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The "wink wink" Thread 2010: This Time It's Personal
KvP:
Elevator Music Vol. 1
--- Quote from: Drownedinsound ---UK-bred dance variants tend to be magpies, marked by a cheeky tendency to beg, borrow and steal where necessary: witness hardcore’s breakbeat-driven rewiring of imported house and techno sounds, the clipped rasta soundbites of jungle or dubstep’s procurement of dub reggae’s expansive headspace. Indeed, what’s proving to be the most interesting facet of the current explosion in as-yet-undefined bass music – future garage? funkstep? flexstep? – is its typically promiscuous nature. The likes of Untold, Brackles, Shortstuff and Roska craft tracks that shamelessly incorporate elements of every major dance trend of the last 20 years. The result has been a surprisingly swift reconfiguring of dubstep’s DNA, unifying each disparate strand into a willfully awkward hybrid - and one that stubbornly resists categorisation.
The people at Fabric tend to be on the ball when it comes to these things. Attempting to keep up with developments in a scene where the majority of tracks only see vinyl release is an expensive business, and Fabric's Elevator Music Volume 1 compilation can take credit for acting as both a welcome primer for newcomers and an impressive collection of unreleased material for devotees.
If any one producer can take more credit than any other for the injection of a welcome sense of fun into dubstep’s darker regions, it’s Untold. His contribution here, ‘Bad Girls’, picks up where his recent ‘Flexible’ 12-inch left off, paring away the softer elements of the Gonna Work Out Fine EP until all that’s left are sheer edges: grimy bursts of bass and a melody played out on a misfiring glockenspiel. He’s also the closest the scene’s come to nurturing a true individual - after wrapping dancefloors in ‘Anaconda’s serpentine coils, he’s fast honed a signature sound that lands somewhere in the sparse hinterlands where classic house meets early Wiley.
Indeed, despite typically being mentioned in the same breath as dubstep, the common traits shared by many of the tracks on Elevator Music owe at least as much to grime. If forward-thinking releases in the past year from the likes of Joker, Tempa T and Terror Danjah have gone some way towards showing that there’s life left in that genre beyond dodgy electro collaborations, Shortstuff’s clipped eight-bar stylings and the blitzkrieg bass of Doc Daneeka’s ‘Drums In The Deep’ suggest it’s still a region ripe for plundering.
But if typically urban influences ground Elevator Music’s better-established names, the ghosts of house and techno prove to be the glue that binds together the lesser-knowns, from Hot City’s bassline-style sliced vocals to Julio Bashmore’s spacey Europhilia. It proves a potent brew - on ‘Pistol In Your Pocket’ Hackman takes London’s emergent funky sound and runs amok, lashing layer upon layer of tropical colour like a four-dimensional Jackson Pollack, and Xxxy’s noirish ‘Sing With Us’ is animated in Sin City greyscale, complete with sudden splashes of cell-shaded red.
But best of all is Mosca’s tack-sharp contribution, which ought to immediately elevate him toward the kind of wider attention currently being enjoyed by Joy Orbison. ‘Gold Bricks, I See You’ is far better than anything Orbison’s yet put his name to, a masterclass in melancholy euphoria that builds in three successively greater stages - shapeshifting from warm house pulse to supple, spacious garage, before a burst of brass and vocals evacuates the space where your brain was comfortably resting. So it goes.
Elevator Music’s real success is that it vindicates the notion that the music emerging from this axis is more than just dancefloor fodder. Innovation is driven by group interactions and friendly one-upmanship, rather than by any one producer. Anyone’s only as good as their last release - a forceful creative motivation, and one which makes each track on here as rewarding in this context as in a longer mix. It’s probably a bit early to be throwing around ‘compilation of the year’ accolades in January, but Elevator Music Volume 1 has thrown down one hell of a gauntlet. It’ll take some beating.
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Ministry - With Sympathy
--- Quote from: Rolling Stone ---Like so many synthesizer-based dance bands, Ministry doesn't do anything you haven't heard before. The rhythm tracks, sprinkled with Latin effects à la Thompson Twins, are built around the same synthesized bass lines that have been filling dance floors since the disco era. The instrumental tracks recycle the same burbles and beeps that you hear on Yaz or Berlin records, while occasionally relying on guitars and saxophones for additional weight, like Heaven 17. And vocalist Al Jourgensen even manages the same nasal delivery and, from time to time, fake upper-class accent as Marc Almond of Soft Cell (an especially odd touch, considering that both Jourgensen and the other half of Ministry, Stephen George, hail from Chicago).
But this lack of originality is hardly worth complaining about, because Ministry manages to do something many far more innovative bands neglect: they write catchy dance songs. "Work for Love," which preceded the album as a twelve-inch single, proved that George and Jourgensen were canny enough arrangers to get mileage out of a melody without running it into the ground. "Effigy," "She's Got a Cause" and "Say You're Sorry" offer more evidence of the duo's writing ability. Jourgensen's sturdy melodies can stand on their own; a ballad like "Say You're Sorry" packs no less punch than a steamer like "Effigy." Nor does it hurt that Jourgensen's singing is charged with anger, passion and glee–real emotions instead of the vocal posturing so common in synth-pop. In all, With Sympathy provides the valuable service of demonstrating how well synth pop's mannerisms worked before they solidified into cliché.
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Julian Fane - Our New Quarters
--- Quote from: Dusted Magazine ---Technology changes everything. For instance, technology made it possible for Julian Fane to trade stocks minute-by-minute on the NASDAQ from Vancouver, just like the big boys at Morgan Stanley's proprietary trading desk...though maybe minus the cigars. Then technology also made it possible for him to say, "Fuck day trading...I want to make music full time," turning the same computer firepower into a home recording studio. He made underground electronic music under pseudonyms like Aardvark Interface and Taoist Blockade, then released his first full-length Special Forces in 2004. It was a completely solo, home-produced effort that drew comparisons to Radiohead and Sigur Ros. Now with Our New Quarters, his sound has grown even more lush and orchestral, embellished with grand sweeping crescendos and achingly melancholy acoustic breaks.
All of which is maybe a roundabout way of saying that Julian Fane's second album Our New Quarters doesn't sound like a bedroom recording...not at all. It's large in scale, immaculately produced and extravagantly ambitious.
The album starts in restrained frenzy, its title track opening with a furious build of vibrating electric guitar and, underneath, a nearly placid series of guitar chords. Fane's voice - and this is where most of the Radiohead comparisons come from - is high and a bit thin. The cut sounds completely organic and rock-based, though supernaturally clean and clear; it's high-end, producer-driven rock music, very similar to the kinds of sounds that Bono and Thom Yorke pay tens of thousands a dollar a day to record. "The Moon Is Gone" plays the same tricks but with even better results, building arena style climaxes out of heavily reverb'd vocals and synthy, Cure-like keyboards. Only a certain dreamy indistinctness keeps it from sounding completely live and collaborative; it the best big rock song on the disc. "Among the Missing," late in the album, shoots for the same grandeur, but doesn't quite achieve it. The climaxes feel forced and distorted, the soft romantic string intervals too sweet.
Other cuts are more overtly electronic. "New Faces" is built on a cool, minimal techno-beat, skittering over piano chords and synthesized sound washes, while "Youth Cadet" has an eerie, not-quite-naturalistic sheen to it, a slush of cymbals rasping over something that sounds like a calliope crossed with steel drums. "Rattle"'s heavy beat spits and stutters, machine-like, a much-needed brace to Fane's high, drifting vocals.
There is one song that fits reasonably well into the bedroom recording genre. The lovely "Downfall" strips down to just piano and Fane's keening, emotionally expressive voice. Fane does amazing things with technology...and he's even pretty good without it.
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StaedlerMars:
So breakcore is this genre of music that is basically really hard to listen to unless you're on uppers and in a club where there are about a hundred other people all jumpin-up-and-down-facing the dj like a group of wacked-out zombies and the music is blasting at you at volumes that are definitely unhealthy.
Some time ago, in Belgium, this little organization called Breakcore Gives Me Wood started to organize parties in abandoned lots and squats to let people enjoy breakcore music in all peace. These are regularly attended by massive amounts of people and are quite rad.
They also released a breakcore compilation a while ago called Breakcore Gives Me Wood:
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Edit: Also, I am digging that new Eluvium.
scarred:
Zombie Zombie - A Land For Renegades [2008]
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French indie-electronic duo inspired by Krautrock and John Carpenter horror soundtracks, and with a penchant for vintage synthesizers. Really fucking rad stuff. The link below is one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen. (Hint: it's John Carpenter's The Thing done in stop-motion with G.I. Joe action figures.)
Youtube: "Driving Down This Road Until Death Sets You Free"
Etienne Jaumet - Night Music [2009]
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Etienne Jaumet is 1/2 of Zombie Zombie and his first solo full-length is a lot more haunting and sinister. The first track is a 20-minute opus of creepifying synthesizer builds and ominous saxophones (yes that's right motherfucker, saxophones).
Youtube: "Entropy"
jj - jj nº3 [2010]
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If you pay attention to the indie music scene at all, you've probably at least heard of jj. The reclusive Swedish duo made waves with their debut, jj nº2, and now they're back with what seems to be a more subdued sophomore release - although this might be because they're no surprise to anyone anymore. Either way, jj nº3 is just as addicting as its predecessor. But if you didn't like jj's unique brand of Balearic pop before, chances are this won't change your mind.
Youtube: "let go"
Scandanavian War Machine:
holy shit that zombie zombie video is fucking amazing. i'd even go as far as to say palatial, whatever that means. seriously, The Thing was one of my favorite movies as a kid and that video just blew my mind back in time.
downloading that album right now just because of that frikkin awesome video.
pogonrudie:
Man, you weren't kidding about that Zombie Zombie video...phenomenal. Downloading, post-haste!
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