Everybody be sure to have their gag-balls at the ready this coming Saturday night, as matters are bound to take a turn way, way dark at St. Vitus in Brooklyn. Trouble and Bass OG, and friend to Мишка, Star Eyes will be DJing a set for the masses at some point throughout the course of the evening, which should prove every bit as riveting as the mixes she’s made for us in the past. If you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing the OV Curse mixtape she compiled in conjunction with Dust La Rock a little while back, I suggest you do so now. As if you’re in need of any more incentive to listen, it also happens to contain the best Grauzone tune having to do with Polar Bears…
Luncay is a strictly dark engagement with the DJs spinning Goth, EBM, Industrial, Death Rock and just really anything that make you feel miserable and dance all at once. For a taste of what to expect download Ov Curse above or Star Eyes older 7H3 H4x0R M1X. The evening will also feature sets by the plainly named DJ’s Omar and Albert, and promises the appearance of special guests. While I currently have no knowledge pertaining to the identity of these special guests, I’m assuming they’ll give you the urge to get out on the floor, and tear shit up just like Star Eyes herself. Plus, it only costs a mere 5 bucks to get into this shindig, so you really have no choice but to show up… So lace up those dancin’ shoes, and prepare for an evening that should, in my estimation, live up to its name in every respect.
Saturday June 23rd, 12-4am Saint Vitus
1120 Manhattan Ave
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
21+ | $5 Cover
So this is going viral as we speak but it is just too good to not post. Best Worst thing i’ve seen in awhile. Music Video version of the Room? Possibly. Some teen pop wannabe named Rebecca Black and her song called “Friday”. The song is great by itself but with the video it really reaches awhole new level.
Now for the bonus. I made a instrumental so you guys can make your own REMIXES. That’s right, let’s see what you got. My roommates and I have even started it all off for you. Instrumental and ACE OF BASS REMIX below.
It seems the ever-elusive white whale of the rap world has been spotted on the horizon yet again. Is it just me, or is this like the third or fourth “first single” for Dr. Dre‘s Detox that I’ve heard in as many years? It’s hard to keep getting pumped up for this CD, after all it has been slated for release for the better part of ten years. Maybe it’s just because I’m from southern California originally, but I just can’t help but believe Dre has one more great album in him. Unfortunately his recent antics haven’t done much to encourage me. Between becoming a headphones mogul and taking so many steroids that his head looks all weird and swollen like Brad Pitt in Troy, it’s been difficult to pick out the Dre of my youth.
Luckily “Kush” is much better than the last supposed single, the stunningly bad synth jam “Under Pressure” that featured probably the laziest Jay-Z verse ever. This one’s got classic Dre cronie Snoop Dogg and a back from the dead Akon (seriously, where the fuck has that dude been at?). It’s a weed song, ‘natch, and has those thunderously slow boom-baps and plinking pianos that the Dr. does so damn well. He even comes out of the box with a rock solid verse. Dude sounds hungrier than he has in a while. Color me (cautiously) excited.
Northern Norway, the Arctic Circle, where seasons are marked by Midnight Sun and Polar Night, where Northern Lights kaleidoscope across the sky as a matter of course; that, right there, is where you’ll find Tromso. Norwegian techno doesn’t exist only here—Bergen, Oslo, so many places brim with beat—but this glacier of a city gives it different, more atmospheric breath. Warmth nuzzled inside the chill. Anneli Drecker started here, Mental Overdrive, Royksopp. Erlend Oye’s from Bergen, but you’ll hear some Tromso in his production; the big sky of it, the space.
But Tromso’s biggest and most continual claim to fame is the Insomnia Festival: this behemoth of a Euro techno get-together piling into the city every October for a week-plus. So in honor of this year’s fest (that I desperately wish I were attending someonebuymeaplaneticketplease) and Royksopp’s latest release (which is a real Tromso homage), let’s take Beats Way Sick on a shivery and totally not definitive stroll through the city’s techno lineage.
From the just-released Senior. Maybe not Tromso proper, but it spins with that characteristic tone: heavenly space and minor chords shifting, shifting, to find their major.
Originally a quartet featuring both members of Royksopp, this jam comes from 1999’s Cargo Cult: the album Gaute Barlindhaug (a.k.a. Kolar Goi) recorded solo under the same name.
From 2004‘s 083. Arguably one of the most influential Tromso artists—especially on Norwegian techno as a whole—Per Martinsen dodges back and forth between this sort of floaty ambiance and over-the-top floor stompers. Both are pretty flawless.
Per Martinsen’s collab project with Aggie Peterson. The more sassy and pop-laden of the Tromso bunch, this one’s from 2007’s Love! Revolution–though their debut Bedsit Theories (when Aggie was paired up with DJ Rune Lindbaek and Per was only an occasional collaborator) is totally worth hunting down.
Solo work from Geir Jennsen, of Tromso’s 90s ethereal Bel Canto (also featuring Anneli Drecker, a frequent Royksopp collaborator). From the 1994 release of the same name, “Patashnik” hints at the purely ambient material Biosphere would eventually create, most notably the epic Substrata on Brian Eno’s All Saints label.
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Drum Island – La Danse Electrique
Trio featuring Royksopp’s Torbjorn Brundtland, early Frost’s Rune Lindbaek and frequent contributions from Aedena Cycle’s Gaute Barlindhaug. 1997’s Drum Island is their only release, but it’s among the most dynamic and addictive tech-chill albums you’ll hear.
From 2001’s Trobbel, released on Bergen powerhouse Telle Records. Born in Tromso but relocated to Bergen, Torske rides the line between the two cities’ relatively distinctive scenes. Still, you hear a lot of Torske in Norway’s Tromso-influenced upcomers—check out Boska. You’ll see.
Won’t lie: This month’s column was, initially, doomed to be phoned in. Jams just weren’t hitting me. All these arguably important releases flew lazily round my head, and what did I do? Spin 90s rave and commercial house. Exclusively. And let me tell you, once you’ve spent 30 days holed up with Technotronic and loads of jungle, it becomes markedly more difficult to get stoked about Conrad Schnitzler on the new m=minimal. I mean, you get stoked, it’s seriously good. I just wasn’t in that place.
But then a fire-shock of lightning. Tell me: how do these things happen? I stumble onto Redlight—way later, months later, than I should have—and here we are. This Bristol producer, formerly known as Clipz, is working with some of the raddest girls around, dropping grime and dubstep and jungle and 90s rhythms whatever other mish-mash in the most neon-sick and irresistible way.
I can’t remember the last time I was so unequivocally excited about a bunch of songs; they defy description. Words just sully them. Check it.
Things that sound like bad drugs, dirty hallucinogens: welcome to my summer. It’s been a season of sonic nightmares, beats that hypnotize and swarm, jams conjuring sex and psychosis and so much lava-blood pouring down the walls—and listen, I’m barely even referencing Witch House here.
Some seriously intense sound designers have been working in the creepshow realm too, combining minimal and horror, ambient with gore, and the whole thing comes off subtle and dangerous, like quiet satanism. Acid without the acid, you know, or with the acid if you need authenticity. But some of these jams are so circular and maddening, I’m not sure you will.
Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld collaborates with sound manipulator Carsten Nicolai (a.k.a. Alva Noto) on a project that feels destined for a padded room. The rest of the Ret Marut Handshake EP isn’t quite this insane—skip the cover of “One” altogether—but it’s worth it for the screaming, bent-saw backing vocals alone.
Tibetan spiritualism. Forest covens. Ouija boards. Demdike Stare combines all manner of creepy touch-points into albums that sprawl and come at you, like hell bubbling up from beneath the earth. This one’s from Forest of Evil, the first album in their 2010 trilogy; second installment Liberation Through Hearing drops next week, and it’s even more intense.
Fairmont’s a subtle one. This B-side to the All Dreams Are Nightmares single pulses with this restrained, trance-inducing texture—sort of schizophrenic in all its weird background warbling—but it takes awhile to get at you. Listen to it in a dark room, alone, on repeat.
Everything hollow and echoing, snares like crunching bones; Caulfield hasn’t been this simple in years, and “Hush”—from Dumb Unit’s 10 Year Tango compilation EP—is a thousand times better for it. Such a dark, sexy murder of a song.
Ambient composer Frost creates a languorous, terrifying track (from recent pseudo-masterpiece By The Throat) that sometimes feels like a lost interlude from The Fragile—except even more gorgeous, expansive and nightmarish. Sorry, Trent.
It started with Tricky and ended with Efdemin, and all I can tell you is there’s a real six degrees of separation thing going on here. Pre-Millenium Tension is so much inspiration and punchline; the sad joke of my high-school years (back then, nothing felt more subversive than jamming “Christiansands” on the way to our small-town prom); the Bristol-heavy, Londoner sleaze so particular to the 90s; the thing I never imagined would hold up, but hold up—have you heard “Bad Dreams” lately? ‘Cause man, that shit hits.
But it’s not just those toms that do it, or that death-rattle of a bass. There’s something to Tricky’s atmosphere—early Tricky at least, before he reportedly disavowed his only good records on grounds of insanity—that makes the heaviest elements even heavier, and it inspired in me a nightmare ride through piles of understated electro. Stuff that doesn’t worship at the altar of pure beat, you know, even though Pre-Millenium Tension is inarguably beat obsessed. While some of this month’s jams love a kick (oh hello, Jahcoozi), they’re equally reliant on the little things: that one breath in a vocal track, the space blips, lounge samples, dream loops, et al, that turn a track from run-of-the-mill Tiesto thump (ew) to pure effing brilliance.
Hands down the best jam on Pre-Millenium Tension, and second only to “Black Steel” as sexiest Martina Topley-Bird vocals ever. Too bad she’s gone so sugary now; Tricky-era Martina was like the saving grace of my high-school experience.
But at least Jahcoozi’s Sasha Perera is picking up the slack. The Berlin-based trio’s latest, Barefoot Wanderer, is full of rad electro-dub and dancehall, but Sasha’s back and forth with Guillermo E. Brown—plus that rad reverb explosion at the finish—pretty much makes the album. So good.
Speaking of explosions: London’s Elite Barbarian are in, like, a cage match with Oneohtrix Point Never for most creepily robotic space-station trauma. I mean, I’m sure they like each other just fine, but put the duo’s It’s Only When You Get To The End That It All Make Sense in a ring with Oneohtrix’s Zones Without People and there’s no way either is coming out injury free.
Trentemøller, on the other hand, seems to be downplaying any and all robotic qualities for something decidedly hushed and organic. New album The Great Wide Yonder is anything but his typical downtempo, but the Danish producer’s still a total genius; “Sycamore Feeling” wafts with reversed vocals and lazy, hollow guitars that (accidentally) school the fuck out of the XX’s “Infinity”. Whoops.
The Field. Apparat. Even Trentemoller remixes—this London duo comprised of Allez Allez’s Sam Willis and Banjo Or Freakout’s Alessio Natalizia is paying homage to the best of the best. Even their name bows its head, however unintentionally; Walls is the title of Apparat’s amazing first solo record, and this self-titled debut takes a cue. Dreamy, lush electro post-punk with a penchant for bells and airy vocal loops. Get ready to see this self-titled debut on gazillions of 2010 best-of lists.
Standout jam from the beloved German producer’s much-anticipated second album, Chicago. I’m not sure Efdemin could ever go wrong, but this track’s maniacal focus on the perfect lounge snippet and slight, subtle beat is beyond right: the most amazing weirdo, deep-summer space lounge.
White noise. Too much. I’m sure you understand; sometimes electronic music gets to be overwhelming. The singles, remixes, edits, re-edits, collabs, DJ sets and full artist albums pummeling you at lightning speed; we live to keep pace, but somehow, in all the flurry, forget from where the whole mess spawned. That once upon a time, genres were merely one unhyphenated word, sans sub-genre and sub-sub-genre. That it was all just…experimental. Or incidental. Or, simply, electronic.
Mother of the Dr. Who theme song. Member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Total tech-wizard revolutionary. Seriously, what else is there to say: electro wouldn’t be electro without Delia Derbyshire. This girl is my hero.
Unearthed by Mark Ayres after Delia’s death, this snippet went unheard for so long, no one’s totally sure when it was made—or whether Delia’s truly the creator. Though it’s clearly her voice asking us to “forget about this, for interest only”, some speculate that the track might actually be the work of collaborator Daphne Oram. Either way: this shit was made near the mid-60s, and it sounds like something XLR8R would flip over tomorrow.
Bandleader, commercial writer, inventor…and unwitting electro pioneer. Raymond Scott not only broadened the voice of musique concrete (and subsequently disco, house and techno), he also built the sequencers necessary to create the compositions. He may not be as revered as, say, Robert Moog, but his work was certainly as crucial; without Scott, we’d have never had the Electronium, a random sequencing machine that paved the way for all those ER-1s and 303s racking up the bucks on eBay.
Breaking news: Germany? Huge techno scene. Seriously massive. I mean, telling people you’re into German techno is like saying you really love paintings, especially the kind that use paint. It’s part of the definition, guys: a rose is a rose is a rose. Techno is Germany is techno.
Because for whatever reason (up to and including my hunch that Ableton Live comes free with every flat), Deutschland does it better. BPitch does it better. Ellen Allien, Paul Kalkbrenner, Thomas Fehlmann, Apparat and AGF/Delay and Pascal Vert—they all do it better. So certainly it’s redundant to base an entire month’s track-hoarding on German releases. A waste. A goes-without-saying. Right?
Well, yeah. Probably. But I’m doing it anyway.
(Except for that Indian re-release post-jump. Variety. Spice of life. Etc.)
Producer, BPitch creator and all-around rad babe Ellen Allien is unarguably the modern queen of Berlin techno and minimal, so it’s super-interesting to hear her talk about the what, how and why of the scene she’s helped foster. And I swear I’m not obsessed with her at all. Not even remotely. Look at me: aloof!
Vaguely wacky minimal that skates just left of center. Is it quirky? Aggressive? A little tongue-in-cheek? I can’t quite get my head around Bremen veterans Goldfish + Der Dulz—but I can’t stop listening to them either.
The flip-side to the equally amazing single Pump, ostensibly from her forthcoming full-length. Classic Ellen: both minimal andmaximal, hypnotic and glitched-out and absolutely on the brink of exploding before it recedes into the best sort of tease. Not that, like, I think it’s so great or anything. Aloof, remember? Look how aloof!
I fucking hate February. It’s the worst possible month, the god-awful dregs of eastern American winter, when everything’s all grey and slush-slicked and all you can do is bear down in your freezing hell of a bedroom and hope spring comes quick and painless. I do a lot of staring at walls in February. A lot of wishing I lived on, like, Easter Island.
So I’m ditching the barren standards this month. Minimal, EBM, chilly German techno—you’re too depressing for February’s blizzard central. We need heat. Lots of it. Sunburns and bikini tops and filthy breakdowns and bass so heavy, it feels like middle earth. We need anything dub-inspired, sounds all echoing and atmospheric, and here’s the silver lining, I guess: February is the no-fail excuse for zoning out to a bunch of warm, summery jams. I mean, what else is there to do aside from check and recheck the 15-day forecast, waiting for the mercury to skyrocket up to 60? ‘Cause I’m not sure that’s the healthiest hobby. Not that I know from experience or anything.
Hot-as-fuck UK dirty dub-tech from the second sampler of the first H.E.N.C.H. mixtape. I actually gravitated toward Komonazmuk’s rad A-side “You Fo”” but immediately abandoned it once “Broken String” slammed into the drop at second 55. Wait for it.
Hawtin’s simmering thunderstorm makes everything else on Seth Troxler’s mixtape sound like a piddly little rain shower–and we’re not talking ho-hum stuff here. Boogie Bytes Vol. 5 also includes a pseudo-disco Fever Ray remix and a new Kiki jam, but they barely stand up to so much heat-soaked, organic noise. Perfect.
