish techno scene, but does he dig on the country’s finest pop singers like Jens Lekman and Sondre Lerche? “Sondre is from Norway,” he’s quick to point out, “and the music I like most from there is all the black metal stuff.” Touché.

To tease out the greatest moments of pop music’s history, Willner looks to the classics. “I probably think that men singing in a painful falsetto can be some of the finest,” he notes. If ’80s R&B/pop comes to mind, you’re in the right ballpark: “A Paw In My Face,” a glistening techno track that plods along on a tight 4/4 beat daubed with triggered guitar strums, playfully makes incisions to the breakdown from Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” but you wouldn’t know it until the punchline at the song’s end.

Sometimes the samples are obvious (the title track’s skipping, churning snippet of The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You”); sometimes they’re not (“Over the Ice” borrows quietly from Kate Bush). Regardless, Willner snickers at the thought of legal clearances and is mum about my guesses on what’s been creatively appropriated. “One guy thought The Four Tops’ “[Reach Out] I’ll Be There” was something by Donna Summer,” he says, referring to a sample used on “Thought Vs. Action” (from an earlier EP).

It’s a particularly tricky process but Willner, aided by his punk-rock background, is mindful of his digital music’s very human facets. He strives for an element of fallibility that goes beyond setting drum hits ever-so-slightly off their Pro Tools grid. On the track “Sun & Ice,” Willner’s system overloads with delay effects and crashes; he happily rides out the storm, the sound crumpling under its own weight and eventually dropping out entirely before returning directly on-beat. (In an interview with Pitchfork Media, he claimed that all of his songs are mixed live to two channels, and that he leaves in most mistakes.)

But as any pop aficionado will tell you, it’s not the technicalities that make a song stick–it’s the emotions behind it. “When I’m in a certain mood, when I have a lot of things to sort out, I might hear an old track that I want to use,” says Willner. “[I’ll use] both the sample and my feeling that I got from it.”

What Is It? Cosmic

Sometimes Gomma’s DJ Mooner and Balihu’s Danny Wang have the same wet dream. They’re in a ritzy club in a seaside town just south of the Italian resort Rimini, and it’s 1977 and they’re dancing slowly, oh so slowly, like swimming through syrup while a DJ in a glass elevator moves up and down between two dancefloors.

The club in this dream is La Baia Degli Angeli, and it’s where Italian DJs Daliele Baldelli and Mozart helped birth a niche sound. Taught to mix by Baia’s resident DJs–a pair of unknown New Yorkers named Bob Day and Tom Sison–Baldelli and Mozart created a psychedelic, reverberating, rhythmic musical mass out of the only records they could get their hands on. With a lack of context for the music and almost no outside DJ influence, they simply played anything that sounded good to them: percussion-heavy African recordings, Depeche Mode and Tangerine Dream extended mixes, classical music overlayed with delay effects, funk 45s pitched to 33.

In 1979, Baldelli moved to a new club with a spaceship-shaped DJ booth, where he played through the mid-’80s. This was Cosmic in Lasize on the Lago di Garda, and it’s where the name “cosmic” crystallized to describe this slow, pulsing electronic mix. A few towns away, at the Typhoon club in Brescia, Beppe Loda was pioneering a similar vibe he called “Afro,” mixing African tracks and proto-house with experimental Chris and Cosey jams.

Though Cosmic/Afro clubs still exist today, they’re usually watered-down world music affairs with little of the spacey exoticism of the original. But plenty of obsessive DJs have dug up information from those days, which seem to have influenced everyone from DJ Harvey to Francois K. And if you search “Cosmic” and “Baldelli” on eBay you’ll turn up a number of bootleg repressings of tracks from old mixtapes.

“It sounds kind of timeless to me,” says New York DJ Jeremy Campbell, when I ask him about his fascination with the sound. “They’re taking all those different types of tracks and putting them into a whole new context. They’re borrowing from all different types of music and making it work together in interesting ways.”

Campbell, who brought Loda to the U.S. last year, plays “cosmic”-influenced sets at his Dazzle Ships party, but says he has to create a balance. “About half of it is danceable stuff and the other half the audience would have to be on Quaaludes to enjoy it. To me, the coolest thing about [cosmic] is it’s not usually just one style–it’s all about mixing some organic funk track into some arpegiating synth track. You really have to know your records well.”

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