XLR8R is pleased to announce a partnership with Interval Festival, which takes place in Bucharest, Romania between November 27 and December 2.
Being touted as “the longest musical event in European nightlife history,” Interval Festival will take place at two different venues with ninety plus artists, running continuously for over 100 hours. The lineup is extensive, and quite eclectic, with a long list of stellar acts such as Barac, Cristi Cons, Vlad Caia, Bambounou, Dekmantel Soundsystem, DVS1, Midland, Ben UFO, Tama Sumo, and many more.
XLR8R will be presenting a segment of the lineup, details of which are to come soon.
In all, over thirty more acts will be announced on November 10. You can learn more about Interval Festival by going to its website here.
First release tickets have already been sold out so be sure to act fast and grab your tickets here.
Offering a wide array of various musical genres, the second edition of the diverse boutique festival, Further Future, has just announced phase two of its lineup, further adding to its wonderfully profound artist roster. Taking place in the desert just beyond Las Vegas, Further Future aims to outshine your common festival experience by providing its audience with an eccentric aesthetic and offering a immense spectrum of music that is seldom found in such a setting.
Phase one of its lineup announcement started to grab the attention of music lovers everywhere, boasting acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Voices From The Lake, The Pharcyde, Lusine, Jam City, Dixon, Rival Consoles, Daedelus, Derrick Carter and many more.
Its most recent announcement has only further solidified Further Future’s standing as one of the most respected and highly anticipated boutique festivals in America. Adding extra allure, phase two has revealed Nicolas Jaar, Four Tet, Easy Star All-Stars, Idjut Boys, DJ Tennis, Fort Romeau, Andy Stott and a myriad of other impressive artists.
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Touting themselves as a “Nomadic boogie crew and purveyors of unique parties in awesome spaces,” the party series Percolate has recently announced two top-tier lineups for its Third Birthday Celebration and New Years Eve party in London. Founded in 2012, Percolate has gained a substantial reputation as one of the best party series in the UK and has recently started to reach beyond its boarders with parties in both France and Croatia.
To help kick off the new year in an adventurous and musical fashion, Percolate’s NYE Party at Shapes boasts a wickedly vibrant alignment of acts. Floating Points, Krywald & Farrer, Tama Sumo, and Levon Vincent are positioned to deliver their first sets of 2016 at the event and it’s bound to be a memorable performance for all those involved. You can learn more about the event by going to the XLR8R event posting here.
Starting his musical career as a member of the now disbanded Norwegian hardcore group Amulet, Oslo-based graphic designer, illustrator, and musician Robin Snasen Rengard (aka Snasen) has pursued a number of various sonic endeavors as a solo-electronic artist which have been met with a great deal of success. In addition to providing the soundtrack for the award winning documentary, Drone, Snasen released his full-length debut LP Forsvinningen in June of this year. Dark, deeply textural and indefinite, the album beautifully reflects an overall feeling of self-doubt and touches on the many emotional traumas that Snasen himself was dealing with during the making of this album.
The experimental Leeds-based band Vessels have graciously provided a remix treatment for the caliginous and gripping Snasen track “Vaapen” as today’s XLR8R download. Contentious and fierce, the tracks haunting vocals pilot the arrangement alongside a blackish bass riff and unruly percussion while rainy, weald like textures litter the background. Learn more about Snasen’s many artistic endeavors here and be sure to check out the Vessels’ Soundcloud page. Having previously featured downloads from both Vessels and Snasen, you grab more music in the hyperlinks below. Download “Vaapen (Vessels Remix)” in the media player below.
Not too long ago, in early October, the Paris-based electro-pop band Ambrose debuted their self-titled EP, spreading it across all corners of the internet. The band took a very concise and standard approach to sharing their music, by uploading it to sites like iTtunes, Spotify, and Bandcamp. Ambrose was quickly pegged by music lovers for utilizing a gazing bass sound that would make fans of Turning Shrines take immediate notice. Their debut EP included four tracks that can all stand on their own, including the ambient-turned–synth-clicker “Red Light”, and wobbling tribal rhythm pace of the track, “Southern Arch.” The release of the EP was a enormous milestone for the band, and they instantly took to their social-media channels to thank everyone who supported them on their way. The success of the release is now being followed up by remixes for the EP—and today we’ree offering up the remix of the track “Fag Ends,” by French production duo, FaCIL.
FaCIL is a young producer and DJ duo out of France. They range between early house-music aesthetics and the crackling textures of daytime disco, a blend easily recognized by tuning in to any of their recent podcasts or sets. Whether it’s the bouncy basslines of their self-released Killing Those Days EP, or the synthetic sounds of their remix of the track “Neptune” for long time friend François Ier, the result is same: spontaneous and powerful house music that keeps on delivering. Today, FaCIL has provided their interpretation of Ambrose’s track “Fag Ends” for direct download on XLR8R. Their interpretation takes the original and puts a special shine on it by incorporating an uplifting intro and straight-forward kick drum. The vocals are also stripped down to one small outtake and recompiled into an unambiguous direct message, leaving the listener with a dance-driven perspective on the original.
You can find out more about what FaCIL have coming down the pipeline by visiting them online, and you can grab their remix of “Fag Ends” by Ambrose by clicking on the media player below.
Renowned Dutch producer Orlando Voorn’s latest album, In My World, will land on Rush Hour Records in early 2016.
Rich in emotion and packed full of his abstract melodies and drums, In My World will be the fourth full-length offering from Voorn under his given name. According to Rush Hour, the release is “beautiful, suspended, rich in detail… it’s that high tech funk!,” and as you can hear from the soundcloud previews below, the description is bang on the money.
In My World is available for preorder now over at the Rush Hour store, with the tracklist and previews available below.
CD TRACKLIST: 1. Turn Left Right Here 2. Space Age 3. Let Me Lead The Way 4. Goon Entire Kickless 5. Anti Political 6. At Last 7. Chicago By Night 8. Predator’s Cave 9. The Swamp 10. In My World 11. Lost In Heaven
LP TRACKLIST: 1. Space Age 2. Let Me Lead The Way 3. Goon Entire Kickless 4. Anti Political 5. The Swamp 6. Predator’s Cave 7. Chicago By Night 8. Turn Left Right Here
Circuit is Novation’s first all-in-one groovebox, borrowing elements from its most successful products—the Launchpad line, most obviously—as well as its extensive synthesizer heritage. In essence, it merges these relatively disparate elements into a self-contained synthesizer, sequencer, and drum machine. While it’s easy to write the Circuit off as a limited box of presets for beginners, further engagement reveals a powerful, portable, and extremely fun little package of creative tools.
How It Looks Circuit’s physical design is most reminiscent of the company recently-released Launchpad Pro. Its four-by-eight grid of LED-lit, velocity-sensitive pads are used to play and sequence parts, and the eight endless encoders on top control the synth engine and drum sounds. At a tad under 10″ x 8″ x 1.5″ (exactly 240mm x 200mm x 35mm for the metric-fluent), the unit is a great size and extremely portable; solid construction means you can put it in your bag and not worry too much, and the rubberized base keeps it in one place when you rest it on a table. The unit’s portability is buoyed by its ability to run on six AA batteries and, to a lesser extent, the built-in speaker on the bottom of the unit (which, though nothing special, will do in a pinch). It has a pair of 1/4-inch jacks for stereo output, a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the front, and MIDI In/Out via a pair of 3.5mm hardware jacks, as well as USB (which only sends MIDI, not audio).
How It Sounds Circuit is essentially an exercise in creative limitations, providing two synth parts and four drum parts per session. The sound engine is reminiscent of the virtual analog synthesis found in the UltraNova and MiniNova; each synth part provides six-note polyphony. There are 64 preset patches available to choose from, and each has its own set of macros set to the rotary encoders up top. The fact that both the presets and macros aren’t labeled in any way can certainly feel like a limitation, but in practice proves surprisingly flexible: Sounds can be transformed drastically thanks to smart modulation mapping, and there’s something oddly comforting about sitting down in front of 64 presets instead of 6,000. (Each synth also has its own sidechain button, with controllable amounts.)
Likewise, each drum part lets you sequence one of the 64 available drum sounds, and the knobs control their pitch, decay, distortion and filter. Circuit provides reverb and delay effects, with the ability to control the send amount for each part individually. While each pattern defaults to one bar, these patterns can easily be combined to let you create eight-bar loops on each channel. The entire mix passes through a hi-pass/low-pass master filter, which has its own dedicated knob. (While it’s a smooth, clean filter for live performance, the ability to apply it to individual channels would be nice as well.) You can easily record your knob-twiddling automation with the touch of a button, too.
The Bottom Line All of this makes the Circuit a surprisingly powerful piece of kit. It sounds fantastic, and its pared-down tool set feels thought through and designed for optimized creativity, rather than the “blank slate syndrome” that sitting down in front of a DAW can bring about. You’re limited in the number of tracks you can use, and the blind noodling of knobs with unforeseen effects can sometimes be frustrating, but the pros well outweighed the cons in my experience. It was taking the Circuit on a six-hour bus ride that really drove home its creative potential, arriving at my destination with a half-dozen sessions that both sounded great on their own and will make solid starting points for proper tracks.
Luca Ventimiglia and Victor Nebbiolo di Castri are the Italian duo behind TIYG. Both classically trained, Ventimiglia and di Castri met during their studies at the Conservatory of Venice, Italy. Following their studies, the pair ventured down the experimental rabbit hole, before forming TIYG in 2013.
TIYG released its first EP on Five Fold Records in 2015, and has since released three more on the label, including the latest EP, In Your Guts. Focusing slightly more towards the dancefloor, it’s an EP rooted in techno, but one that hasn’t lost its experimental roots.
Following the release of In Your Guts, b-side cut “Collapse” lands with a video perfectly fitting the dark, experimental sound of the track. The brilliantly shot clip takes place in a sprawling, derelict building, with haunting vision of a mostly faceless, and shirtless, protagonist writhing throughout the disintegrating rooms, before twisting her way to the ocean and beyond.
You can watch the full video for “Collapse” below, with In Your Guts available to purchase here.
New York producer Physical Therapy lands on Mute subsidiary Liberation Technologies later this month with Hit the Breaks, his latest EP. As Resident Advisor reports (and as is implied by the title), the record finds him working with weighty, manipulated breakbeats across all six tracks. Physical Therapy also heads up his own imprint, Allergy Season, and holds down a regular slot at Brooklyn club night SHADE. Before Hit the Breaks drops on November 20, stream the first in a series of mixes for Liberation Technologies below.
Having enjoyed a lengthy career as a drum & bass producer, best known for his work under his Raiden alias, Chris Jarman switched his attention to techno in 2012, and Kamikaze Space Programme was born. Since then, he has released on Mindcut, Trust, and Mote-Evolver, a bastion of the sound that is run by Luke Slater (a.k.a. Planetary Assault Systems). Ballard, which will appear on the latter this month, is a four-tracker packed with some of his toughest material to date.
Ballard is available for pre-order at Juno. We caught up with Chris ahead of the release.
This will be your sophomore release on Luke Slater’s Mote-Evolver, following Concrete Musique, which was released last year. How did your relationship with Slater begin, and how did you come to release on the label? I received an email out the blue from Heidy, who is the label manager, telling me that Luke had heard my music via my Soundcloud and wanted me to make him an EP. As you can imagine, I was blown away! I spoke to Luke through a few emails and he’s very decisive—within a week we had a record mapped out. The process for the second was just as fast and efficient. I’m very proud of my Mote Evolver releases, they all feel like a complete package. I love working with them as they bring the best out in me, by giving me total creative freedom and encouraging me to think outside the box, not to mention enforcing a nice short deadline!
Ballard has a bit of a more aggressive sound than your previous works. What sparked this progression? I moved back to the UK three years ago having lived abroad in Estonia for a decade, which is a very different culture — a small country with a more relaxed and modern approach to society. During the three years since, I’ve felt a seismic shift in our society towards something increasingly dystopian. I’m finding this cultural cynicism is having a profound effect on my work. These feelings seem to have sparked a more darker, introspective side to my music. Also, I’ve always had an infatuation with Brutalism—raw concrete building blocks and rusted steel made in a time when we were more optimistic about our future.
Can you explain to us a bit about your influence from J.G. Ballard’s fictional novel “High Rise” for this EP? J.G. Ballard referenced in many of his novels the idea that we living in a consumer society where reality and fantasy has become blurred, and that we interface with reality via technology—a culture of sensation with a quest for endless excitement. His writing was very good at predicting the future. It’s obvious that we are now living in a media landscape, confused by what’s real and what is false, a feeling of being bombard from all sides. I wanted to create tracks that captured this social anxiety from four distant moods for the tracks on the EP, each of which is named after a J.G. Ballard novel. I feel his writing is as important as George Orwell’s as commentary of modern times. We live in a bleak man-made landscape where the psychological effects of technological, social developments are very ‘Ballardian’.
This is not to not to say I’m a pessimist though, it’s a reaction to the reality we are currently living in. It’s quite difficult to write cheery music surrounded by all this uncertainty, and art will always be an expression of the time.
