Welsh producer Doc Daneeka has built a reputation for fusing influences together with astounding dancefloor success. His diverse CV reveals versatile production chops capable of reaching anthemic heights, from his funky house roller “Walk On In” for Numbers to his recent nine-minute techno odyssey with Benjamin Damage, “Kansas,” on 50 Weapons. To finish off 2015, Daneeka has come through with two big ones for his own Ten Thousand Yen imprint: an EP of original material, Global Luv, set to drop December 11th, and a massive remix package for his 2014 smash collaboration with Seven Davis Jr., “What’s It Gonna Be”.
Daneeka calls on Detroit house legend Andrés and Welsh compatriot Earl Jeffers for remix duties, adding his own dub version for a package that presents three distinct sides to the original genre-blending tune. Andrés transforms the upbeat immediacy of the original into slinked-back R&B seduction, teasing out the longing nature of Seven Davis Jr.’s vocals while adding in a chunky and round bassline to anchor the groove. Label affiliate Earl Jeffers, who’s also produced under the alias Chesus, deconstructs the original and eschews most of the vocals for a filter-heavy pump that’s primed with raw floor energy. Daneeka’s dub presents the song at its very core, allowing only the very basics of the stripped-back 4/4 groove to do the heavy lifting. Closing out the calendar year in a strong way, Daneeka looks poised heading into new year, re-tooling one of his surefire classics in his ever-expanding catalog.
Having released his real name only recently, identifying the anonymous producer Man Power was one of electronic music’s favorite guessing games ever since his debut release on Correspondent in 2014. John Talabot, Michael Mayer, Andrew Weatherall, and Tim Sweeney were among the names thrown out to try and pinpoint the identity behind the textured, genre-straddling house and techno producer, but all came up short. Quenching the curiosity of fans from all over, the UK-born, Mexico-based producer Geoff Kirkwood (aka Man Power) revealed himself to the world. In an interview with XLR8R back in May when the question of his identity was still at large, Kirkwood revealed “[My anonymity] wasn’t intended as a gimmick, but I’d be full of shit if I pretended it hadn’t ended up helping me get noticed.” Despite having revealed himself, Man Power’s music speaks for itself and he has continued to gain a great deal of popularity.
Kirkwood was kind enough to gift us an exclusive track as today’s XLR8R download that was crafted while recording his self-titled debut album, Man Power. Read what he has to say about this exclusive cut in the text below.
“The album ‘Man Power’ was a long, drawn out, and occasionally painful process. Before the focus narrowed to the tighter, experimental pop work it became I had wanted to touch more overtly on my relationship with club music, hence me writing and recording Ess Kew, which kind of tried to bridge Italo vibes with cleaner modern sounds sounds.
When the album finally took a different direction, this track was left homeless. I usually like to write EPs with some kind of Narrative thread to them, so it never felt right to just append this track on to another record as some kind of surplus part, but I really do love it, so I’d rather just throw out in to the world like this. Unclothed and orphaned.”
You can download the track in the player below and be sure to check out more from Man Power by visiting his Soundcloud page here.
Birmingham techno veteran Anthony Child (a.k.a. Surgeon) stars in the latest installment of RA Sessions. When we visited his studio last fall, Child revealed that while at first he wasn’t so taken with modular synths, he was intrigued by how much fun Blawan appeared to be having with his “box of wires” and decided to give it a go. Good thing he did—RA observes that in this new live session, Child’s “colorful, dynamic rave tracks seem to emerge fully-formed, though in fact the performance was ‘completely improvised with nothing prepared beforehand.'” Watch it in full below.
Roly Porter‘s third solo album, Third Law, will see a release via Tri Angle in early 2016. Formerly one half of Vex’d alongside Kuedo, Porter’s 2013 LP Life Cycle of a Massive Star and previous solo output drifted away from dubstep to focus on beatless production. According to a press release, this latest album “represents a coming to terms with his goal of leaving dance music as it is, free to explore ideas of rhythm, bass, and sound design within his own world without having to shape any of these elements to fit preconceived ideas or rules.” Ahead of its release on January 22, stream lead single “4101” below.
01. 4101 02. In System 03. Mass 04. Blind Blackening 05. High Places 06. In Flight 07. Departure Stage 08. Known Space
At first glance, the Roli’s Seaboard Rise looks like rather standard fare: a 25-key MIDI controller with some extra controls on the left side. In actual fact, however, it’s more or less a complete rethink of the piano idiom, fusing elements of MIDI keyboards, touch devices, and the kinds of diverse physical responses that can come from acoustic instruments. Creator Roland Lamb’s company pioneered the concept with the 61-key $2,999 Seaboard Grand in 2013; now, the 25-key, $799 Seaboard Rise is an attempt to bring the technology to a wider audience, in a smaller, more accessible format. The result is exciting, fun to play, and extremely ripe for experimentation.
How It Looks The Rise is a heavy black slab of beautiful industrial design, with thin white touch strips delineating its traditionally white-and-black keys from one another. To the left are a series of LED-backlight sliders, buttons, and an X-Y pad, and on the left side of the Rise are some ports: USB for connecting to your computer or mobile device, power (to charge the built-in battery, which lasts about 12 hours), and a foot-pedal input. The built-in battery and Bluetooth mean that the Rise can be used to perform wirelessly, with merely an iOS device and some headphones or speakers attached.
The keys and pads are incredibly soft and pliable, with a smooth, rubberized finish that beckon the sliding, bouncing, and squeezing of your fingers to produce sound (and are also bizarrely comforting to touch, sort of like a slick memory foam mattress for your fingers). In fact, calling them keys isn’t quite right: rather, the whole keyboard functions as a single pressure-sensitive interface (the creator refers to the keys as “keywaves”). You can play the Rise like a piano, but you can also bend the pitch of any individual note by rubbing the soft keys from side to side, or create glissando effects by sliding your fingers up and down the surface. Essentially, the Rise is an interface that allows users to play individual notes, but also explore the spaces between them.
How It Plays Quite differently from a piano, for one. The Rise effectively combines the expressiveness and physicality of an acoustic instrument with the flexibility of a digital one. With the Rise you have far more degrees of input at your fingertips: Not only is there a consideration how hard you press the keys, but also how you let go, wiggle, and slide them. All of the discrete inputs make for effortless scales and vibrato, and this information is translated into subtle changes in response—the acoustic twang and slap of guitar strings, for instance, or the cutoff filter of a synthesizer. Roli’s approach represents a unique, new way of playing music, and there’s a great deal of depth and sophistication to it. One can imagine mastery of the instrument being a long, satisfying process.
The Rise’s bundled Equator software can run standalone or as a plug-in inside your DAW. A preset browser (with handy buttons on the controller to move forward and back) allow you to pop through vastly different sound sources easily, and there’s plenty here: three oscillators, a noise generator, and two sample modules that let you load in sound files its library, along with a host of multimode filters and effects (distortion, EQ, chorus, delay and reverb, to name a few). Your gestural commands can also be mapped as you see fit, with discrete readouts for strike, glide, slide, press and lift. It’s incredibly easy: Simply click on a gesture, and then push a parameter setting to configure an assignment and its functional range. You can map not only the gestural commands from the “keywaves”, but also assign the XY pad and the three configurable sliders. This is an incredibly deep, layered instrument that is in many ways more powerful than anything before it (or at least anything that’s available for less than many thousands of dollars).
The Bottom Line The compact size and weight of Roli’s Seaboard Rise belie its sheer expressiveness as a creative tool. For sound designers and experimental music producers, it’s one of the most exciting releases in music tech in quite some time. While it won’t necessarily be immediately obvious how to best integrate the piece into your studio, the Rise welcomes new ways of thinking and playing, and feels very much like it will stand the test of time.
Following their debut EP, Mexican Smoke, released via Straight Lines Are Fine, Lawrence Northall and Molly Dixon (a.k.a. The Caulfield Beats) are set to return to the label to release their latest single, ‘Acid pt. 1.’ The Caulfield Beats caught its break when Boiler Room featured the track “90’s Love (Acid pt. II)” as a Boiler Room Debut, resulting in a flurry of positive feedback concerning the heavy and driving music that this burgeoning talent has managed to construct.
With a debut LP coming out next year, the track “Acid pt. I”, which is being featured as today’s XLR8R premiere, is meant to give fans a taste of what comes next. The bass, which lays the foundation of the track, is identical to that of “90’s Love (Acid pt. II),” but does away with the fascinating mixture of acid house and indie vocal appeal that the latter track utilizes. The duo replaces those aspects of the track with choppy, down pitched vocals, a concentrated bass, and an abundant techno vibe that gives the track a heavy zephyr and rhythmic space.
You can stream “Acid pt. I” below and be sure to check out more from The Caulfield Beats by visiting its Soundcloud page here.
Hailing from Berlin, Arms & Legs label boss Daniel Steinberg has kept himself in the habit of producing unconstrained club sounds with a refreshing amount of consistency and sonic etiquette. Steinberg got his break after being signed to Jesse Rose‘s Front Room label back in 2008, on which he released his first full-length LP, Shut Up. It was the following year that he and Nils Ohrmann established their Arms & Legs imprint, which has seen various EPs and singles released from the label head himself. With now over forty releases under his belt, it is safe to say that crafting lively and poignant dance music is simply a force of habit for Daniel Steinberg.
His third full-length LP, Left Handed, was released earlier this year in October on his Arms & Legs imprint. The nine-track album is being lauded as one of the German producers most clever and unfettered releases to date. The album was recorded after an unfortunate drunken escapade around the 2014 holiday season which resulted in Steinberg fracturing his right wrist, hence the album title. According to the Berliner, the accident ended up benefiting his production process as he explains in the text below.
“As luck would have it I am left handed, the fracture nevertheless really slowed things down. At first it was super annoying, but as the days past I realized what a blessing my drunken fall had been. The pain from the fracture forced me to take my time, which I had, laboring over every single sound.”
Lucky for us, Steinberg has offered XLR8R a special edit of the album cut “1981” for today’s XLR8R download. The track itself plays off an old-school house vibe, using persistent piano chords, a satiating backseat bassline, and some great spoken word vocal samples that take you back to the year in question. You can download the track for free in the player below and be sure to check out more from Daniel Steinberg by heading to his Soundcloud page here.
Luc Veermeer and Sebastiano Zanasi, who make up the Cape Town-based duo Christian Tiger School, have managed to amass a loyal following in South Africa and beyond since the release of their debut album, The Third Floor. The duo’s sound is steeped in a hip-hop/LA beat scene influence, with a perspicuous South African influence—hinting at elements of a thriving beat scene in the Cape Town that is relatively unknown to the outside world. Christian Tiger School’s sophomore album, Chrome Tapes, was released this past summer on Tommy Boy and while keeping in tune with the duo’s hip-hop influence, they have further expanded on their sound by adding fresh electronic dance music influences.
Christian Tiger School’s latest track, “Damn January,” features South African MC Okmalumkoolkat, who has come to be known as one of the country’s most respected lyricists. You can watch the tough, haunting music video for “Damn January” in the player above. Switching the vibes completely, you can also check out the music video for their hasty and emotive track dance track “Chorisolo” below.
The Moscow-based label Hyperboloid is celebrating its 40th release with the massive compilation Cyberghetto. Featuring twenty-one brawny, bass-strapped tracks from a widespread selection of up-and-comers and a handful of celebrated Russian producers such as Pixelord and Lapti. Hyperboloid has released a heap of noteworthy releases this year, including Portal by Pixelord, Fissure by Seafloor, and 831‘s Body Race EP, from which the track “Dick Cash and Burger (Pixelord Remix)” was the number one most downloaded track on XLR8R in June 2015. The label has made it clear that you can expect to see a release such as this one for every tenth release that they manage to put out so you should be “expecting a fruitful onslaught of new beats to come in 2016.”
“Last Drop” by Nphonix, which is being featured as today’s XLR8R download, comes directly from this grime-laden, cyber-club compilation. Having started his musical career making drum & bass back in 2006, the Moscow native demonstrates a heavy and evolved techno/footwork sound that emits an enduring, high-octane dancefloor vibe. With a large discography under his belt and having seen support from some of the scenes most successful DJ/producers, Nphonix’s stylized musical output continues to be enjoyed by many and expand across all various sorts of genres.
You can download the track in the player below and be sure to check out more from Hyperboloid by head to their Soundcloud page here.
Fellow Brit George FitzGerald, famed for his bass-heavy sound and releases through the likes of Aus, Double Six, and Hotflush itself, takes on “Colt” on the A-side. The second remix is of “Airless,” and comes from Grain, an alias of Arthur Smith (a.k.a. Artwork) that he used for techno releases during the late 90s, via FatCat Records. He has since enjoyed successes alongside Benga and Skream as Magnetic Man, pushing a dubstep sound, though this remix harks back to those techno roots.
