Memotone “Across The Divide”

Just last week, the Bristol-based instrumentalist William Yates (a.k.a Memotone) released his sophomore LP titled CHIME HOURS via Black Acre. With the ability to play over eleven instruments proficiently, Yates comes from a musically talented family that has nurtured his love of grunge, minimal, classical composition, and electronic music. The influence of three genres shine through in his Memotone production and come together for an album whose “roots twists around rural horror, techno, and neo-classical sounds mixed with field recordings documenting archaic seasonal ceremonies.”

To help celebrate the release of his second album, Memotone has offered up the first track off the LP, “Across the Divide,” as today’s XLR8R download. The first two minutes of the track consists solely of a stunning yet anxiously portent piano composition. The track eventually trails into an ominous percussive element with a rising, granular, and fast paced sound that is steeped in darkness and ritual for a black and white excitement that is enveloped in witchcraft and awe.

You can download the track “Across the Divide” below via WeTransfer.

Across The Divide

Larry Heard Remixes Land on L.I.E.S.

Chicago house legend Larry Heard (a.k.a. Mr. Fingers) has had an active year so far. Just last month, the producer released the Mr. Fingers EP—his first release in ten years that landed via Alleviated Records. Today, New York imprint L.I.E.S., has announced the release of new material from the veteran under the aforementioned moniker. This latest project sees Heard offer up his own take of Simoncino‘s “Beyond the Dance” track, taken from his Abele Dance EP, originally released in 2014.

Tracklisting:

A Beyond the Dance (Mr. Fingers Remix)
B Beyond the Dance (Mr. Fingers Dark Mix)

Beyond the Dance Mr. Fingers Remixes is out today via L.I.E.S.

Lil Silva Announces New EP; Shares Track

The restless UK producer Lil Silva has announced plans to drop a new EP titled JIMI (Journey Inside My Imagination), set for release on May 6 via Good Years. To help spread the word regarding this announcement, Lil Silva is sharing a new track “Lines,” which can be streamed in full below. Employing his dream like vocals, the track is meant to act as a “consistent reflection of the EP’s overarching theme of immersion into a more meditative state of mind.” Despite his compulsive music-making tendencies and his ability to make over 80 tracks a week, Lil Silva has chosen from the cream of the crop for this six-track EP that borrows from a plethora of genres including soul, techno, UK Hardcore, and R&B.

You can check out more from Lil Silva by visiting his SoundCloud page here.

Tracklist:

01. The Play

02. Lines

03. De Ja ft. Kent

04. Jimi

05. Caught Up ft. Cosima

06. Struggle

Stream Chris Carrier’s Latest EP in Full

Parisian DJ and producer Chris Carrier dropped his latest EP, Flying Sausage, on Hudd Traxx on March 21.

Last year, Hudd Traxx celebrated its 10-year anniversary with a compilation that included cuts from some of house music’s most prolific producers including Chez Damier, Iron Curtis, Brett Johnson, Matthew Herbert, and label heads Slum Science—a trio made up of Eddie Leader, Danny White & Rucky—and its first release of 2016 finds Carrier in typically fine form. Comprised of four raw, club-focused house cuts, Flying Sausage is yet another notch in the belt for Hudd Traxx and the prolific French producer.

In support of the release, you can stream all four cuts in full below, with the EP available for purchase here.

Artist Tips: Âme

“The digital age has changed a lot about finding music,” says Âme‘s Kristian Beyer in our recent conversations. The German DJ-producer—who co-runs the prolific Innervisions institution alongside Dixon and Frank Wiedemann—has forged a wildly successful career out of mind-bending sets with uncanny timing. Core to this is of course his skill in being a selector. It is because of this magic equation that he has become something of a regular in the top 10 DJ’s of RA’s year-end poll, finishing number two in 2014. And being an exclusively digital-format DJ, it seemed most relevant to ask Kristian to lay out his top tips to finding the best tracks for your sets.

Find the Right Headphone

I mainly search for my music on the laptop, and so I would always recommend that you find the right headphone. Your set of headphones must give you a picture of how it will sound in the club. Very often in the old days, it sounded great in record stores on the headphones but it would never translate to the live situation. Finding the right headphone can stop this from happening.

Do a Good Preselection

It’s obvious that there is much more music out there to play compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, there was a list from the various distribution companies and you went through that and ordered the stuff that you wanted. Per week, there were no more than 10 good records—but now it is very different because all these filters are now missing. These filters are important. I used to run a record store for more than a decade so this is easier for me, but I think it is very important to do a good preselection.

Commit

Even after this filtering process, you need to be very patient and careful as you will have to go through a mountain of tracks. I will always remember seeing Ricardo [Villalobos] in a record store in Frankfurt at 1pm going through every record in the shop—and at 8pm he was not even finished. That is how you find the little nuggets that nobody else checks. It could be the dub version of a commercial record or the beat version of a really crappy song.

Create a Network

One of the main things is always to have a good network. It’s not good enough to check one or two record stores like in the past. First, I will check all that I receive from friends, then promos—and this is already a lot. After that, I check the main record stores to see what they have new in store, and after that I might go to Beatport / Traxsource / iTunes to find the final missing gems. This is what we do during the week or on a flight. This is the work that nobody sees and only a few recognize—but if you love that job then you have to do it with passion!

Experience Counts

As with all things, it eventually comes down to experience—but that is something everyone can work on, in my opinion. Why is this cover looking like that? The record may be interesting even if it is an artist you normally don’t like—sometimes it really is that simple. Be open and don’t think about categories and styles.

_____

Âme are playing DGTL Festival in Amsterdam this Easter weekend.

Download a New Mix from Momo Trosman

Born in Buenos Aires in 1991, Jerónimo Turek Trosman (a.k.a MOMO) started his career as a professional DJ towards the end of 2011. Influenced heavily by Ricardo Villalobos, Raresh, Praslea, Sonja Moonear and others, he entertains a love for all things vinyl, and has invested lots of time to compile a unique catalog of musical works. “I’ve been known to spend 10 hours a day on Discogs,” he says.

His reputation has grown considerably over recent years, supported, in part, by a series of performances at Creamfields (2012-2015) and Time Warp (2014, 2015) and some much further afield, including Berlin, Barcelona, Milan and Madrid. This year, he is set to return to European shores once again, playing at Sweden’s Into the Valley festival, and many more smaller settings.

Alongside Felipe Valenzuela, he also runs Cure Music, a vinyl-only label that “brings you hints on a hidden, underground network connecting Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, and Berlin’s dancefloors.”

The following 60-minute mix was compiled especially for XLR8R.

Keysound Announces Collaborative EP from OKZharp and Samrai

Dusk and Blackdown’s Keysound Recordings has announced a new collaboration between South African producer, Gervase Gordon (a.k.a OKZharp,) and South London DJ, Samrai. Entitled Gated, the record sees the two producers collaborating with three different vocalists; South African Ruthest, Jamaica native Shokryme and UK singer Specialist Moss. According to the imprint, the title track has been a staple at the Keysound Sessions parties, as reported by RA.

Tracklisting:

01. I Know feat. Specialist Moss
02. Woza Uzova feat. Ruffest
03. Body Deh feat. Shokryme
04. Gated (Instrumental)
05. Gated (Woza Uzova Instrumental)

Gated will land via Keysound on April 22, 2016.

Abdulla Rashim, Ron Morelli and More Tapped for Monoton Remixes

French label Desire Records has announced the release of two forthcoming 12″s featuring remixes from Monoton‘s Monotonprodukt 02 and Monotonprodukt 07 LPs—originally re-issued by the imprint in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

The two upcoming records were first issued as part of Konrad Becker’s Monoton art project in the ’80s, and are both expected to land in April of this year. A list of high-profile remixers has been tapped for the upcoming project featuring: Northern Electronic’s label-head Abdulla Rashim, L.I.E.S. linchpins Ron Morelli and Svengalisghost, Opal Tapes founder Basic House and affiliate Prostitutes, Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner) and Modern Love duo Rainer Veil.

Tracklisting:
Monoton – MPO2 RMX
A1 Wirklichkeit (Sergie Rezza Remix)
A2 Leben Im Dschungel (Abdulla Rashim Remix)
A3 Leben Im Dschungel (Basic House Wooden Clock Edit)
B1 Scanner Overview

Monoton – MPO7 RMX
A1 Root Of 1_1 (Prostitutes Mix)
B1 Soundtrack Dubpitch (Svengalighost + Ron Morelli Remix)
B2 Whereami (Rainer Veil Remix)

MPO2 RMX and MPO7 RMX will land via Desire Records on April 11.

SBTRKT Drops New Album

Masked UK producer, Aaron Jerome (a.k.a. SBTRKT,) has released a new full-length today entitled Save Yourself—it marks the producer’s first release since 2014’s Wonder Where We Land. The newly released project features a track with frequent collaborator Sampha, as well as new partnerships with R&B artist The-Dream, rapper D.R.AM. and female vocalist Mabel.

Listen to the full album on the player, above.

Tracklisting:

01. Gemini
02. Good Morning feat. The-Dream
03. I Feel Your Pain feat. D.R.A.M. & Mabel
04. TBD feat. Sampha
05. Revert feat. The-Dream
06. Ready Or Not
07. Let Them In
08. Bury You feat. The-Dream

Save Yourself is available now.

MGUN Gentium

Producers nowadays can make a beat, upload it, and get five seconds of fame before even making their first brew of the day. Nice as that might be for the ego, it doesn’t often result in music that stands the test of time. Detroit native MGUN (a.k.a. Manuel Gonzales) knows this, and for that reason the tracks that make up his excellent debut album, Gentium, range from a few months to nearly 10 years old. It is an approach that fellow Motor City prodigy Kyle Hall also took on his latest LP, From Joy, and one that similarly pays off.

For many producers, playing such a long game would render much of their material out dated, but not Gonzales. The grainy and lo-fi style he fomented early in his career remains exciting. It manages to be heady, heavy and heartfelt, and that makes it hard to pick apart the old and the new here. There is also a biographical element to Gentium that finds moods shift from carefree and playful to much more serious minded. Buoyant melodies and rolling grooves make way for spitting hi hats and broken beats, maybe as adult life bites.

“Pok” is an icy opener of rainy melodic loops, slithering hats and snares that immediately hook you in. From there thick, foggy house grooves continue: “Half Past 3” is a deep and lonely chugger that Omar S would be proud of, and “Don’t Hurt Yo Self” is the true sound of heartbreak with its wounded chords, machine glitches and nails on a blackboard squeals. Wrong as that sounds on paper, it is so right in practice. And that is part of the Gonzales appeal: His ability to conjure familiar feelings with unfamiliar sounds.

That continues through the haunting, churchy chords of “Past Due,” which is desolate and empty, and could well portray a decaying corner of Detroit. Water drips from bust pipes, warm billows of smog hang in the air and bassy menace percolates up from below. Crunchy trance trip “Bed & Breakfast” is then pumping and party, and “NVR” and “Veyra” are fizzing, drug addled cuts that are more akin to the techno and electro EPs MGUN was releasing on labels like The Trilogy Tapes and Berceuse Heroique before he took a two-year break to focus on family and work. Ultimately, no one track outshines the other here, because Gentium is a coherent work from an artist who is fluid in his own language, no matter when he talks or what he says.

Tracklisting:

A1 Pok
A2 Half Past 3
B1 Don’t Hurt Yoself
B2 Past Due
C1 Bed & Breakfast
C2 NVR
D1 Veyra
D2 Nobs

Gentium will land via Don’t Be Afraid on April 1, 2016.

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