Single: For Give Me Son by Jus Ed
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.
Album: Sheet One by Plastikman
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.
Video: History of the Roland TB-303
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.
Techno-fetishistic geek fixation: Room EQ Wizard
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.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:45 am
aaaah plastikman. i tend to listen to him when in a weird mood, with the lights off (or with UV on) and it just takes your mind places…i haven’t actually listened to the last album (Closer) but the last track on it, ‘I Don’t Know’, is one of my all-time favourites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WixuNQorosE