Polynation is an exciting new live electronic music project from two Amsterdam-based artists Stijn Hosman and Hessel Stuut. Polynation dropped its debut EP, Allogamy on November 13 via Dutch label Atomnation, which is also home to analogous artists such as Applescal, David Douglas, Gidge, and Sau Poler. The five tracks on Allogamy present a varied but refined sound—one of deep, melodic subtitles and emotional depth, and enough club-focused punch to move any dancefloor. In support of the EP, XLR8R has been gifted “Damp,” an engrossing slice of deep, melodic house that grabs your attention from the outset with its gorgeous pads and organic textures. Across its seven-and-a-half minute run time, the Amsterdam duo layer in an assortment of synths and slicing percussion, slowly building the tension to a beautiful and climactic finish. Ahead of the full EP release, “Damp” is available as a free download below.
The fifth edition of MIRA Barcelona has just released the final details regarding its stellar lineup for this year’s festival, which takes place between October 30 and November 7 at multiple venues around the city. Featuring 33 concerts, 9 installations, 20 visual artists and a number of lectures and workshops, the event is committed to innovation and the blending of visuals and sound.
New additions to the lineup include Cardopusher and the cardinal of 90’s french electro The Hacker (a.k.a. “man of shadows”) will be performing alongside fantastic artists like Robert Koch, Nosaj Thing, Andy Stott, Ghost Culture, and many more.
For more information regarding MIRA 2015 you can head to their website by going here.
When you think of electronic music, its connection to surfing isn’t something that instantly springs to mind. One is based around the connection between human and machine, and the other, human and nature. However, both are centered around personal reflection and, for some artists, surfing and the ocean provides a meditative experience that, like the music they create, is a necessary emotional release.
In between gigs in Los Angeles, Clint Stewart, Dave DK, and Mia Lucci chat with XLR8R TV about their bond with the ocean and the balance it provides them.
What exactly is minimal? So often today the term is labored with connotations of lifeless, unimaginative loops, a far cry from the heyday of the early-noughties scene, when stripped back structures and reduced form allowed musical creativity to flourish. It is a topic that Les Points, a collective of young artists from Zurich, tackle head on in their first full length release, the aptly titled YOUKNOWWHATMINIMALISCH LP
On first listen, it’s evident that this is not entirely cut from the same cloth as their previous output, which had tended to tread a more formulaic path through minimal house. In fact, to get a sense of this sea change, one need look no further than the eye-catching artwork, which is laden with day-glo acid smilies, each encompassed by another of the diverse influences referenced by the artists (from gabber to glitch, and everything in between). Given the freedom of the full length format, Les Points have grabbed the opportunity to experiment.
A common feature of all the tracks is their origins in analog jam sessions, giving the LP a distinctly organic sound, one which is still characteristic of its producers. It opens with mesmeric “Lost,” a woozy trip through the typical clicks and pops of the minimal sound, followed by the ravey “Ultitemplate,” which rattles between freaky acid and oscillating sirens. A chunk of the album then take a plunge into more techno territory—“Baasiclaxer” is a breezy dub session, and the menacing “Saturn2” sounds like a juiced up STL. There are hints of Aphex Twin in “Breakbits2,” one of the album’s high points, which puts a rusty, gritty sounding breaks loop under some glowing keys.
Even in its more subdued moments, the productions are still compelling. The skippy beats of “Erica” embody the same haunting qualities of early Burial, muffled by ghostly moans and off-key strings. On the other hand, “Fddd” is far gentler—a slow-building, atmospheric cut, tied together only by the tick of a highly reduced hi-hat. Finally, wrapping things up is the title track—bleeps resonate over marching drums, before a concluding vocal begs the question, “Do you know what minimal is?” Some light is indeed shone on Les Points’ vision of minimalism: The sum of all the parts of the record is a lesson in restraint, and a reminder of the variety that can be teased out of such a condensed set of sounds.
The news comes as the artist is due to release his maiden EP for the label, with It’s Just You and Me landing on October 9. Ahead of its release, “Carpet Sneak” can be streamed in full below.
“Gel Abril is a fantastic DJ since a long time and very qualified. But besides his DJ skills, he has impressed me with his driving soulful techno, which always rule my sets. They’re energetic and soulful, with a big heart and a love for the Detroit school. He’s an artist who knows exactly what he is doing and that makes him interesting and never boring. I am so excited to welcome him to mobilee!” – Anja Schneider
The two friends have been spinning together for over 15 years; they founded the world-conquering Get Physical label with friends Peter Hayo, Thomas “DJ T.” Koch, and Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger of Booka Shade in 2002; and that same year, they started producing as a team, collaborating to create a style of austere, spacious and melodic dance music that owed as much to trance (albeit a stripped-down form of trance) as it did to house and techno. Flash forward to 2015, and M.A.N.D.Y.‘s Philipp Jung and Patrick Bodmer are still together, and though they’ve largely ditched their trance-tinged inclinations, they’re still going strong, as is Get Physical itself. The label’s very longevity has elevated it to “iconic” status—but it’s still got a long way to go before it catches up with Transmat, the hugely influential Detroit techno label founded by Derrick May in 1986 and originally housed on the city’s Gratiot Avenue alongside Kevin Saunderson‘s KMS and Juan Atkins‘s Metroplex. The two labels will be joining forces at the upcoming Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) on October 18 for second edition of the Transmat Gets Physical bash, with M.A.N.D.Y. and May joined by none other than Atkins, along with the WhoMadeWho DJ team, System of Survival and many others. In the run-up to the party, we caught up with M.A.N.D.Y.’s Jung at his Berlin flat to talk about May, the lasting influence of Detroit, and the importance of ADE itself.
It must feel great to be playing alongside Derrick May and Juan Atkins, couple of guys who have undoubtedly had a huge impact on your music. Oh, totally! I’d never met Juan, but I’ve met Derrick—we’ve played together a few times in the past, and now that we are doing the Transmat Gets Physical events. We’ve already done one at the Rex Club in Paris. Derrick is such a lovely guy; he does it with the same passion that he probably started with. It’s so nice to see that after all these years, he still so dedicated to his job and is so into the music. That’s very inspiring, and is great for others to see. We’re very excited to have the chance to do this again at ADE, with a couple of his acts and a couple of our acts joining forces. And we hope to keep doing this in the coming years—we get along super-well with Derrick.
One thing that I love about Derrick is that he’s very opinionated, and that he’s not afraid to express those opinions. Yeah, he’ll give you shit if he doesn’t agree with you! And he can take shit as well, which is great.
“The way Derrick mixes is so incredibly dynamic; he’s really working. It’s like he’s handcrafting a set.”
May and Atkins, and the electronic music in general that’s come out of Detroit, has obviously had a huge impact on what’s happened in Berlin—and I’m guessing it’s had an influence on everyone involved with Get Physical. That’s most definitely true—and not just of Berlin, of course. I think all music has been influenced by these guys. And they are still having an influence—look at a guy like Kevin Over, who’s a young kid who’s releasing on our label. He was playing for us just last Saturday, and started at eight in the morning—the normal Berlin time—and it was exactly like what they were doing 25 years ago, but with a 2015 approach to it. It was so good to see things translated into our time. It’s very refreshing; it means things aren’t standing still.
I know that you come, at least in part, from a trance background—and you’ve said before that you left that sound because it did get stale. Yeah, we all came from there in the early ’90s. That’s when trance was called trance because you’d trip to it. But there hasn’t been any evolution in trance for a long time, and I guess that’s why we all got sick of it. But guys like Derrick and Juan are always pushing it. I mean, the way Derrick mixes is so incredibly dynamic; he’s really working. It’s like he’s handcrafting a set.
You’re doing this party as part of ADE, which is one of the biggest gatherings on the dance-music calendar. How important do you think it is to have something like ADE, where pretty much whole scene spectrum—producers, DJs, industry types, various insiders, representing such a wide range of sounds—come together? Or do you look at it more as just a fun thing to do? I honestly think that ADE is the best one of all of this kind of thing. People actually get together to communicate with each other, and not necessarily just get fucked up all the time. From the business side, it’s great: You have this one place where everyone comes, and you don’t even have to set up meetings. Everyone you want to talk to is just there, and you can just chat with them. At similar events—like Miami, or MIDEM in the south of France—they’re just about the parties, and whose lineup is the biggest. It’s just too much; everyone is stressed out. ADE is a bit more calm. And the panels are really interesting and well-curated, you know?
You don’t quite have the longevity of Transmat yet—but still, Get Physical’s been around for almost a decade and a half, and M.A.ND.Y. has been around for even a bit longer. Did you have any clue back when you started not only that you’d still be going, but that you’d also be playing alongside your heroes? I probably should have thought about it! [laughs] But we never took ourselves serious enough to even think like that. I mean, you take what you do seriously, but you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously; that’s one of the foundations of a long career, I think. I’m always aware that we are very lucky. It’s not just the talent—it’s being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people, and a lot of that is luck. Of course, it’s also a lot of work—it’s an every-fucking-day job—so you have to be ready to do that. But to have the freedom to present our sound without changing too much over the years—to still do what we like—we’re super-fortunate. And very happy!
EP1 is the debut EP from Rote, the new pairing formed of BleeD boss Casper Clark (a.k.a. Volte-Face) and Bournemouth trip-merchant Daniel Avery. Over four tracks (two original, two remixed), the pair’s stripped-back techno cuts have an understated sophistication familiar to anyone who enjoyed Volte-Face’s quietly brilliant debut, the Charlatan EP, earlier this year.
“Rote 1” kicks us off with 4/4 bass drums draped in a crisp haze of white noise and mechanical ambience. The palette here is less “clanking, industrial death machine,” more “distant, malevolent vacuum cleaner,” and this concision of scale works beautifully to evoke hissing, echoed dread from small, subtle movements. The track is a steady suck-pulse of softly rolling machine noise, buffeted by shakers, percs, and eventually a single repeating note which folds into the mix like a low battery alert, forming a powerful crescendo that sets heads nodding early on.
DJ Nobu’s remix of the sametakes that blueprint and dehumanizes proceedings even further, accenting “Rote 1″’s extant sparseness with a flurry of chittering tones, adding a thin film of tension to the steady drip of field hospital bleeps already present in the original. This menacing counterpoint winds around the track’s structure with an uneasy grace, resulting in a welcome new layer of malevolent heft.
It’s the atmospheric “Rote 2,” however, that proves to be EP1’s showstopper. Here, steam locomotive percussion builds layer by layer, until plaintive, swelling pads cut through the filtery wash at the track’s midpoint. The lush chords escort the listener through a break in the industrial murk, soaring above the maelstrom for a tantalizing glimpse of euphoric sunrise, before tumbling beneath the clouds and back within the familiar storm of hissing, whirring hydraulics. This is resolutely a form-and-function techno record, with none of the pyrotechnics associated with Avery at his more hallucinatory—but in brief, stolen moments such as these, one hears the melodic sensibility common to Avery releases like his Drone Logic LP or Movement EP.
For the most part, however, EP 1 is avowedly unflashy techno and all the better for it, eschewing most things fanciful or complicated. Nowhere is this more evident than on Svreca’s uber-minimal “Rote 2” rework, an unfussy effort that actually feels like a near-perfect loop for most of its duration. Despite the minimal fuss or fanfare, repeated listens bear out each of these track’s hypnotic qualities until—with each additional airing—you notice how those subtleties become strengths, and how sparse little moments become major events. It’s certainly a brave gamble to name your act Rote and release a platter of cuts this straight-forward and classical in form, but the craft and confidence of EP 1 shows that simplicity needn’t mean painting by numbers.
Mike Parker’s next unique analog techno abstraction release will finally debut on Darko Esser’s Balans Records with his Transgression and Punishment EP.
Tracklisting:
A1 / 1. Transgression and Punishment A2 / 2. Smoke From Burning Fields B1 / 3. The Freezing Process B2 / 4. The Midnight Zone
In advance of the EP’s October 9 release, XLR8R spoke with Darko Esser to learn more, with “The Midnight Zone” available to stream in full below.
How did your relationship with Mike Parker begin, and how did this release come to fruition? I booked Mike for a couple of show in Amsterdam and Nijmegen a few years back. I’ve always been a big admirer of his music. We hung out all weekend and it clicked. I gave him a whole bunch of records and he really liked the sound of the label. We stayed in touch, talked about collaborating, and this release grew organically from there.
Can you describe your vision for the label? Would you say there is a particular kind of sound developing through it? Balans is aimed at pure, dancefloor orientated techno. It’s a puristic and fairly minimalistic platform, but pure techno appears in many forms in my mind. There’s a place for all of these different flavors on the label, whether it’s more melodic, Detroit-orientated techno, or straight up DJ tools.
You also own the labels Wolfskuil, Wolfskuil LTD, and Tripeo. What differentiates Balans from the others? Wolfskuil Records is much broader orientated then BALANS. I don’t think in genres for this label. My own taste is the red tape there; it doesn’t even necessarily have to be for the dancefloor. Wolfskuil Ltd is aimed at the deeper, more experimental sides of aforementioned genres. And finally: Tripeo is just for me; I don’t release music from other artists on this imprint. It’s my own little playground.
What do you feel when you listen to a new Mike Parker’s track? Like being sucked into a black hole. His music sounds so alienating, yet so comforting.
Following a period of personal growth and his work on his own Zooloft Records imprint, Giorgio Gigli is scheduled to release his debut album, entitled The Right Place Where Not to Be.
The album, which is scheduled for release via Speedy J‘s Electric Deluxe label, explores sophisticated ambient layers as much as obsessive and hypnotic techno landscapes.
The album takes its outset in a scenario where all human life-forms have perished, and only plants and minerals have survived. Gigli performs that concept by writing an ultra-detailed soundtrack to an imaginary movie, using rich textures that reveal new acoustics, enhanced by alienating atmospheres that captivate the listener.
Tracklisting:
Ø1 / Ø. Il futuro è solo un ricordo di uno stupendo passato (Everything Begins Here) A1 / 1. Last Frame of Myself A2 / 2. Surrounded B1 / 3. Eve of Destruction B2 / 4. Nocturne C1 / 5. The Silence Was Infinite C2 / 6. Through Leaden Clouds D1 / 7. Shades of Depth
Ahead of the album’s October 23 release, XLR8R spoke with Giorgio Gigli to learn more about the release, with the opening track streamable in full below.
What inspired you to record your first album, and what’s the connection between the record’s title and the music itself? It took me more than two years to get to the end of it. It has been a long process because I really wanted to give a real identity to this project. The title The Right Place Where Not to Be gives the idea that we are in a place where it would be much better not to be. In this particular case, I am talking about our planet at an unspecified future time, where humans have taken the planet to the point its collapse by taking advantage of it and its resources. The music wants to be the soundtrack of the Earth, with no human beings involved, where the only things to survive are the animals and minerals.
The album is your third release on Electric Deluxe. Compared with these other releases, it is much more introverted sound. Is there a connection with your previous releases on the label? There’s no greater connection between my previous releases on EDLX really. My previous singles from the past years represent my kind of sound with a techno approach. The Right Place Where Not to Be is more of a soundtrack—a listening record. It’s much more introspective.
How did your connection with Speedy J begin? It was actually really spontaneous. A few years ago we’d been emailing each other. I sent him some projects and, after he listened to them, he asked me if I would like to do something on the label. The most important thing to me is that we started a very good friendship.
Together with Obtane, you co-founded the Zooloft imprint that released its most recent release back in 2012. Why did you decide to discontinue the label? I worked together with Obtane for five years and we did have great satisfaction with that label. At one point, we just felt that we had said all what we had to say and therefore we decided to take our different ways. Now he’s producing as Violet Poison. After many years we decided to collaborate in the studio again and soon a new record titled The Long Decline will be out on his label.
Based in the Austrian city of Graz, Dizzy Womack has continued to impress us here at XLR8R with his ever growing catalog of productions. With his last EP titled “Riot Music” really piquing our interest, we were more than keen to feature him again in our downloads section. Over the past few years, Dizzy has become no stranger to the website, with his track “Flares” receiving over 9,700 listens back in February of this year. We also featured a remix by Raziek of Dizzy’s original production, Black Ice, back in 2013. To round out the fall season of this year, Dizzy has submitted a straighforward and driving cut by the name of “Bang” for your consideration.
“Bang” comes out the gate with a pounding bassline and 16x high-hat that hold on throughout the track. With vocal samples layered over the top, the track leans towards a ghetto-tech 4/4 program that is reminicent of the early styles of Loco Dice or James Zabiela.
