Released, finally! I’m delighted that Phonica have started a label, since I’ve discovered so much great music through their shop. (Plus, it’s nice during these times to see a new vinyl venture pop up). Getting Appleblim on the remix is a canny move, but the original is actually my favourite side of the record, taking in influences from all over the shop (as it were) - a bit of deep house, some dub techno, some Berlin techno…my only criticism is that the high sustained string note towards the end is a bit corny…but still, this well-named track is really impressive.
Um…that’s it for this week really. A bit overwhelmed by my queue of downloaded audio and can’t pick a favourite. My subwoofer arrived a few days ago so I’m going back through a lot of older dubstep records (Loefah etc) and enjoying all the new frequencies I hadn’t noticed before (and getting myself an ASBO if I’m not careful…)
As a sickening early-adopter constantly on the lookout for a new nerdier-than-thou technofix to a nonexistent problem, I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, having signed up long before the free London papers started blathering on about it. (Why am I telling you this? Because I am a twat!) Nevertheless this weekend I’ve noticed a bit of an influx of dubsteppers to the Twittersphere, so I’ll list a few of them here for you to stalk at your leisure - all marginally more interesting than knowing what Jonathan Ross fed his dog this morning. In no particular order:
A couple of corrections need to be made to my previous post. Firstly, I would never have dug into either Ghost Box or Moon Wiring Club if it weren’t for Loki23’s post on the subject, which even now I’m still getting huge value from in terms of avenues to explore. So credit where it’s due!
Secondly, and this has been bugging me all morning, on the subject of internet-mediated music scenes contrasted against the pre-internet rave scene, I wrote:
We’ve traded magic and mystique for something, but what?
Which is completely embarrassing vacuous crap and should never have made it through my editing, of which there clearly wasn’t enough last night. Without the internet I’m not sure I’d be able to persue my music interests with a tenth as much success as I currently do. In terms of shopping, personal recommendations, getting feedback on my mixes, hearing direct from artists when and where their next releases will be available….it’s incredible. Even though most of the Muswell Hill / Ally Pally set are listening to the sort of insipid singer-songwriter dreck and worthy world music that’s given away free with the Sunday Observer - not so much music as homeopathy - the internet keeps me connected and reassures me that countless thousands of others are as passionate about the music I like as I am. So yes, much romanticism and mystique has been lost - in the nineties, people even went raving without mobile phones, can you imagine? - and I’ll always feel residual nostalgia for that…but as to whether it’s a been worthwhile trade, well duh.
There were some white labels of this record a few weeks back, but by the time I saw them on Boomkat they’d sold out. Later that day I stumbled, distraught and confused, into Phonica, where a bemused Hector did an uncanny impression of someone who hadn’t listened to a bloody word I’d said and tried half-heartedly to fob me off with some other random dubstep stock I didn’t want. This is a great record as you’d expect from Appleblim and you can hear Geiom’s style in there too, particularly with the melancholy rave / dub chords. I expect it will pop up in a mix I’ll post on here soon.
Great, another rabbit hole to fall down! I don’t really feel up to writing about this, suffice to say that at a £4.95 download it’s the absolute fucking bargain of the year, so I’ll refer you to the Guardian review:
The music…conjures up what David Peace might call an occult history of 70s and early 80s children’s television, the soundtracks of stuff invariably forgotten in who-remembers-the-Wombles? roundups: the station idents of long-lost ITV franchises; Schools and Colleges programmes; the grimy, low-rent British horror films that provided a cheap way of filling time until the Epilogue and attracted an unintended prepubescent audience thanks to the rise in portable bedroom sets; the public information films that suggested a flatly terrifying broken Britain, filled with people who spent their time Fooling With Fireworks, playing Frisbee near power stations and jamming the bare wires of electrical equipment into sockets with matchsticks.
There is so much more to it than that, though, and I’d urge you to explore the Ghost Box website and immerse yourself in the whole alternative-reality British Isles they’re creating. The guide to Belbury is essential, and the short story by Arthur Machen (argh! Another rabbit hole! There aren’t enough hours in the day…) has left a real impression on me. Ghost Box provide perfect full-immersion sensory input for the springtime (the most pagan time of the year, surely). I think I’ll be spending a lot more time in Belbury.
Full rips of all those Dreamscape / Helter Skelter tape packs from the nineties. This is great music and a huge, huge nostalgia trip for me too. These tape packs were - along with magazines and flyers - the main connection me and my friends had to the rave scene in those days (we were just a little too young and a little too skint to go raving, although we certainly didn’t miss out on all the action. Still, don’t you sort of miss the days before the World Wide Web, when the underground was just that bit less accessible? Where as a kid in a hillbilly town you didn’t really know anything and just had to imagine where the records came from, instead of going onto MySpace and getting a definitive answer? We’ve traded magic and mystique for something, but what?)
I’m enjoying the jungle sets and the happy hardcore sets - at least, the older ones - equally: a joy. Massive respect to IronMan for taking the trouble to publish this stuff. It’s true what Simon says:
once your nervous system has been re-programmed, you can listen to this stuff ‘on the natural’. On its own, it’ll induce memory rushes, body-flashbacks.
When the M.C. asks how are you feeling, Dreamscape?….fuuuuck!
In a way this week was all about the Shed remixes, but the song that left the strongest impression on me was For Give Me Son, the B side to Jus Ed’s Sweetness. Emotional, Detroit-y strings over an open and honest analogue drum beat, it’s a simple House tune with a real emotional punch. In fact, listening to it on headphones at work the other day, I was practically sniffling into my mouse mat. Something about the title and the aforementioned strings. Warning: this record may make you want to suddenly rush home to your kids.
I sort of ignored Sheet One and the whole Plastikman thing the first time around. The weekend has been all about 303s for me (and a vague desire to listen to more techno and house from the early nineties) so this album really hit the spot: classic techno sounds given room to breathe. I’m not so sure about Hawtin’s newer material (which I haven’t really spent time with) but I’m loving this.
Enjoyed this despite some minor geek annoyances (the narrator doesn’t know the difference between a square wave and a sine wave - hey mate: one of them is SQUARE and the other one is CLEARLY SINUSOIDAL). The most entertaining thing about the documentary is listening to the records made by pop acts who used the TB-303 as the manufacturer intended, i.e. as a stand-in for a bass guitarist. So the acid box just plods along in the mix, pH level diluted to nothing - acid house homeopathy - and yet full of potential and sounding, to me, faintly embarrassed. A bit like when you see people who put clothes on their pets: a snarling beast reluctantly zipped into a coat from C&A.
This week I used this amazing piece of free software, along with a twenty quid SPL meter from Radio Shack, to measure the acoustic signature of my dining room. And do you know what? It was fun! The down-side is that it empirically validated my suspicion that the very worst place in the entire room to actually listen to music is directly in front of my decks.
Not a lot to say about this. Even my wife likes it. Some “wonky” efforts leave me cold but I reckon this is the best track of 2009 so far and it has renewed my faith in Hyperdub, a label I occasionally find it hard to engage with. Also, the cover is awesome, it matches the record so well and looks like a huge bank of dormant multicoloured LEDs waiting to come alive when someone puts a coin in the slot. I ended my last mix with this record. If I may lapse into Boomkat-speak for a moment: essential twelve!!
Only had this a couple of days but it’s on repeat-play. The wife does not like this one. One thing I’ve learned over the last couple of years is just how broad a church techno really is. I gather the Berghain style (whatever that is) has negative connotations for some but this album is extraordinarily satisfying. It’s got spadefuls of bass: an incessant, unbelievably deep rolling presence underpinning the other elements, which are thoughtful and emotive. I agree with the commenter on RA who said it needs playing loud and doesn’t really work on headphones, so I can’t wait to blow the window panes out with it when my new subwoofer arrives…
Never heard of this guy until now, which no doubt means he’s completely ubiquitous, and the set was recorded way back in October 2007, but what of it. Broadly speaking this selection would probably be called minimal techno, but sonically it seems to me far removed from the lame mnml template of clicks, tinny farts and stupid pitched-down vocal samples. It throbs, pulses, rolls and fizzes along very nicely - and I only counted one stupid pitched-down vocal sample in the whole hour. Great stuff. (Found via Adriaan Van Keerbergen).
YouTube: Clown by Korn (Media Studies video by Phil Higgins)
An old sixth-form mate brought this to my attention on Friday. He made it for a media studies project in 1996. Twenty-three seconds in, you can very briefly see a grotty, lank-haired seventeen year-old incarnation of yours truly doing something uncertain with a teddy bear. NB I was never into this music but the jungle crowd and the metal crowd used to mix a lot at my college.
Since having my head blown off by the sound system at FWD, I’ve been looking for a subwoofer to pile on the bass weight at home and have been doing a fair amount of research, finally putting in an order for BK’s XLS200. Basically, BK’s main business is making subs for other “manufacturers” to put their badges on and sell for prices edging towards a grand: but if you buy direct from BK, and you’re prepared to tolerate the idiosyncratic customer service and wait three to four weeks for it to be hand-built (even though they’ll quote you ten days) the word is that you’ll end up with a rock-solid sub that doesn’t have much in the way of bells and/or whistles (remote controls etc) but will sound as good as, or better than, units costing over twice as much from other manufacturers, all for £200 - £400. I’m super excited about this although my neighbours will of course be gutted when it lands. They should thank their lucky stars I didn’t plump for the Monolith.
