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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Actress at Plastic People

Wow, went to catch Actress live at Plastic People last night. it was so good, literally best live gig i've saw in ages. By the time he came on at 2am, i was kinda fading, after having been DJing in the Foundry since 7pm, and i was still carrying my laptop, but i forgot about everything when he started playing.

All the lights were out, he was shrouded under his hood, a freshly lit spliff smouldering away in the darkness hanging from his mouth, rocking back and forth on his feet. Sonically it was way more detroit and dancefloor than i was expecting, yet in some broken configuration, disjointed loops, sounds out of place, constantly shifting and mutating. Listening back to 'Hazyville' now, i can hear all that detail in there, but somehow it had seemed more mellow when i had only heard it in my headphones or on my room speakers. Absolutely top album of the year.

Friday, December 12, 2008

2008 Top Tens

I've dithered over these for the past few weeks, but i think my final selections for top 10 singles and albums for 2008 would be..

SINGLES::::
Ikonika - Please / Simulacrum
Mayer Hawthorne and The County - Just Ain't Gonna Work Out
Rick Ross - The Boss
Gemmy - BK 2 The Future
Zomby - Liquid Dancehall / Strange Fruit
Joker/Rustie - Play Doe / Tempered
Mike Slott - 2x7 Beat Series (All City)
Keri Hilson Ft. Lil Wayne - Turn Off
Paleface Feat Kyla - Do You Mind ( Crazy Cousins Remix )
Fulgeance - Low Club E.P.

ALBUMS::::
Madlib - Beat Konducta Vol. 5: Dil Cosby Suite
Actress - Hazyville
Lucky Dragons - Dream Island Laughing Language
The Caretaker - Persistent Repetition of Phrases
Lil Wayne - The Leak V
Zomby - Where were you in '92?
Dalglish - Ideom
Shed - Shedding The Past
Byetone - Death of a Typographer
SND - 4,5,6

nearly made it:
Starkey - Ephemeral Exhibits
I didn't think it was a strong album but almost worth it just because of 'Miracles' and 'Dark Alley'

agree/disagree? what are your picks? post your own in the comment section..

Thursday, December 11, 2008

first Hot City review in..

From Boomkat:

"The eccentrically eclectic Highpoint Lowlife imprint fires off their finest release in ages on the debut 12" from massively tipped producer, Hot City with two shockingly fresh house mutations backed with a mangled Eats Tapes remix. Hot City is involved with the eager Wifey crew based in Hackney, London, looking to bring the shiny sound of Bassline house and other forms of rethunked gutter housisms to those in the know, and on 'Yeah' he manages to wrap up some 15 years of developments from rave to UKG to with a solid base of tough Chicago box beats with no intention other than to jack your body proper. The old skool pianos could be Carl Cox circa 1993, while the beats are like a laminated DJ Sneak production and the attitude is just Hot City. The 'TVO Has the Anti-Life Equation Mix' oddly runs with a mutant hardcore vibe given the 2008 treatment, but we've been bowled over by 'Head Work', a wiry mesh of itchily swung Todd Edwards funk with Akufen levels of production bashed into something deceptively raw and effective. Eats Tapes finish the pack with a psychodelic analogue revision of 'Head Work' losing the floor bomb effect for a locked in head groove for the craftier DJs. This is pure house goodness and should be compatible with any of your related sub genres, get spinning! Tip!"

Labels: new releases, reviews

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"A Garrison of Two" web EP now up for download

I've uploaded the four tracks me and Gerry recorded in Cushendall as a web EP - grab it here.

I don't promise greatness, but for those interested, have a listen!

Labels: curfew tower, cushendall, downloads

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

returnd

wow, what an experience! it was pretty surreal living in a medieval style tower/dungeon for a week! the place is quite bizarre, a mixture of gallery, live and work space, with tons of art left around and on the walls from previous occupants, plus one almighty tome of a book, a journal of everyone who has stayed there, which made for some amazing reading.

Gerry has started posting up a bunch of pics on his flickr pages, and we shot loads of video which i still plan to edit down to a small 20 or 30 min documentary.

Workwise, we succeeded in producing a small ep, three tracks composed entirely of field recordings and sounds recorded in and around the tower and town, plus one completely non-related acid jam!

The doc will go into more detail about the shifting plan from the originally set out lofty aspirations through several permutations, before settling quite happily on an organic inbetween, wafts of voices and nature, several recording mistakes left in for good measure, and strange rhythms from noise. They're not amazing by any means, but they were fun to do and we were quite happy to have finished something. I'll post em up as a download so you can hear the results anyway.

i'll write up some more details later, but check out gerrys pics in the meantime!

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Cushendall!

Aiight! If you've been reading this blog before, you would have read that my friend and I got accepted for a week long residency at The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, NOrthern Ireland. It's a fortified building built in the early years of the nineteenth century. It has five floors, one room on each floor. From the ground up: dungeon, bathroom, living room, bedroom, bedroom.

So that was all good and exciting being accepted, but all we actually had for a plan was a rather vague idea: I had written on the application form that "we would do a psychogeography themed sound piece" but what exactly is that? what are we gonna do?

Over the past year i've been reading quite a bit about pyschogeoraphy, from Peter Ackroyd's "London: The Biography" and "Hawksmoor", Iain Sinclair's anthology "London: City of Disappearances" (which incidentally includes a piece by Bill Drummond), Defoe's Journal of The Plague Year", Stevenson's "Jeckyll and Hyde"; The more i read of it, the more I've come to the conclusion that it's just a fashionable term for interest in the history and geography of a place with a dose of mysticism thrown in, which is certainly no bad thing. My first thoughts were as simple as taking out a audio recording device and getting lots of field recordings from in and around the Tower, then editing them into some kind of sound piece. Actually, i had a couple of ideas of the bat:

With the common history Gerry and i share, i immediately assumed we would aim for some kind of ambient dubbed out techno framework for the music; For some reason that seemed the most appropriate sound, incorporating our years of clubbing and electronic music influence, and in some sense emulating the ambience of the 'Chillout' album, while allowing plenty of room for experimenting. Another fashionable term seems be Hauntology which from a musical perspective seems to also an overblown, but in this case might actually be a reasonable theme too. From wikipedia:

"Hauntology is an idea within the philosophy of history introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 work Spectres of Marx. The word, a portmanteau of haunt and ology, and a homophone to ontology in Derrida's native French, deals with "the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor non-being", according to a professor at RMIT University. The idea suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history will begin to orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are thought of as rustic, bizarre or "old-timey"; that is, towards the "ghost" of the past. (The name and concept fundamentally come from Marx's assertion that a "spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.")

As a musical genre Hauntology is (again from wikipedia):

"Hauntology is a type of music, influenced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the vague sense of cold war dread present in public information films from the 1980s, along with an acknowledged debt in both sound and sleeve design from library music. The concept of what people in previous decades imagined the future would be like is a key element of the hauntology sound".

I should point out here that both my friend and I, while having dabbled in music making for many years are not very accomplished, with no real history of finishing or releasing anything, so as much as i hope we come up with an interesting end sound piece, there is also a good chance it won't be terribly interesting to anyone else except our own egos and a couple of friends who we can subject to it! I thought of a secondary and complimentary approach to the project in that we would endeavor to document as much of the project as possible, through photographs, video recording, and in a nod to the 'Bad Wisdom' book, we should also keep individual diaries which we can then combine after the week is up. The documentation should be interesting enough in its own right, almost negating whether the album ends up to have much musical merit, which has another nice effect of relieving the pressure of ensuring the album has to be "great". The idea being that we should at least have a good documentary about the process whether it ends up good or bad.

We don't want to go over there with a whole plan completely laid out as that would seem to go against the idea of soaking up the spirit of the location, and taking inspiration from Tower and our experiences, so in one sense we don't want to be too restricted in our scope, however its still nice to have some kind of guide or framework to work around. I started thinking on what psychogeography means, and how a location can have histories linked to it, ghosts almost which permeate the place and its current goings on, and while pyschogeography tends to be location focussed, it's always a subjective viewpoint, and therefore necessarily it always come back to the people and individuals who give us these stories and imbue places with their spirit.

Towers in themselves have a lot of symbolism and many connotations. The Tower Of Babel, was the crowning achievement of the city of Babylon. From the biblical account it was a city that united humanity, all speaking a single language. The people decided their city should have a tower so immense that it would have "its top in the heavens.", a Tower which was not built for the worship and praise of God, but was dedicated to the glory of man, with a motive of making a 'name' for the builders. (of course God didn't like that and smited the fuckers, giving us the fragmented languages we have today!)

Taking that as a starting point, a tower being a tribute to men, not gods, and reading through the history of the Curfew Tower there are a few people who stand out and have interesting stories. From speaking with Gerry, we agreed that aiming for around four pieces of finished music was a good number, giving us an attainable goal. I started thinking about four people who could tell the story of how we came to be at the tower, and settled on:

1. Francis Turnley, an eccentric english Nabob, who made his fortune in China while working for the East India Company and upon his return, he bought two estates, one of which included the village of Cushendall. It was he who built the Curfew Tower, and it was apparently 'the great object of his thoughts', erected as a place of confinement for idlers and rioters'. He did a lot of work on the village as well, changing the shape of the river to make the town more romantic, and built many of the notable buildings. Possible themes/ideas: samples of old chinese records, faintly in the background, a sense of opening and a new start, radical shifts to construct the new town.

2. Turnley left instruction that the tower was to be guarded night and day by a 'permanent garrison of one man' - this was initially an army pensioner named Dan McBride, and so i figure the second track should be in honour of this Hibernian ornamental hermit. Possible themes/ideas: solitary, paranoid, retired musings, daydreams, aggressiveness, guarded, tight.

3. Bill Drummond obviously is the great inspiration and enabler of this adventure, so it seems fitting that he should have a place in this story. One thing i didn't previously mention about 'Chill Out' is that it was based on an imaginary cross county drive across America, where at that time, i don't believe either Bill Drummond of Jimmy Cauty had travelled to. I think we could perhaps take that idea of imaginary journey and utilize for our own project. possible themes/ideas: Scottish history, mystery, acid house, 1988, youthful idealism,

4. Lastly, well, it all culminates in our being there, so i think in someway one of the songs should actually be based around us actually being in the Tower. possible ideas/themes: samples of the car we drove, maybe samples from the ferry journey, vocal samples of us chatting randomly, and i guess we'll be working on this one towards the end of the week, when we've already spent some time there, so we can develop ideas for this in response to our goings on, possibly recordings of locals we meet over the time.

So yeah! thats the plan - let's see what comes of it!

Monday, November 24, 2008

'views

hmm, been a few weeks since i posted a few music reviews up here, and theres been loads of good stuff out too!

Actress - Hazyville [Werk Discs]
I really like this album, it feels like its been made in a vacuum, eschewing all forms of fashion in electronic music at the moment, with some super strange rhythms and sound sources creating some weird hybrid techno-ish liquid forms. The album has a super nice flow to it, starting out quite abstract and skittery, gradually coalescing into a more rhythmic and percussive middle section, and building into quite the schizophrenic acid-tinged climax with the last couple of songs. highly recommended.

Starkey - Ephemeral Exhibits [Planet Mu]
I haven't been in full agreement with a lot of the hype i've seen around Starkey, I've been more of the opinion thats his material has been pretty good, but not groundbreaking; yet for all that, i was quite eagerly awaiting the release of this album, and i don't feel disappointed - i think its a much more successful combination of hip hop and dubstep than other similarly directioned releases. Some real outstanding tracks on here like 'Dark Alley' taking a dubstep wobble and tweaking the hell out of it, with a big hyphy style vocal over the top.

Mayer Hawthorne and The County [Stone's Throw]
Super retro sounding Motown style soul 7" pressed on pink loveheart shaped vinyl. I ordered this over a week and still eagerly awaiting my vinyl copy, but check out the sweet video of it spinning at: http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2008/11/introducing-mayer-hawthorne-and-the-county

Kode 9 vs LD - Bad EP [Hyperdub]
Quarta 330 - Homeless [Hyperdub]
Two excellent new releases on Hyperdub - the Kode 9 vs. LD tracks are nice and original, taking a middle ground between funky and dubstep, less sparse and more rhythmic than dubstep, with a nice dancefloor shuffle to them and rolling bass. The A side of the Quarta 330 release has a nice unique sound to it, super sharp rhythms, muffled bass and atari 2600 melodies, although the B side, an 8-bit remix of Cardopusher's Homeless seems a little pointless, and in fact reminds me too much of this crap 8-bit remix of Slayer

Slugabed - Superphreak [Stuff Records]
Two amazingly fun tracks of crunked up midrange heavy hip hop, that can only comes from Glasgow's Stuff records. Watch out for this release as i'm sure its totally gonna blow up!

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

a quick nudge

hey! hectic round here at the moment! Busy working on the upcoming Hot City 12" which is a belter! Two tracks - "Yeah!" and "Head Work" plus two remixes from The Village Orchestra (under his more dancefloor TVO guise) and one from Eats Tapes. Got the mastered versions back from Twerk on monday morning and its now off to the pressing plant, and should hopefully be back for beginning of December!

More details coming soon too, but we have the lush Cafe Oto booked for December 16th for the annual HPLL xmas party too, which will have Hot City playing live, and also Love's Tru Flavour, our friend Ralph, who, along with his friend Robin, does the Wifey nights here in London - should be fun!

Heres the flyer for it, me totally ripping off old Vision Skates Mark Gonzales artwork! (well copying it, its not directly using the graphic):

Monday, November 3, 2008

catch the pigeon!

I know most of you won't know Mat/Fisk Industries/Kwaidan personally, but i still find a vicarious fun through following peoples adventures even if i don't know them. Mat has set up a travel blog to follow his adventures on his round the world derive, and now that he's out of China, he's started posting to it. Follow him here.

Go on and freak him out by posting random comments on his posts!

Labels: adventures, blogs, fisk industries, kwaidan, mat

O.S.T. - Synken outtakes

ah, the excellent netlabel adozen.org have just release a new collection of tracks from Chris Douglas/O.S.T./Dalglish.

heres the blurb:

adozen.org :: netaudio is really proud to announce the online release of 24 tracks of beautiful electronic intensity by the legendary chris
douglas as o.s.t.. he already produced two tracks in 2004 and 2005 for the netlabel, but this time he offers 54 minutes sharp of his trademark haunting music -like auditory savourings of the multimedia atmospheres developed in synken.

these outtakes are a small selection of the over 600 songs/pieces composed for the project synken, a collective creative experience by transforma (video) and o.s.t. (music). most of the tracks here are played on instruments (piano, organ, melodian, melodica, harmonica, vibraphone, guitars, zitars) then processed with either analog or
digital effects.

after starting anew last year with the synken project, including the dvd production and touring through europe, chris douglas makes a shift in his production in 2008. two brand new albums are already available: waetka (as o.s.t.) on ideal recordings from sweden and ideom (as daglish, his more "protorhythmic" guise) on record labels records. and there is more to come -chris douglas is back!

best,
marc

------------

visit their website here
extended notes and links here
------------
direct downloads:
flac - lossless - 236 mo
mp3 - 256 kbps - 97 mo

Sunday, November 2, 2008

a winter warmer mix for ye

the weather was so shitty yesterday, i just stayed in all day and cook up a wee dj mix with some thick swampy warm beats ffor the cold winter nights:

Thorsten Sideb0ard's Meat and Potatoes mix

Tracklisting:
Lokid - Ocean Beat
Mike Slott - Knock Knock
AFTA-1 - Honey Dip
Madlib - Rebirth Cycle (Super Soul)
Fulgeance - Revenge Of The Nerd
Gouseion - Caps13
Ragga Twins - 18' Speaker
King Midas Sound - Lost (Flying Lotus Remix)
Frank N Dank - Clap Hands (Morgan Space Instrumental mix)
Baby Huey - Pop, Lock and Drop It (remix)
Gemmy - BK 2 The Future
Tom Trago - M*TH*RF*CK*R
Slugabed - motherfuckeeeeeeeer
Dev79 - From the Get
DJ Maxximus - Rms
Atom Heart feat Teamtime - Muñeca Rica
Oliffey Family - Rock the Spot (Hudson Mohawke Remix)
Ikonika - Millie
Gravious - Double Think
Funckarma - Metalliz 230208
Gemmy - Final Boss Theme
Headhunter - Physics Impulse

Its mostly all mixed tempo, so its not very beat matched, mostly all clean segues, but none the less, its a nice wee playlist..

Labels: chunky, dj, downloads, mixes, mixtapes, winter

Thursday, October 30, 2008

sneakies

hey!

If you head over to the FACT magazine site, you can download an exclusive Drop The Lime mix he did for them. The first track he is playing is actually going to be the next Highpoint Lowlife 12", by Hot City, otherwise known as Moustachioed Rupert, the lad i was just out in Poland with. The vocals you hear in the mix are Drop the Lime singing over it, they're not on the actual 12". It'll be a four track 12 - 2 original Hot City tracks full of old school stabs, chopped vocals and garagey 2step beats, plus two excellent remixes - more news on it soon!
You can hear two other Hot City tracks over at his page on Lastfm.

I've been listening to lots of new Funckarma this morning - Don sent me over preview files for their upcoming album on n5MD - and fuck, it sounds excellent! I also got to hear some potential tracks for their Dubstoned EP3 which is currently being worked on too. all good shiz!

Quite a few other new things in my mp3 library too -

I picked up the first 5 of the 7x7 Beat Series on All City Records a couple of weeks ago from emusic. The whole series is pretty good, with the standout being Mike Slott's which is just so bumping - chopped off soul vocals over a tumbling totally off-kilter beat. At the same time i picked up the couple of Heralds Of Change EPs they had, and was well impressed with them too, considering i've never gotten quite into Hudson Mohawk in the same way. (Although i enjoyed the HudMo refit of Tweet, when i've heard him DJ there seemed to be too many weak 80's songs in his set.)

Well - number 6 in the Beat Series was just released this week (digitally anyway), and is by Hudson Mohawk, and although i wasn't blown away on first listen, the more i hear it, the more i'm sucked in. Its not straight ahead beat science hip hop, in fact pretty experimental and strange, and all the better for it. 'Star Crackout', the first track is a weird crackling beatless monster with strings and diced vocal snippets, sounding a lot like DJ Shadow's "What does your soul look like (part 2)", different enought, but pretty infectious. Track two, 'Root Hands' is an ambient techno groove, slow 110bpm straight kick with a lot higher end weirdness going on, and finishing with 'Everybody Else Is Wrong' which is most hip hop of the lot, but even it is pretty damn tweaky, in a very good way! Aiight, i'm now officially a Hudson Mohawk fan!
You can grab the new Hudson Mo EP at Boomkat along with the rest of the All City catalogue. I also highly recommend the new Mike Slott on there too.

Labels: dj, downloads, mix, new releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

return from Unsound

jings crivens, what a weekend! Starting from the Netaudio festival on thursday which was tremendous, it was an early hungover rise on friday to meet my friend Rupert and head out to Luton airport for our flight to Krakow.

We were picked up at the airport and whisked straight to a bar/club called Pauza where we were to DJ for the next two days. Pauza is really just a nice little bar, and was the unofficial base for the festival organisers over the weeks length of the festival. People were super friendly and helpful, and within minutes of us arriving, we were set up on the turntables with two big cold Zywiec in hand.

We left for dinner about 8pm, and then to see Pan American play in St Katherine's Church, a lush big venue with lovely acoustics, however due to the very quiet nature of the performance and the effects of several beers, we were all feeling a little too sleepy and decided to head out to find the club for the evenings performances, a strange gallery space called Manggha, which we were told was specifically to feature the works of Polish artists inspired by Japanese art!
The first two acts on were pretty decent and got the place jumping as it filled up, but it was really Bruno Pronsatos' set that everyone on the dancefloor going for it, and then finishing with the swiss duo Galoppierende Zuversicht, who were also excellent.

Saturday morning was breakfast and some sight seeing before back in Pauza again. We started off with a much more chilled set as it was early afternoon, playing lots of drone, ambience and dub before feeling like we were being too mellow for a saturday, no matter what time it was. As me and Rupert got more drunk, we started playing around with the effects unit on the Pioneer mixer, and stopped ourselves before we went too far, laughing at how drunken DJs can be known to get too carried away with the effects. We got curtailed slightly short, as there was some problems with the DJ setup at the venue for the main saturday evening club, and the equipment we were using had to be taken over there. Saturday was the big night we were looking forward to - Fuck-buttons, Xiu Xiu, Boxcutter, Benga and Skream, and Pinch.

Fuck-buttons played pretty decenty, and Xiu Xiu were strangely entertaining. We missed all of Boxcutter as we managed to go backstage with a friend for some nice smoke and a needed seat and rest.

Benga and Skream had decided to do a back 2 back DJ set, and we all went out for the start of their set. They were pretty entertaining, with lots of posturing and shoutouts - pretty much just two drunken lads DJs all the big tunes, slugging back on bottles of vodka, and bringing out groupie ladies on stage to parade. It started off well, and i was enjoying their stage show, but as they kept going, the three bottles of vodka they had gotten through seemed to be doing a bit of damage and guess what.. yup! Drunken DJ discovers the Effects unit on the Pioneer Mixer, which was of course, the one we had been laughing about earlier! classic!

all in all, a magic weekend, well impressed by how beautiful Krakow was, and how well run the festival was. I would heartily recommend both a visit to the city and/or next years Unsound festival!

Labels: benga, dj, gig, holiday, krakow, skream

Friday, October 24, 2008

Gemmy

i've not had much time for posting here recently, just between the dayjob and normal label stuff, but one quick mention - i've been so into one track these past few days, its been on almost constant repeat...

Gemmy - BK 2 The Future

I first heard it on the Joker set that was played out on Mary Anne Hobbs a few weeks back, but i think it was only recently released in the past few weeks.
Check him out at http://www.myspace.com/djgemmy and you can buy the tracks at digital-tunes

get it!!

aiight, more next week - i'm off to Poland for Unsound!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Mandelbrot masters

yar! just a quick update to say i received test masters of the new Mandelbrot album from Tigrics today. They're sounding good! Once Keung has had a chance to listen to them over and see if there are any changes needed, project should be underway.

Labels: mandelbrot, masters, new releases