The "wink wink" Thread 2010: This Time It's Personal

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KvP:

Slugabed - Ultra Heat Treated EP

--- Quote from: Resident Advisor ---Slugabed's peculiar strain of squashed and rigidly fashioned instrumental hip-hop has infiltrated heads for months now. In fact, his particularly masculine brew of square wave stomping dates back to 2008, so it's a little odd to think that this, the Ultra Heat Treated EP on Planet Mu, will only be his second solo 12-inch.

It nonetheless both underlines his accomplishment to date as well as marking a confident stride into the arena of competition. Right from the off, with the title track squeezing out a jagged-edged bass riff, Slugabed wanders like an overexcited child through a forest of Easter eggs; haphazardly jumping off the beaten path, checking every hiding place. Strong, slow drums frame the breakdown on "Ultra Heat Treated" as Sluga adds wispy synths that lift the ear back into the whirling of the bassline when it reappears. The two other more up-tempo numbers, "Skyfire" and "Pressure," display his talent for thumping drums hard, forcing his punishing love of heavy-as-hell simplistic rhythms right on you whether you like it or not.

The remaining three tracks on the EP aptly display a keen ear for synth colouration and melody—even if they're all primitive computerized RGB in hue. Taking the toy town sounding, pony production value of some of skweee music's shining lights as a starting point, Sluga pours his own compression-happy technique into his song workings, letting the distortion of the drums pull the focus rather than the throwback novelty of some of the resounding 8-bit sounds. "Goulash" is the epitome of this style: Slugabed literally booms out his kick drums and thick, LFO-heavy basslines over synths that have been lifted straight out of Sega's early '90s "end of level boss" music library.
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Lusine - A Certain Distance

--- Quote from: Resident Advisor ---Is Jeff McIlwain, the Seattle techno producer who works under the name Lusine, starting to go pop? Maybe. A little. Sort of. Is this a bad thing? Not at all—in fact, it gives A Certain Distance, his second full album for Ghostly, more reach than 2004's Serial Hodgepodge, and not just because he's working with vocalists more. This still sounds like a Lusine album: it's still largely abstract, still in McIlwain's tonal comfort zone, still partial to timbres that scan as lustrous to techno lovers and as kind of grey to non-partisans. Where Serial Hodgepodge bumped its share but still felt a little camera-shy, A Certain Distance is grabbier than its title suggests, and that is, often, down to the singing.

"Singing," of course, is a relative term here, since McIlwain likes to smear and serrate the human voice as much as he does the clipping beats, curdling static and glossy keyboards that make up the rest of his work. As you'd figure, the types of voices he likes best have a kind of foghorn breathiness: two Distance tracks guest-star Vilja Larjosto, a Finnish singer-songwriter, whose work here is pleasant but lacks bite; another, "Gravity," features Caitlin Sherman. Apart from "Two Dots," though, few of these voices, including whomever it is making his/her way into the relatively straightforward (and rather beautiful) "Crowded Room"—maybe McIlwain himself—do much enunciating, at least by the time it reaches our ears. McIlwain is a subtle and smart producer, and while sometimes he can seem more subdued than is necessary, there's a lot to uncover here.

Particularly in the album's second half—tracks six through eleven are where most of the meat is. "Gravity" is subtly funky, pitter-patterned hi-hats over irregular-just-so pulse, while McIlwane cuts Sherman's voice into a series of stroboscopic, charged, percussive confetti-patterns. "Baffle" builds and builds some more for until it's slowly but gently swallowed your headphones, before receding quickly. "Every Disguise" is curling and enveloping, its micro-sound-bites traipsing evenly, apart from a stray bit of static that goes on just far enough past where it should to set the whole thing slightly off. And on "Double Vision" a ruminative keyboard figure in foreground seems to play with its own timing, dragging before landing on the beat and making it sound new each time. Then some others join it, and they help.
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Amµnition Sampler

--- Quote from: me ---It certainly seemed as though, for a good few years at the turn of the millennium at least, the inheritance of the 90's IDM "movement" was changing hands from the descendants of acid techno to a particular substrain of drum and bass that came to be known as "breakcore". The reasons for this were at least somewhat obvious - "classic" IDM and breakcore tended to share a certain gonzo sense of humor, and the luminaries of the breakcore scene displayed a knack for virtuoso composition, particularly when it came to drum programming. Unfortunately it was not to last.

Planet Mu's Amµnition compilation of breakcore's brief heyday makes a good case for why people might've felt that the genre held promise. At the time, Planet Mu was home to breakcore's leading lights, notably Winnipeg's Venetian Snares and Massachusetts avant-garde composer Keith Fullerton Whitman, recording under the name Hrvatski, and the full range of the label's breakcore and jungle catalogue is on display (excepting Hrvatski, unfortunately). The compilation mostly consists of clutches of tracks from particular artists mixed together seamlessly, though the version I have is technically unmixed (all tracks are separated). The first 6 tracks are a sampler of Venetian Snare's early works, and they showcase Aaron Funk's mind-boggling drum sequencing prowess, particularly the classic "Whiskydrunk". Short "sets" by Hellfish and The Gasman proceed before a 4-track sampler from the oeuvre of legendary junglist Remarc, and a jungle/breakcore workout from the ever ridiculous Shitmat. From there the disc closes out with a smattering of selections from Planet Mu's 12" singles of the period.

As a means of introduction to the more IDM-tinged corners of the breakcore scene as it was, Amµnition is as good a resource as you're likely to find. There was some good stuff being released at that time. Unfortunately it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the trend wasn't going anywhere. Aside from some very notable exceptions, breakcore really just had its one mode - giddy, spastic freakout. That was fine for a time, but the medium proved too restrictive for any sort of real growth, and so it faded into irrelevance, or worse, was assimilated into the awful (but sometimes so-bad-it's-good) "gabba" culture so beloved by Dutch guys with dreads. Venetian Snares, Planet Mu's first breakout star, still hammers out roughly an album a year (sometimes more) but his most acclaimed work has been that which has moved farthest afield from breakcore, namely the essential jungle-meets-Hungarian classical music experiment Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, Hrvatski has gone back to ambient drone music, Planet Mu itself has been reinvented as a formidable institution in the dubstep scene, and the new IDM scene appears to be coming from LA's abstract hip hop producers. But for those curious as to the recent history of left-field electronic music (who aren't opposed to a bit of abrasion) Amµnition is something worth looking into.
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System - Peach Fuzz / The Voices

--- Quote from: Resident Advisor ---MC and drum & bass scene stalwart Mark System settles into his production guise for dBridge's Exit label with two techno tinged drum & bass rollers. "Peach Fuzz" is set off by an indecipherable automaton chant that sets the tone for its rigid robot funk style. Synth chimes, buzzers and riffs revolve around the central motif of the machine-like voice, tic-toc beats and subby bass, while the occasional and unexpected growl gives the track a looming sense of danger and excitement that is never fully released. The monotonic groove and the stark minimalism in the end are too much: While it's a catchy DJ tool, "Peach Fuzz" is a bit forgettable on the whole.

"Voices" is on a similar tip but here the arrangement of melodic elements and breakbeat science help build a much more memorable and better tune. What starts off as a steppy bass and beats combo slowly progresses into a breakbeat-driven number as the menacing and shadowy vibe gives way to a wistful sense of melancholia. Sounding like glitchstep wunderkind Martsman hooking up with the Metalheadz crew back in 1997, System juxtaposes and mixes up different sides of the drum & bass ethos resulting in a new and exciting blend.
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Floating Points - People's Potential (white label)

--- Quote from: me ---Snagged this one on vinyl just as soon as I heard about it, but the quality of my rip was not satisfactory so I had to wait for somebody else to do better on this one.

Floating Points continues his forays into dubstep's undiscovered territory with this blank label single, released at the beginning of the year. The loose, jazzy sound that has put him on the radar of various tastemaking types (Avey Tare, Thom Yorke, etc.) is on full display, but as Floating Points goes this is not nearly as essential as some of the other stuff he's done. The main problem as I hear it is a lack of payoff - I felt like I was waiting for a crescendo that never came. I suppose it's meant for the meat of a DJ set ("mere dance music", if that's a bad thing). That's certainly how Yorke used it in his BBC1 radio mix, throwing in a bit of the middle portion of "People's Potential" in the middle of the mix. The song itself is classic (well, "classic" in the loose sense) Floating Points - heavy jazz elements, particularly in the skipping organ / piano strikes, with a rather unusual acid-y bassline thrown on top. Not a bad song by any standard, just a not-particularly-showy song. Not to damn it with faint praise, of course. Give it a listen.
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Subeena - Solidify

--- Quote from: me ---Due either to UK dance culture or the tight economic times (or maybe both), a great chunk of Planet Mu's output in 2009 came in the form of 12" vinyl singles and EPs. One of the advantages of this approach (aside from a lack of filler material and a rapid rate of releases) was that the relatively light commitment required led to a diverse and impressive array of producers releasing material, from hot new talent like Floating Points, Burnkane and Ikonika, to old heavyweights like Terror Danjah and Pinch. From the former pool comes Subeena, a young London producer who's been around for awhile but has only recently been gaining attention for her sleek, futuristic techno/dubstep sound. "Solidify" is sleepy, syrupy R&B chillout track with rippling Rhodes-like synth a nice heavy low end, while "Analyse" is a nice 2-step / technopop throwback to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. I days. Highly recommended.

For those interested, Subeena also released a free mix for FACT Magazine, and it is really excellent stuff - http://www.factmag.com/2010/01/22/fact-mix-117-subeena/
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blaha 41:

Miles Kurosky - The Desert of Shallow Effects

The Beulah frontman makes an album that sounds like Beulah if Beulah had a TON of time on their hands to play around with arrangements and effects. I've only given it one listen so far, but it was a better listen than most albums I've heard so far this year.

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meanwhile:
Lemonade - Pure Moods EP (2010)

sample:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-3hN8P3JEw
link (not mine):

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Koremora:
Gentlemen! Behold!

Liars: SISTERWOOOOOOOORLD (CD rip, deluxe edition)

Disk 1

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Disk 2 (Remixes)

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BTW, the packaging on the deluxe edition is fucking delicious. Awesome gatefold hardcover book style with accordion-fold landscape picture backing. Plus, it comes with an envelope with a print of the band and a developed picture and film slide of a location in LA taken by the band. All unique to the package you bought.

JD:
Kaki King - Junior

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I pretty much agree with scarred on this album

--- Quote from: scarred on 08 Mar 2010, 01:27 ---Just grabbed the new Kaki King. Sounds like what would happen if Tegan and Sara started doing hard drugs with Laura Veirs. Translation: fucking awesome.

edit for rocking track youtubage

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