Colossal Insight
All I Know Is Tonight
Diplo Rhythm
Edan: Psychic Out
Look closely at the cover art of Edan’s Beauty and the Beat–a pastiche of swirling colors with Prince Paul, Flavor Flav, and an assortment of old school hip-hop heads draped under ill-fitting afros and mod hairdos–and you might find the 30-minute whirlwind that is the MC/DJ/producer’s second album encapsulated in a nutshell.
“The colorful part of the record I ganked from some weird rock 45,” the 26-year-old Maryland native explains from his apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, as he does some last-minute record sorting for a one-off London DJ gig the next night. “I removed the titles and graphics on that record and cut out faces of the group that was in the heads of hair, and then found various hip-hop faces and put them underneath the hair. I looked at the 45 and thought ‘This represents the rock aspect of the record, but I wonder if there is a way to incorporate the hip-hop aspect visually?’”
While Edan says he was well aware that The Go-Gos already had an album called Beauty and the Beat (“But I didn’t care”), he was actually referencing Sugar Hill songwriter/session man Duke Bootee’s short-lived mid-‘80s record label, Beauty & The Beat. “I took a face or two from [those] sleeves and threw ‘em under the blonde hair,” he explains. “I was getting subtle with it for my own enjoyment or anyone else that recognizes. It all represents what I was doing musically. Taking things that already exist and throwing them in a big pot, to me, is such a fly form of art.”
A mélange of psychedelic soundscapes, abstract lyricism, and old school homages, Edan’s 13-track LP is perhaps more densely layered with samples than any full-length hip-hop album in recent memory. Although cobbled together from eclectic source material, the album finds its comfort zone connecting with late 60s/early ‘70s psych rock, a vibe its maker rounds out with some self-recorded Moog work, and loops that frequently bleed from track to track. “I didn’t look at (Beauty and the Beat) as a psychedelic record, I looked at it as a record I had to make,” Edan exhorts. “I don’t compartmentalize shit. We got to squash all these boundaries, end all the segregation in music, and just let freedom ring, son.”
Lyrically, Edan’s MC diatribes fall somewhere between MF Doom’s wistful streams of consciousness and Nas’ and KRS-One’s earnest desire to educate (“Walk out the doors and explore/With the innocence of kids age four/I frolic in the sand with a colony of ants/My particles expand/Building oxygen in plants/from Rakim to Caz/To Lakim Shabazz/Illogically advanced with the knowledge of the past” goes one particularly illustrative verse on “Making Planets”). And while listeners who’ve caught his early EPs, his debut LP Primitive Plus, and his exceptional Fast Rap mixtape (as Edan The DJ) already know how deep Edan’s passion for hip-hop runs, “Rock and Roll”’s references to The Zombies, Love, and Small Faces reveal more about his background. Born to Israeli parents in the Washington, DC suburbs, Edan Portnoy played flute and bass in a jazz ensemble and made folky four-track recordings with Dead Meadow guitarist Cory Shane before relocating to Boston to attend the prestigious Berklee School of Music.
“I have been around circles where I was just playing guitar and people didn’t know I was into hip-hop,” Edan says with a hip-hop-inflected drawl that makes this statement a little hard to imagine. “The whole spectrum starting with the Rolling Stones and The Beatles is what most of us crackers grew up around.”
While there’s no getting around the “p-word” when talking about the vibe of his new record, Edan says he didn’t do any drugs during the making of Beauty and the Beat, nor does he have a hallucinogen-addled past. “The furthest I ever took it was ‘shrooms,” he insists.
Instead, Edan says, he draws his inspiration from an earnest desire to be a part of an ongoing musical continuum that needs to look to the past as much as to the future. “We have this blessing of all this recorded art–we don’t have to be in the dark about what happened back then, which is really right now,” he explains. “We mustn’t get trapped in pushing forward. Just because something happens today does not mean it is an improvement on yesterday. That is why I study my manuscripts and my old music. I want to know how high these people have climbed, and I would like to learn from them.”
Wighnomy Brothers: Moving East
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of Jena, Germany. It’s okay. I hadn’t either, until I discovered the Wighnomy Brothers. But take a moment to locate it on the map–equidistant from Berlin and Frankfurt, it lies 100 miles or so west of Dresden, hovering perhaps 50 miles north of the Czech border. And take a good look at the cities nearby: Leipzig, Zwickau, Chemnitz. Why? Because the Wighnomy (pronounced “why-no-me”) Brothers, raised in the former East Germany, represent a generation of dance music that’s moving east, away from established metropolitan centers like Frankfurt, Cologne, and Berlin and towards regions where dance music, once an unlikely import from faraway capitals, is beginning to mutate into unexpected new forms that are quickly filtering back to the center.
The Wighnomy Brothers–the duo of Robag Wruhme (birth name Gabor Schablitzki) and Monkey Maffia (a.k.a. Sören Bodner)–may not command enough English for an interview, but that hasn’t held them back. Their meteoric rise is astonishing, first releasing deep house on their own Freude Am Tanzen label, then launching the more mechanically inclined Musik Krause imprint, gigging routinely across Europe, and being tapped for remixes by everyone from Trüby Trio to Alter Ego, from Parisian label Tigersushi to Seattle’s Orac.
The Wighnomys have yet to release a proper full-length, but their evolving style quickly becomes apparent from a survey of their singles and remixes. Expectedly minimalist–what German isn’t?–they flesh out their herky-jerky tracks with wild syncopations remembered from their youth as Iron Curtain b-boys, keening pads culled from their deeper house origins, and hyperkinetic, almost Latin sensibilities akin to those of Luciano or Ricardo Villalobos.
Robag Wruhme currently enjoys the higher profile of the two, thanks to his well-regarded debut LP, Wuzzlebud “KK” (Musik Krause), and a slew of remixes for over a dozen labels, but don’t discount the duo’s cumulative clout. On their bootleg label W.B., they rework unlikely classics–Underworld, Kosheen, even Busta Rhymes–into drum-heavy workouts leavened with contemplative pads. And judging from an October appearance at Berlin nightclub Rosi’s, their DJ sets are a model of collaborative synergy.
With each partner swilling separately from an upturned vodka bottle, one Brother manned the decks while the other hammered away at various effects boxes, turning a garden variety set of minimal techno into a relentless storm of echoes and loops. The louder the crowd screamed, the harder they played–and drank–returning again and again to the eerie acappella refrain “something for your mind.” They hardly needed to add the obvious: “…and your ass.” Welcome to the eastern frontier of booty.
The Books: Reading Between the Lines
The title of The Books’ third album, Lost and Safe, is the damn truth. Listen: bluegrass melodies on banjo and fiddle contorted into paperclip sculptures; crates of samples seemingly dug by a blindfolded Goodwill shopper; lyrics that make accidental sense. It sounds like everything from Asiatic Appalachian folk to a soundtrack for a future where robots made of empty tomato cans, ham radios, and duct tape rule the world.
Not that the NYC/Western Massachusetts-based duo of Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong can completely explain their music either. “We never heard our kind of stuff until we started doing it,” de Jong says. “That basically means we didn’t know what we were doing at first,” adds Zammuto.
Zammuto and de Jong met in 2000, when they happened to share the same Manhattan apartment. Zammuto is a visual artist who previously dabbled with stroboscope-like guitar on Willscher (Apartment B), an album recorded through a PVC pipe. De Jong is a classically trained cellist from the Netherlands, who spent years modifying his instrument with guitar effects. (“I largely wasted my time on a decade of experiments,” he quips.)
The Books was initially formed to create “pop music,” says De Jong. “[But] when Nick said ‘pop,’ we both stopped to ask what it really means. [The definition] took us both by surprise.” The band kept the pop format as a loose premise to work in, but their music developed a striking cut ‘n’ paste aesthetic more endearing to the folks on IDM listservs than, say, Christina Aguilera fans.
The Books’ music isn’t easy to translate, but it’s not exactly “folktronica” or “digital folk,” tags popular with the critics and journalists who acclaimed their scattered 2002 debut Thought for Food and the following cult hit, The Lemon of Pink. “We just happen to use those instruments that people identify with folk music–banjo, mandolin, fiddle,” says de Jong. “But at the same time, what we do has so little to do with folk music.”
Nonetheless, The Books do embody electronic music’s “folk” essence–namely that anyone with the right software and imagination can domesticate electricity. They favor cheap consumer software, basic microphones, and a sampler. “I think it keeps you more centered as an artist,” says Zammuto, extolling the virtues of simple editing software like Sound Forge and Acid. “It makes you think more carefully about the source material.”
To make Lost and Safe, The Books visited a Wal-Mart to record bouncing balls, performed junk-shop percussion with an amplified file cabinet, and listened to 10 hours worth of minidiscs of Zammuto’s brother rambling in the woods (a representative sample: “Expectation leads to disappointment/If you don’t expect something big, huge or exciting/Usually, uh, I don’t know, it’s not just as, yeah”). “We are both into collecting sounds that are so out of this world, but at the same time very natural,” de Jong explains. “It can open up people’s ears to sounds they never thought of listening to.” Instead of mutating the sounds with zeroes and ones, they let those moments breathe. “Things will have to stand on their own in order to survive,” offers Zammuto. “You can’t take crap and turn it into gold. You [have to] start with something really nice and work with it.”
One of The Books’ favorite pastimes is recontextualizing samples of what de Jong calls “language oddities.” “In all our three records, there are cut-up language samples that are done by serious voices 40 to 50 years ago,” he explains. “[They say things] that could not have been said back then, because we chopped them up and made a new material order.” There is room for self-parody within this technique–as when a sample of an evangelist from the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s church interrupts a pastoral banjo and cello duet to dictate “Sit up straight and be quiet! Sit down, son. Sit up straight in your seat!” Often, The Books carry on entire conversations made of disparate utterances. In “An Animated Description of Mr. Maps,” one voice says “You may call me brother now,” while another (sampled from a separate record) replies, “Yes, brother, I know.”
Included in Lost’s lyric sheets are lines both sung and sampled–with no noted distinctions. The band’s chicory-watered vocals add to this theme, containing meditations on seeking order within chaos. “That’s the basic state of the world,” offers Zammuto. “That’s really the way we think about sound and its potential to connect to other sounds…[meaning] can be magnified if you mix them together in the right way. But as always, it’s about bringing whatever you have to it. We try not to pin down the meaning–we try to leave it open for everyone.”
Prefuse 73 on The Books
“[Around November 2003], I was introduced to The Lemon of Pink from Kieren Hebden (Four Tet), who had picked it up while we were on tour together. Once I put it in my headphones, I was hearing something so unique and original that it became the soundtrack to that tour for me.
“As soon as I got home, I contacted Nick (Zammuto) and told him I wanted to include him in the list of guests on [my] next album. Months later I received material from them via bicycle, and from there I figured it would make sense to make an EP out of it. (The CD) was over 20 minutes of stripped-down sessions from the The Lemon of Pink and other field recordings. I wanted to do some versions of their songs with beats à la Prefuse 73, but not exactly consider them remixes–more like collaborations. I started working on that separate from my actual album, trying to incorporate only their sounds. I wanted to create something ‘banging’ out of it as well as new compositions. The sounds I used would be aligned with [theirs] sonically, rather than aligning our styles of production, which differ but both rely heavily on edited elements.
“I feel their last record was generally slept on and remains a gem to be discovered and felt by many who can relate to any inventive forms of music. It’s a mesh of a bugged-out Nonesuch record, a perfect psychedelic folk record, and a precisely cut-up edit record made out of beautifully composed pieces rolled into one…
“I don’t know what else to say. They’re on their own shit.”
Macka Diamond: A Girl’s Best Friend
After 15 years struggling to bust into the dancehall scene, 2004 saw deejay Macka Diamond reach the number one spot in Jamaica. Riding the Thriller riddim, Diamond dropped the hilarious track “Done A’ Ready,” a scathing ode to one-minute men. Beside the hit being a great personal achievement, she was the first female artist in four years to get a Jamaican number one.
Delivered with the kind of lackadaisical assurance only a mature lady could pull off, the track was the antithesis to the raw slackness or sing-songy styles Jamaica’s other female deejays offer. “That tune bring me back to the people,” says Macka. “Women like to hear woman speak out about situations. If you can do that in entertaining way, you have them.”
Macka (Charmaine Monroe to her mum) has a dogged determination that has to be admired. She started her career in her teens (she’s now 30-something) as Lady Charm and did the rounds of Kingston’s notoriously tough studios. She teamed up with ghetto star Queen Paula until an irrevocable fight split the pair. She briefly became part of Captain Barky’s Worm Dem Crew before going solo and finding success with a counter tune to Major Mackeral’s King Tubby-released “Don Ban;” this led to a producer pressuring her to adopt the name Lady Mackeral. “I was always looking for the right formula,” says Macka, explaining her many guises. “When I was young I don’t think I was ready to do it on my own. I’ve been in it so long now nothing phases me and I can just be myself.”
2003 saw her announce another alias on “Tekk Con,” a response to Vybz Kartel’s “Tekk Buddy.” Kartel loved it and asked her to perform the track at his Up 2 Di Time album launch.With the majority of Jamaica’s musical movers and shakers present, Macka stole the show, her years of experience warming up the hostile crowd and upstaging Kartel’s stiff performance. It was this event that began Macka’s meteoric rise to fame and secured her first ever solo album deal with UK reggae imprint Greensleeves; dancehalls are now ringing out with young ladies hollering her catch phrase “Money-O.”
“Since ‘Tekk Con’ I’ve blown up,” whispers Macka in a feminine tone that contrasts sharply with her no-nonsense deejay style. “There isn’t a day when I not in studio, doing interviews or performing. It’s what me always want.”
Supersystem’s Political Dance Punk
It is debatable whether dance punk is dying, or whether dance punk’s flag is just getting raised. Franz Ferdinand and Interpol are as ubiquitous as the phone bill, and there are many, many imitators praying to be floated to golden shores by the nu-disco tide. Then there is Supersystem, who you may remember by their recently retired moniker El Guapo.
The combo started life as avant noodlers who favored reed-instrument solos and free jazz awkwardness over the mid-to late ‘90s Washington, DC hardcore sound. Nonetheless, after singles and a largely ignored debut on a small co-op label run by friends, the band signed with local punk stalwarts Dischord. Over the next few years, their sound and line-ups continually shifted. By the release of 2002’s Fake French, the band was decidedly song-based and their album (produced by the heavy hand of Trans Am’s Phil Manley) was laden with beeps, blips, and tumbling 4/4 cadences. Along the way, they added keyboardist Pete Cafarella (The Rapture), and half the quartet began biding time in Brooklyn, while the other half stayed rooted in DC.
After recent tours with The Rapture and Ted Leo, their tracks started showing up in Tommie Sunshine’s playlists; and, while hounded by bigger, dance-oriented labels, the boys chose to sign with Touch and Go. But a Chicago bar band with a Budweiser endorsement already trademarked their name of eight years. Letting go of El Guapo’s past, the boys ushered in a new sound with a new name: Supersystem.
Supersystem’s Touch and Go debut shows the band biting into a meatier, fuller style and ditching their snakey, fragmented free jazz ends all together. It’s one of the first dance punk albums that is actually, well, danceable. The band comes from disparate grooming and inspirations: Cafarella from the school of booming 808s; co-frontman Justin Moyer from a strict diet of Elvis; drummer Josh Blair also plays in prog power metallists Orthrelm; and other frontman Raphael Cohen listens to Afro-Latin sounds “exclusively.” Nonetheless, the band coheres into a fierce, funkdafied combo, showing their DC roots (think Trouble Funk, not Fugazi) all the way.
To listen to Moyer explain it, it’s all happy accident: “We didn’t plan on making an accessible dance album. All we set out to do was make something tighter. I think we just got sick of improvising–got tired of trying to ‘blow peoples minds’ with how out there we could get. It got boring. We realized there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing catchy songs with hooky choruses.” Especially if you are Supersystem.
Annie: Norway’s Electropop Heartthrob
If you find yourself regularly throwing cushions at the TV in protest of the banality of most modern-day pop music, Annie has come to save you. Her sparkling, life-affirming songs may be destined for the charts but don’t be fooled–they are packed with a knowing cool that comes from the heart of underground Norway.
It was the breezy pop/house track “The Greatest Hit” that first got Annie Lilia Berge Strand noticed in 1999. Produced by her then partner Erot, it had all the hallmarks of Norway’s thriving late ‘90s alternative music scene, taking inspiration from everything from Larry Levan disco productions to The Ramones whilst stealing a sample from Madonna’s “Everybody.” The song’s contagious chorus made it a club hit from Paris to Stockholm to London. However, this blossoming singing and DJing career was painfully cut short when Erot died in 2001. Unable to face the world, Strand retreated from the scene she loved until she found the strength to go back to the clubs of her native Bergen.
Through DJing she met Finnish electro producer Timo who asked if she would consider putting vocals to his Opl:Bastards project. Soon they began work on what has become the core of Strand’s debut LP, Anniemal. What’s more, her label 679 made a canny choice for the album’s producer: bootleg guru Richard X. Effortlessly combining disco, electronica, house, and pop it dexterously crosses the divide between commercial accessibility and a contemporary dynamic edge. Despite turning down the likes of Britney Spears for remix work, fellow Norwegians Röyksopp dropped work on their new album to guest produce two tracks; adding further credibility are remixes for her “Heartbeat” single by Maurice Fulton and Alan Braxe.
The scene is now set for Annie to take her sound out on the road at key dates across Europe and the States. Whether she becomes the cool version of Kylie Minogue–name-checking the likes of Bjørn Torske, Kompakt, and the Tom Tom Club–remains to be seen. What is certain is that the marriage of Annie’s captivating vocals to dance music is infectious enough to give the likes of Usher and Maroon 5 a run for their lame-ass money.
