Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the notorious Canadian winter festival known as Igloofest has today announced the impeccable lineup for its upcoming 2016 edition along with the news of a complete makeover of the festivals layout. On top of boasting the fact that this years lineup is without a doubt “the best program in its history,” it has been shared that all the festivals offerings, which includes two stages, an interactive playground, the Iglooswag snowsuit contest, ice bars, and the heartwarming fire pits, will all be revamped and up for rediscovery.
You can view a new promotional video from Igloofest 2016 announcing its entire lineup in the video below. In addition to this, you can read more about the program launch by going here.
Tickets are available now, purchase them by going here.
Back in Febuary, London label Spinning Plates launched its acclaimed first release, Will & Held’s Ours. On December 14, the label’s sophomore release will arrive as a spilt EP from veteran Sydney-based producer Andy Rantzen and one of the label’s A&Rs Bruno Schmidt—who evidently found Rantzen’s tracks during a wide-eyed, late-night youtube session.
Spread across four tracks, with Rantzen and Schmidt supplying two each, SP002 kicks off with the bass-heavy, electro-tinged “98%,” which uses Tibetan tuning for a slightly warped and abnormal sound. The ferocity of the drums in the EP’s second cut, “Opalescent,” recalls Factory Floor’s drive, with a chest-cracking bassline sitting underneath, and trippy, swirling synths riding up top. Schmidt steps up next with “Cornbread,” a deep and gurgling, synth-heavy outing with intricately woven percussion and a deep, echoing bassline. Closing the EP are the minimalistic grooves of “Microdot,” a Perlon-esque cut with warped rhythms and evolving synths.
Released on vinyl only, SP002 will land on Spinning plates on December 14, with the full EP streaming below.
Acclaimed London-based artist Andrew Weatherall has just announced the release of his first solo album since 2009, Convenanza. Despite not having released any full-length albums in the past six years, the British techno savant has kept himself busy with the creation of his subscription-based, vinyl-only music label, Moine Dubh, which launched earlier this year and will dabble in photography and curating festivals such as the now annual Convenanza festival. In addition to this, Weatherall has worked on various remixes, including his remix of the Unloved track “Guilty Of Love (Andrew Weatherall’s Guilty Of Dub),” which was featured as an XLR8R premiere this past October.
Convenanza will be released via Rotters Golf Club on February 26. You can stream album cut “Confidence Man” in full below and be sure to check out more from Andrew Weatherall by visiting his Soundcloud page here.
This week’s picks is all about Saturday. As Art Basel hits Miami so does the dance party scene with a number of events taking place throughout the weekend. Saturday afternoon, Miami’s Minimax and Brooklyn’s Verboten team up for the Verboten StageONE Art Basel edition hosting acts Art Department, Black Coffee, Matthew Dear, and others at a popup event in Wynwood. The event goes all day from 1pm until 2am, and tickets are available via XLR8Rhere.
To find more events in your city or to submit a new event, visit our events page. XLR8R is now offering ticketing for U.S. events, promoters interested in participating during our beta-testing can get in touch here.
Giorgio Luceri has consistently delivered genre-defying records since 2011 when he released a four-track soulful slow-burner called the 6D22EP for On the Prowl Records. Now with over 10 releases under his belt—on labels like Zurich’s deepArtSounds and the horror label Giallo Disco—Luceri will return to Mathematics with a new project under the 6D22 alias called I Know U Have Wings.
The EP saw a limited, colored-vinyl release last October that was kept to only 100 copies. The full vinyl release is now seeing the light of day and includes a black edition of the record with printed sleeve. The EP features four original productions that speak to the heart of Detroit techno, easily resonating with the early 90’s sound of labels like Carl Craig‘s Planet E or the Transmat sub-label, Fragile. XLR8R recently spoke with Luceri about the new record as 6D22 and here is what the producer had to say:
With all of the records that you have released in the last four years under your own name, what motivated you to produce under an alias?
The acronym 6D22 was a type of signature that was present during a debut release in Brooklyn via On the Prowl Records in 2011 (whole EP was called “6D22”). It was a code that I dedicated to few tracks since I wanted the release to be more oriented to an “out of the box” concept. “6D22” is one of the faces that helps me represent myself in my wider vision of music making. I use to produce most of my records with an ethereal and melodic approach and when it comes to house music I plan on using my own name but in the last year I have chosen to differentiate my musical output by using these diffrent faces. I want to produce and give names to these different faces. For example, my Garofano Rosso release via Giallo Disco Records was my first record under that alias this year.
6D22 is different from the previous releases. Hardwax described the debut release as ‘Detroit-leaning techno,’ and most of influences behind the project came from techno music, but 6D22 is not a tribute or just a techno project, it’s a way to show another side. Most people still don’t know this alias. No rules behind it, no trends, I’m just producing what I love.
I U Have Wings has a very warm and rich sound to it. What were the first instruments you gravitated towards when making this new EP?
The whole EP was recorded during both the end of 2014 and March of 2015. I used the Korg Poly 800 for bells and pads, Roland Juno 106 and JX-8P for bass lines, and a Microkorg for strings and leads. For the drums, I used the 808 and 909 sounds from the Roland TR-8 and few sounds from Yamaha RX-5.
I used lots of channels that passed through an Alesis 3630 while the FXs came from an Alesis Quadraverb. The album was mixed on Mackie 8 bus desk and sequenced by Logic software. I still love to work with digital synths and most records I’ve done under my own name used D-50 from Roland and Korg M1, but tracks with 6D22 use another combo. The best instrument any producer has is a narrative in what you are trying to say, trying to tell a story. As I’ve done in every release, I produce tracks with different stories from the private side of my life.
What is the next release we can expect from 6D22?
At the moment the next release is on the way and a third EP is in production. The next 6D22 release will be out in mid 2016 with one of the most important collaborations of my path indefinitely. I’ll announce it at the proper time.
You can grab a vinyl copy of I Know U Have Wings right now by clicking this link, and you can find out more about Giorgio Luceri by visiting his website.
Real Talk is a series of artist-penned essays that appears on XLR8R from time to time; this installment’s scribe is producer Tim Exile. Born Tim Shaw, the producer is ambitious, restless and inquisitive—traits that are clearly evident in the music he’s made. He long been something of an exploratory genre-hopper, with a kinetic output that has taken in, at times, sounds that veer close to drum & bass, IDM, electro-pop, breakcore and lots more, often delivered with a degree of theatricality that few of his knob-twiddling peers can match. Since his 2009 Warp Records long-player, Listening Tree, Exile’s been quiet on the release front, but don’t take that as a sign that his burning curiosity has ebbed. He’s simply refocused his energies, spending his time crafting new modes of musical production—and to that end, he’s forged a set-up he calls the Flow Machine, along with a trio of performance-orientated tools developed for Native Instruments called the Finger, the Mouth and Flesh, the last of which just hit the shops just last month. Below, Exile fills us in on the Flow Machine, and his attempts to liberate the act of music making.
Since my last album, Listening Tree, came out six years ago, I’ve been working on building new instruments for performing electronic music. I’ve always thought of electronic music as the perfect musical form for spontaneous performance, if only we could invent the right instruments—so that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The Flow Machine is at the center of it all. It’s an all-in-one integrated performance instrument—a studio in a box—but with the studio bit taken out. That’s to say, anything that has anything to do with recording, or producing, or generally having to hit stop to tweak something, has gone. Hence the name Flow Machine: Everything happens in the flow of time.
So after ten years working mainly in the world of music, I’ve spent the last six years working mostly in the world of technology. When I started my first instrument-building experiments about 15 years ago, my energy came from the same place my track-making energy came from—and the things I created went into the same pot in my own mind. I was just a guy following his creative flow wherever it took him, whether it was a track or an instrument. The instruments would feed into the productions, and the productions would feed into the performances I did with the instruments. The “‘products” of this process that I could earn a living from were records (hardly a living) and live shows (still hardly, but just about).
But somehow the universe has a way of making things complicated—well to be fair, I have a way of making things complicated—and eventually things got to a point where I could no longer do both things to the extent I wanted.
2009 was the pivotal year. Listening Tree was released on Warp Records, a much more sizable operation than I was used to—and I teamed up with Native Instruments, another pretty sizable operation, to release my first plugin, the Finger. The two years leading up to that were packed with intense work making the album and developing the new Flow Machine, out of which the technology for the Finger appeared. The idea was that the Flow Machine would be the instrument I’d use for the Listening Tree live shows. I wanted the live shows to be a blend between performances of the tracks I’d written for the album, and improvisation on the Flow Machine.
“I wanted to master the act of improvisation—to be completely free on stage, free from the shackles of repertoire, back catalog and the need to meet the expectations of people who came to see me play by performing tracks I’d made that people recognize.”
With hindsight I can see that I didn’t realize the implications of the contradiction I was getting stuck into. On the one hand, I wanted to release a polished album and play the music-industry game—the showcases, the press days, the ongoing touring to perform tracks from the album live. On the other hand, I wanted to master the act of improvisation—to be completely free on stage, free from the shackles of repertoire, back catalog and the need to meet the expectations of people who came to see me play by performing tracks I’d made that people recognize.
I felt this contradiction most acutely on stage. For about two years on a weekly basis, I was doing performances woven from a patchwork of karaoke-style playback of tracks from the album, interspersed with sections of pure from-scratch improvisation. I think it probably came over better than how it seemed in my head, but internally it felt like I was being ripped apart.
One of the most memorable and enjoyable gigs of that year was in a dark Danish warehouse, where somehow I threw off my shackles, didn’t play a single track from the album and improvised the whole hour. The moment was blessed by angels—I’d never felt as connected to an audience before. By the end of the year I knew where my heart really lay. I had an alternative vision for what music could be: improvised, spontaneous and adapting to each unique scenario. I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied just making music in the traditional ways. As a matter of conviction, I had to explore this new way of making music.
And so began this next phase of exploration. It was a bit of an into-the-void moment. My vision for how I want to create music is as much a technical one as a musical one, and it needs to be approached from both angles and in both industries. Doing that has turned out to be tricky, to say the least. The infrastructure of the music industry just isn’t designed for the act of improvising; it’s fueled by creations that can be pinned down, replicated, packaged up and distributed, whether that’s through recordings or live renditions of those recordings. Conversely the music-tech industry isn’t really cut out for people who have an artistic vision behind the technology they’re creating; it needs technology that’s versatile and capable of being a platform for a multitude of artistic visions.
Either way, to follow my dream, I need to do figure out a way of doing both to some extent. In reality, the technology has received the vast majority of my attention in the last few years, mainly because developing tech is a huge amount of work. The time needed to create technology that’s anywhere near ready for personal use—let alone public release—is in a different league from music-making. It’s years rather than months. The Flow Machine has become such a behemoth that it takes months to implement a single feature properly—and when it comes to creating commercially available technology such as the Finger, the Mouth or my latest release with Native Instruments, Flesh, there’s a whole other level of stuff to think about —interface design, marketing, video production and so on.
Ironically, the quagmire of hours spent coding, building, prototyping, throwing it all away and starting again has accidentally reinforced my commitment to improvisation. Since my time has been taken up with the monumental effort of building there’s been little left for music-making, so whatever happens in that small remainder is golden—and if I can make 30 minutes of music in 30 minutes, so much the better. Being able to do this with the Flow Machine has been what’s kept my hope and enthusiasm alive these last few ye
“As a species, we’re so much more musically creative than we have the chance to express.”
And this has really got me dreaming about the future of music for all of us. I still feel that as a species, we’re so much more musically creative than we have the chance to express. Music making is still largely a non–real-time pursuit. We plan our tracks on timelines and execute them with the space bar, which puts many people off. We’re heading in a very good direction—the music-tech industry has made leaps and bounds in the last five years,with innovative and accessible instruments launching regularly—but I still believe there’s a long way to go.
Imagine if we were all able to have a fulfilling, meaningful, musically creative experience in real-time from start to end, in just 30 minutes. This would liberate music-making in a revolutionary way. There are many things that keep me awake at night, but this particular thought is, hands down, my favorite—and my devotion to making it a reality is unstinting.
Tim Exile plays the Littlebig Xxxmasparty at Badehaus Szimpla Musiksalon, Berlin on Thursday, December 17.
Paranoid London is stuck in the past, forever trying to tap into a well of nostalgia mere golden glow in the rear-view mirror. That might sound like a negative statement—after all, nostalgia was once considered a form of mental illness, sometimes attributed to demons inhabiting the middle brain. But in the case of the production team of Quinn Whalley and Gerard Delgado, the delirium is entirely welcome—the era that the pair are fondly looking back towards is that of the original acid-house explosion, when the likes of Phuture, Sleezy D, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Adonis and the rest were first twiddling the knobs of the Roland TB-303. And the pair—aided and abetted by a series of vocalists, most often the somewhat mysterious Mutado Pintado—absolutely nails it, in both in old-school sound and honest, early-house ethos.
That ethos could, in part, be described “let the music do the talking”—Paranoid London doesn’t do interviews and, beyond their raucous live gigs, seem relatively oblivious in the ways of self-promotion. Until now, the duo didn’t even make their music very accessible; Paranoid London, a re-release of a hard-to find, vinyl-only album that came out late last year, is first the time that Whalley and Delgado have made any of their productions available in a digital version. But whatever the format, it’s hard to beat the appeal of this music even if you weren’t around for the first acid explosion, or even if you managed to avoid one of the genre’s multiple resurgences.
The album kicks off in high acidic gear with the grinding bassline and synthetic claps of “Light Tunnel,” a cut reminiscent of the aforementioned Adonis’s “No Way Back.” The track sees Pintado, in his monotone voice, substituting Adonis’s ode to abandonment on the dancefloor with…well, it’s not entirely clear, really. (Something about “light tunnels, way down below,” basically.) The track sets the template for much of what follows: raw grooves, skeletal arrangement and a grunginess that makes it sound as if it might have been recorded on a broken Tascam Portastudio. The instrumental jack track “Machines Our Coming” pares down that template, its relentless kick, hi-hats and spiky 303 line reducing acid to its core; “300 Hangovers A Year,” another of Pintado’s numbers, is similarly defined by low-end grit and low-slung groove. There’s a bit of variety on tap: “Paris Dub 3,” featuring Paris Brightledge of “It’s Alright” fame on the mike, goes a bit deeper and dubbier, with Brightledge’s adding a ghostly that floats over a chopped choir; the moody, DJ Genesis–led “Lovin U (Ahh Shit)” could almost be a lost Fingers Inc. track.
But really, unrefined acid rhythms are the name of the game here. One could argue that it’s not the most original sound around, and one would be right—but it’s pure in intent, authentic in form and relentlessly powerful in execution. Paranoid London, above all, is an reminder of the the fun and the feeling—the pure jacking joy—that house can bring.
Following the release of his debut LP, Sounds of the Desert Gully, on Studio Rockers, Marcel Lune is set to release a four-track remix EP titled Desert Gully Revisited on December 11. The release will feature a remix of the track”Gully State” from Bavarian producer PNFA, and two additional reworks from Studio Rocker regulars Bunny on Acid and Hi-Ryze. The Bristol-based producer has in short order become a regular (and a favorite) on XLR8R’s downloads section over the past two years, while continuously managing to modify and impress with each coming release.
In addition to featuring three new remixes, the EP will see a new exclusive track from Marcel himself. The original cut, titled “Temples,” is a nimble and bright soul-laden house jam with a heavy handed shuffle and sun-soaked vocals that give the track class and prominent dancefloor potential.
In addition to streaming “Temples” in full below, you can download four tracks from Marcel Lune as previously featured in our downloads section. Be sure to check out more from Marcel Lune by visiting his Soundcloud page here.
Having hosted the likes of Fur Coat, Bedouin, John Tejada, Atish, Hoj, David Scuba, Louie Fresco, and many more, the quality Los Angeles-based underground event known as Dialogue holds a considerable amount of reverence in the LA house/techno community. For their final party of 2015, they are hosting Cityfox and NOSI Music artist Justin Marchacos for his first ever west coast performance along with Los Angeles own Tara Brooks to cap off a successful year of organizing top-notch underground events.
According to his website, Nathan Pope (a.k.a. Antenna Happy) got his first taste of techno when listening to a Kevin Saunderson CD on his Walkman in the back of a religious studies class in the late 80’s. From there, Pope went on “continuing his religious education at clubs and raves in the West Midlands and the North of England,” and started his DJ career whilst at college in Bristol. Trying his hand at acting (his second love), software design, and standup, Pope eventually circled back and began to concentrate on his production skills which have become both lively and refined over the years.
Having just self released his last 12″, Rotor / Late, Antenna Happy has decided to link up with XLR8R to offer his track “Rotor (Late Mix)” as todays download. Featuring a solid pattern of thick synth tones that intertwine with “bubbling acid lines” to create a track that is restorative and draws inspiration from the pioneering electronic sounds that initially sucked Antenna Happy into the wonderful world of techno.
You can download the track in the player below and be sure to check out more from Antenna Happy by going to his Soundcloud page here.
