I really didn’t mean to go this long without an update! Moving house, setting up a business, yadda yadda. I won’t bore you. I have been archiving some of the tunes I wrote back when I was a teenager with very chaotic MIDI setup at home, digitising various dusty cassette tapes, and I hope to post some of those sounds soon. Serendipitously, Gutterbreakz is starting a netabel devoted to unheard, ramshackle homemade electronica, so I’ll be watching this project with interest!
Anyway, before all that, these are a few of the records which are currently doing it for me:
Breakage: Clarendon
Not really dubstep this, Breakage seems to be a drum & bass producer and this is certainly the right tempo, but it’s not like much other DnB I’ve heard. Lovely sort of spring-reverby sound to it, a bit like Squarepusher’s Budakhan Mindfone EP, quite dubby too.
Ramadanman: Blimey
Ramadanman is my producer of the moment, every track on here (and on the other record of his I’ve got, Carla) is pure gold. Really crisp and punchy drum work, lots of sub, quality production, and (what seems to be a trademark) really really quiet and quite scary background pads and muffled voices. I’m not doing it justice here. Anyway, I stayed up late to listen to Blimey the other night on my own and I was shitting myself by about halfway through. I think this record might be haunted.
Cluekid: Hovercraft
Affecianados of the more Bristolian dubstep sound like to poo-poo the more ravey dubstep tunes (the Boomkat reviews barely disguise their contempt: the word “wobble” is code for “we think this is shit but it sells”, and to be fair, much of it is shit) but I’m still going out of my way to pick up some of these supposedly less cerebral records when I go shopping. The A-side on here is by-numbers, but I think Hovercraft is ace. Also I really like hovercrafts.
Fennesz / Jeck / Matthews: Amoroso
A recording of the organ in York Minster, all distorted and phased and fed back and shit, an utterly gorgeous record. I’m gonna pick up the new Philip Jeck album pretty soon I think.
Rhythm & Sound: No Partial
I fucking love Rhythm & Sound! I’m mentally compiling a list at the moment called "reggae tunes to play at a barbecue on my new patio, once we’ve unpacked all our shit" and this is on it.
Bar 9: Murda Sound
Another rave tune, if you don’t like this sound you’ll probably throw it in the Spongebob bin (I liked Spongebob!) but this record stands out to me by the sheer force of its total dementia. It reminds me a lot of one of Aphex Twin’s AFX releases on Rephlex from a few years back that I don’t know the name of. My wife hates this even more than my other records (which she mostly hates).
In addition, I’ve also picked up a couple of drum & bass records in the last week, something I thought I’d never do (I stopped buying DnB on vinyl in around 1999, and on CD in around 2002). I honestly felt that the form was totally bankrupt, just noisy stress music for spazzed-out 22 year old German web geeks with white spit in the corners of their mouths to take loads of speed to and generally be annoying. Anyhoo, I bought this without really listening to it and assuming it was dubstep, turns out it’s DnB on some kind of boutique label, and it’s pretty good. Also Drum Tools, the B-side of the recent Bukem release (I know! Bukem! Can you believe it?) is an ace amen workout, probably gonna be very satisfying in the mix, so I grabbed that this lunchtime. I don’t know if this is DnB thing is going anywhere though.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:31 am
The flip-side to that Breakage single is even better I think - a really interesting departure for the guy… I didn’t take much interest in his stuff I’d heard on the Planet Mu compilations, but I’ve been playing the Clarendon stuff non-stop
I hope you’re considering leaping aboard the Bleepfiend express, there’s good stuff in the pipeline… you still got stuff lurking in the archives uncleansed by the housemove?
May 24th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
yep, with Wordpress as my witness i swear i’ll upload some audio this weekend!