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

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scarred:

--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 13 Apr 2010, 05:43 ---My boner is massive and can not be tamed

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Tom:
GOOD MORNING EVERYONE!

KickThatBathProf:
greatest fucking day

Dimmukane:
ugh ugh much love for dis record

KvP:
If I could interrupt this fascinating circle jerk for just a moment.




Starkey - Stars EP

--- Quote ---Planet Mu continues its hot streak with this EP ahead of Starkey's upcoming full-length, his second for the label.

Starkey's an intriguing character. His stock in trade is hip-hop flavored bass music with a candy coating of R&B shine. If we can think of Flying Lotus and the like as the IDM-ification of the existing west coast underground hip-hop aesthetic, post-Dilla, I don't think it would be that much of a stretch to suggest that Starkey represents a progressive shift in the underground hip-hop of the east coast, which has generally revolved more around the club scene (Starkey hails from Philly). Starkey has called it "Street Bass", and it's a heady conflagration of rave, bass, IDM, hip-hop and dubstep sounds. For someone like me who really enjoys the atomic thump of a really well-tweaked kick drum it's manna from heaven.

The 12" single consists of four songs. The eponymous "Stars" is a smooth future R&B song with a really sweet gated rave pad undergirding the track. Slugabed's remix of that song bring a more recognizable dubstep feel to the track with his sweltering, swaggering style. "Starting Gates" is more in line with Starkey's more club-oriented tracks - kick drums, hand claps and a gigantic, elastic rave lead. "Millennia" is a slow-building monster with purple-hued pads that build up with delectable arpeggios to a booming "chorus" before dropping back to the buildup again. Madness.

The digital download release of the single includes an additional three remixes of "Stars". Techno underdog Few Nolder's edit strips the song back to Anneka's vox in an echo chamber and adds a minimal beat and an understated bassline / chord synth. Definitely a "nite version" of the track if there ever was one. Raffertie's remix, on the other hand, takes the song to a more rave-oriented place, creating a large space with his pads before collapsing it with a buzzing, wobbling bassline and thudding dubstep rhythm. Finally, Ital Tek applies his early-period Autechre fetishism to the song, crafting an edit that seems to be all low-lying bass and simple, ringing synths and arpeggiated stabs, before breaking out into the sort of melodic, mechanical dubstep he's so good at (he keeps the gated pads, unlike the other remixers)

A massive release, comes highly recommended. Keep an ear out for the full-length, Ear Drums and Black Holes, next month. Only "Stars" and the previously released "OK Luv" will be present on the LP - every other track presented here is native to the EP. Coming up next for my favorite label - The Internal Tulips release a debut I've been waiting for some time for and a single from a DJ who purports to fuse the sounds of modern dubstep with the aesthetics of Frank Zappa. Oh boy.
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Bonobo - Eyesdown

--- Quote ---A few years back a friend of mine whose taste I generally trust sent me a copy of Bonobo's Animal Magic and recommended it vociferously. At the time there were many tracks that I enjoyed but as time went on I found it to be a listless sort of electronic chill-out music that critics invariably gravitate towards (see also: Four Tet, who made a big splash this year with yet another album that I find to be largely boring).

So imagine my surprise when this single for Ninja Tune made it on down the pipeline and proceeded to really impress me. The first thing you'll notice is the swing in the drums. There's a definite UK Garage influence to the rhythm of the song, and overall this feels like a particularly excellent Zero 7 track, which is to say it's chill music of uncommon caliber. Funny how these things go - Air, who really popularized this sort of music, came out with a tepid album this year that was easily bested by Zero 7, who up until that point were basically riders on the coattails of Moon Safari, enjoyable as they could be. This is blue-tinged neo-soul with nice, clear production that avoids the curious flatness endemic to those Zero 7 records.

Included in the package are several remixes and an instrumental version of the track. The first remix is about perfect, as the aesthetic of the song is simpatico with Floating Points' sensibilities right off the bat. FP changes up the beat and makes it a bit more mechanical, and adds a bit of buzzing acid bass, which is nice. Warrior 1 gives the track a martial Garage makeover that makes it a whole lot more dancefloor-ready. Applebim / Komonazmuzik round out the release, deconstructing the song and reconfiguring it into a spacey future-disco groove, complete with strings, a more recognizable 4/4 rhythm template and dubby reverb on the vox.

So it's been a pleasant surprise, to say the least. Eyesdown has been released ahead of a full LP called Black Sands (evocative title - I've been to some black sand beaches and they are divine, and hot) due out in a few weeks. I'm hoping the whole album is in this vein. I'm ready to give Bonobo another shot, if he's willing to shake off the sleepiness that's crept into his past output. This is a good start.
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FaltyDL - All In the Place

--- Quote ---Way back in the late 90's and early aughts, when I was really getting into electronic music for the first time, I remember being constantly frustrated by how my favorite artists just never seemed to put out music in a timely fashion - The Aphex Twin and (especially) Boards of Canada seemed to be working on timetables of several years between albums.

This dissatisfaction was due to a number of factors. First and foremost, I was at the mercy of my circumstances. Living where I did in Northern Colorado, with sharing and streaming services relegated to the famously spotty P2P sites (Napster and the like), the electronic music that I liked was restricted to only the most acclaimed and popular artists - Aphex Twin, Autechre, BoC, etc. And for whatever reason those artists didn't put out a lot of readily available stuff. Second, I was in my teenage years, and when you're that age time just slooows down. Perhaps the most important thing was that I just wasn't looking in the right places. There were a lot of progressive electronic acts that had (and still have) a prolific streak - Luke Vibert, Venetian Snares, etc.

Now that the internet has rapidly expanded in its search and retail capacities, it's a lot easier to keep track of those prolific artists. One of the more recently established is FaltyDL (ne Andrew Lustman) who I've covered before for the blog. In the space of the last year or so, he's released a single on Ramp and both an LP and an 8-song EP for Planet Mu, all high quality records. His first release of 2010 is a 4-track EP for the Rush Hour imprint.

The title track "All in the Place" is an electro-tinged acid dance anthem that wouldn't sound out of place on a Vibert record, but the percussion sound is all FaltyDL, prominent open hi-hats and rattles abound. "St. Marks" is more in the vein of Lustman's previous output, with a cool, New York feel and cut-up soul vox samples. The melodic IDM of "Discoko" shows just a bit of Lustman's professed Aphex Twin influence, with vowel-sounding acid bass and a bright synth lead. "Groove" get backs to the complex hi-hat shuffle that's Lustman's stock in trade, adding a busy, skittering funk bassline and echoing, oscillating synths before yet another cut-up vox sample. It's to Lustman's credit that the repetition of elements from song to song somehow never becomes exactly formulaic. He's got a style that he usually sticks to, and within that there are a multitude of ideas to explore. All in the Place is of the quality you'd expect from FaltyDL at this point, but it's also not a bad place to jump in if you're new to him.
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Dbridge & Instra:Mental - Fabriclive 50

--- Quote ---It's kind of a dirty open secret that, infatuated with electronic music as I am, I've never been all that invested in the more purely dance-oriented corners of the scene. However, while most house and every trance song I've ever heard has left me cold, I have responded well to drum and bass music. Perhaps it's the more insistent rhythms, maybe it's the breaks, maybe it's the fact that the IDM I heavily gravitated towards was flourishing around the time that DnB was having its big moment in the 90's. Many IDM luminaries - Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, but especially Squarepusher - all made music in the DnB vein. The only "club music" experience I ever had was showing up to a place in Denver on a random night with my friends to find that the highly respected drum and bass DJ Andy C was spinning. It was about as good of an experience as I could have asked for, being a headphones-oriented kid. I've since scoured Denver for big-name DJs but we get very few of repute outside of trance and electro-house guys.

I had a lot of fun that night, but like a lot of club-oriented music, drum and bass often gets monotonous for me when played through headphones. The relentlessly break-neck speed of most DnB tends to make it sort of exhausting, as well (see: Noisia's Fabriclive 40).

Which is where dBridge comes in. In the last year or two, dBridge and Instra:Mental have, through dBridge's Exit label, popularized a newer strain of DnB, cross-pollinated with the dubstep culture of the UK, that shifts the focus off of the "drums" part of the music and shifts it onto the "bass". Tempos are slowed down, rhythms are 2-step, more often than not (although that's not particularly uncommon in DnB these days) and the bass is larger and more prominent.

As the title implies, dBridge and Instra:Mental share mixing duties for this Fabriclive set. dBridge I'm only just now gaining awareness of, and he seems to be the spearhead of this newer DnB style. His choices tend to have a heavy neo-soul / R&B element to them, as evidenced by the absolutely perfect opening track, "Seems Like" by Riya, and a medley track from Genotype. I've known about Instra:Mental for awhile now, as he was the standout in one of Boomkat's "future garage" compilations. His choices tend to hew more towards dubstep, as do his own songs that appear in the set (Skream, Scuba and Distance all make appearances). For my money the Instra:Mental parts of the set are the highlights, though your mileage may vary.

A bit about the Fabriclive series - If you didn't know about it already, there's a famous club in London called Fabric that releases DJ mixes by many of the names that visit the place. There are two series - Fabric and Fabriclive. Fabric is comprised of more "classic" dance music, house and techno primarily, while Fabriclive encompasses everything else - electro-house, DnB, hip hop, bass, acid, etc. They're fairly strict about their standards and as such they have yet to release a mix that's anything less than good (most of them are great, actually). There was some controversy a year or two back when Justice, who were probably the biggest DJs in the world at the time, submitted a mix only to have it rejected for not meeting length standards. These guys don't fuck around. Collect the whole set.

The version I have is actually unmixed, which is to say that the variant songs that make up the mix have been parsed out and separated into tracks. As far as I'm aware, retail versions of the set are mixed only, meaning they're one unbroken track.
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Starkey Presents Street Bass Anthems Vol. 4

--- Quote ---I wrote about Starkey just a few posts ago, and now we switch gears from his Planet Mu output towards his Street Bass Anthems series. Whereas the Planet Mu stuff is definitely more UK-oriented in the dubstep vein, the SBA  series is recognizably American. From syrupy pop R&B in the opener "Starkvillain", to Bug-esque dancehall dubstep reggae in the 6Blocc remix of "Lockdown" to B-More party rap in "Gals Be Wilin" (my personal favorite), numerous pop styles are subducted and retooled under bass trends in almost every track. Slugabed's apocalyptic bass attack hits hard in the almost Justice-esque "Slugabed Sez". Autotuned R&B even makes an appearance on the Starkey cut "Hair Redone".

There's just so much stuff going on in this mix it can be hard to get your bearings, but your enjoyment of the bulk of the music will probably be dependent on how well you can stand contemporary hip hop radio. It wouldn't be quite correct to call this a dance music record in the way we mean it when we describe a techno or house record. This is a hip hop record. It just happens to possess an emphasis on massive bass production.

If that seems a little intimidating or iffy to you, I've also included the Street Bass Anthems Volume 4 Singles, a 4-track selection from the heart of the mix, featuring the bombastic, Anticon-esque Starkey cut "Alarm (feat. Non & Halfcast)" and the machine-lifter bass of DNAEBEATS "Razor Kut". If you like that, you'll probably like the whole thing. Enjoy!

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SBA V.4

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SBA V.4 Singles

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