Donky Pitch started as little club night in Brighton, England back in 2009, but now in 2015 the label has become a force of a label. Delivering wonky club driven music, Donky Pitch is label with no equal, simply because the diverse range of artists and styles brought to the table. From a string of singles and even two amazing albums by Lockah and The Range, this label has a lot to draw from. This smorgasbord of musicians plays well on the labels newest release, Remixes.
As the name would suggest, Remixes is a compilation of edits and mutations by label mainstays as well as outside names. The mixture of woozy and gleaming synths with rumbling bass provides for a fun ride through this collection of remixes. Only one of the remixes appears to be previously unreleased, but coinciding with the five year retrospective released last October, it seems like a good companion piece.
Cuts like Obey City’s remix of The Range and Mount Bank’s VIP of Starfoxxx seem to present the more downtempo and chill side of the label. Synths flow while subtle bass and drums seem to fill out any open space. But that doesn’t mean the remixes can’t take it to the dance floor. Lockah presented an excellent remix of LiL Texas’ “My Love” that absolutely takes the vocal sample to new euphoric heights. Tokyo Hands remix of Tel Aviv’s VesperTown starts with a hard four to the floor kick, eventually giving way to skittering hi-hats and wonderful stabs that sound like a sugary coated rave, which would play well with labels like PC Music.
The biggest winner on the compilation might go to their very first release from back in the fall of 2010. Mweslee’s remix of Slugabed’s “Donky Stomp” falls near the end of this 8 track compilation, but the wait is worth it. The opening synth glitches don’t prepare the listener for a fluid bass line, hard drums, and clicks of chimes that are soon to appear. By the time the vocal sample comes in, the song mutates into something like a neon version of early James Blake.
Remixes by Donky Pitch is available now on Bandcamp at a name your own price point.
Born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait, and presently splitting time between London and New York City, Fatima Al Qadiri could be seen as world traveler. Her debut album Asiatisch, being released on Hyperdub, takes the listener to what is described as an “imagined China.” It’s clear from the start it’s a China as taken from the perspective of Western Culture, the sonic explorers she’s associated herself with, namely labels UNO, Fade to Mind, and Tri-Angle (under her Ayshay alias) as well as bass futurists Nguzunguzu and J-Cush of Lit City Trax, whom Al Qadiri has collaborated with as Future Brown.
Nothing introduces this imagine China better than the opening track “Shanzhai (for Shanzai Biennial).” The song, as the title suggests, was born from working with art collective Shanzai Biennial, but what the title doesn’t tell you is that it’s a muted, a soulful reworking of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Instead of being kitschy, it comes away hooking you in.
The idea of the “imagine China” plays out into the next few songs. Where the opening track soundtracks a nice landing into the airport of Asiatisch, the following three songs take you on a hover-taxi ride through the sprawling Utopian cities that inhabit the China of our mind. Ice cold synths in “Szechaun” give way to the sharp percussion and warped vocals of “Wudang.” The end of the first half, “Hainan Island” features skittering percussion, with just enough sadness in every hit.
The second half starts strong with the proto-grime tune “Shenzhen.” The synths have now gone from being ice cold, to completely frozen over. The sparse percussion and subtle vocals dance somewhere in the range of anxiety and paranoia. “Dragon Tattoo” might be the best song on the album, with all the parts previously explored on the albums coming to a head. A rich kick drum and bass, reverberatingbackground vocals, liquid synths, and a subtle gong hit that might be missed. The main vocals are an interpolation of “We Are Siamese” from Lady & the Tramp, and instead of posing it as the stereotypical joke, it’s posed as a menaching R&B jam.
Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch is released on May 5th Hyperdub Records
Recently Squarepusher released an EP called “Music For Robots” on Warp Records. The EP featured typical Squarepusher tropes: frantic breakbeats, virtuoso jazz bass and guitar, and those melancholy chords. What makes this Squarepusher EP so special is that while it was written by Squarepusher, the EP was performed by The Z-Machines, a trio of robots. “Music For Robots” wasn’t just for mechanical men, it was also by them.
By now Squarepusher has said he wanted to challenge the perspective of how we view music with this EP. The idea was that music played by robots could still be emotionally engaging is the idea spurred out of this, but let’s be honest, it still had a human touch. The writing was done by a human, specifically Squarepusher, but played by robots who are essentially giant sequencers. As Squarepusher pointed out in an interview with NPR, it’s not much different than when he used drum machines on his 1997 album Hard Normal Daddy, these drum machines just hit real drums.
Furthering this, the younger generation is presently obsessed with electronic music, which often lacks the traditional instrumentation that gives the “human element” to music. So the real question is why does a distinction matter? Sure, the music you might hear your favorite DJ playing is coming from their laptop or CDJs, but that doesn’t make you any less likely to dance than say a full band running through funk classics.
Consider Tycho for just a second. His last two albums Dive and Awake are sun drenched and sand covered trips to the coastline that evoke more emotions than a bland generic band with your typical bass, guitar, drums setup. So why does Squarepusher feel it necessary to try to make a distinction between music by robots and music by humans? Would it be any different than Tycho programming a drum machine through MIDI because someone doesn’t “actually play” an instrument? While Squarepusher and The Z-Machine’s “Music For Robots” is a fun project, it really isn’t causing waves in a technological generation.
Ten years ago yesterday, one of the most important hip hop records of the 2000s came out. Madvillain, the combination of MF Doom and Madlib, released the fittingly named Madvillainy on Stones Throw Records. Making use of Madlib’s jazzy, crate digging production and Doom’s stream of consciousness rhymes. The album was abstract, broke down the typical format of hip hop songs, and is completely a unique release.
Ten years down the road, the record still sounds fresh, a quality many classics can claim. What makes this a truly special record is that while others have tried to emulate, nothing else comes close to Madvillainy. The blunted raps on Raid, All Caps, and obviously America’s Most Blunted flow well, but the abstractness of Bistro, Curls, and Rhinestone Cowboy also ground the listener into an altered reality.
22 songs in around 45 minutes is strange for any record (save maybe the most hardcore of punks) but does so in the world of hip hop. The record gets to the point, even if you’re not really quite sure what the point was. By today’s standards, even the more underground rap isn’t quite as adventurous and intellectual as Madvillainy.
The record spawned several singles, two remix EPs, one by Koushik, the other by Four Tet, and a re-imagined version by Madlib himself. While the group has only spawned one new song since, promises of a follow up are clouded by the ever mysterious Doom, who is apparently holding the project up. Since then Madlib has released many, many, many albums, while producing for tons of other rappers as well. Doom has released a few albums by himself and with others, but really nothing touches the legacy of Madvillainy.
Grime, mostly of the instrumental variety, had a hell of a year in 2013. With releases from the likes of Slackk, Logos, Visionist, Murlo, Rabit, Filter Dread, Mssingno, Dark0, and many more, the distinctly UK sound returned to critical acclaim in the wake of the dubstep explosion. Besides just being active and exciting, grime producers fired shots at one another with a very public and prolific battle of war dubs.
Aside from the clash of producers, one label seemed to stand above the rest in grime: Her Records. The label displayed some of the best forward thinking grime and bass music and is based out of South London.
Off the accolades of label co-head of Her Records Miss Modular’s Reflector Pack / Cruzer Edge EPcomes Her Records first release of the year with the other co-head Sudanim’s The Link EP. With everything expected, this five track EP is full of the metallic bass, off kilter eski-beats and punishing synths. The opening track, and title track, “The Link” opens like a hip hop beat out of hell, with punishing kicks, erratic percussion, reverb heavy vocal samples and all nasty synth stabs.The second track “Midrift” is just as great, built off airy and playful synths. A Neana mix at the end of the EP turns “Midrift” into a nice 4/4 banger with paranoid synths and schizophrenic vocal samples. “Lightmare”, the third track, opens softly until descending into an arpeggio of rain drop synths and detuned toms. Big and punishing, this seems to be the highlight of the EP, being suitable for the Night Slugs and Fade To Mind camp, with a noticeable nod to Jam City and Girl Unit. “The Thirst” suitably rounds out the original mixes, and sounds almost like what would happen if you ran a trap song through a grime filter then let Kode9 turn it into something suitable for his ever experimental label, Hyperdub.
Be sure to check out Sudamin’s new EP, The Link EP above, and get your hands on the name your price HERVOL002, a compilation from the label, below.
My first encounter with Perc was the lead track on his A New Brutality EPand that piercing high note entered my soul in a way very few ever have. By the time the boisterous kicks entered the fray, it was over. A New Brutality couldn’t have had a better title, but Perc’s latest album The Power and The Glory doesn’t quite live up to it’s title.
Perc, aka Alistair Wells of London, last released a full length in 2011 with Wicker & Steel but hasn’t necessarily remained quite, releasing at least 11 singles & EPs in the time between the two albums. The Power and The Glory is frankly about what you’d expect from the Brit: gritty textures, that locked groove rhythm, and punishment beyond punishment. The style has worked for Perc and is a very cool sound but how does that translate into an album?
Techno (and by extension, house) albums often feel dull. Very rarely can it sustain attention for longer than about twenty minutes. Perc falls into the stereotype by opening up his album with an ambient piece (featuring sampled dialog potentially explaining his philosophy nonetheless). It feels less of a gimmick and more of a sequencing choice when you realize the album’s middle and end are also being held up by ambient pieces. It breaks up what would otherwise be a very familiar record.
Songs like “Lurch”, “David & George”, and “Bleeding Colours” are exactly what’s to be expected from Perc. The heavy kick drums propel this record into an advanced and frantic sense of movement. “Dumpster” provides gleaming rave stabs that sound isolated on an otherwise angry album. The shuffle of “Galloper” has the shuffling percussive tendency of UK Garage, but the mean spirited attitude of the techno scene. My favorite moment was the last track before the closing ambience, “Take Your Body Off.” Those heavy kicks, stuttery clicks, and distorted vocal sample is all the ugliness and power expected from Perc. The power is definitely there, but maybe not the glory. Not to say The Power and The Glory isn’t any good, but it’s definitely not going to turn anyone onto techno that wasn’t already.
Helm, the alias of London sound artist Luke Younger, has been releasing music since 2007. It wasn’t until 2012’s Impossible Symmetry that Helm was known to much wider audience. That release came out on Pan, and started a wonderful relationship with him and the label. Helm’s recent release, The Hollow Organ, is his third release on Pan.
For the uninitiated, Pan releases music from experimental artists. So on first listen you might be looking at yourself if what you’re listening to is really music, but trust me, here’s a label that specializes in sound. The Hollow Organ is just another fantastic piece from Helm. It opens with a light drone that gives way to thumping percussion and the sounds of what could be a Tesla coil firing straight into you brain. Ominous doesn’t seem to do opening song “Carrier” the justice it deserves. As the storm subsides, it takes you to a leaky boiler room that is possibly being visited by alien invaders.
“Analogues”, the second track is a paranoid race through the dark alleyways of a city that seem entirely too foreign for somewhere you’ve been before. Just when you thought you had finally settled yourself out, a gang of dudes sweep you off of your feet and throw you into a van, carrying you into “Spiteful Jester.” It’s a mind scraping affair, and leaves you completely discombobulated. It doesn’t stop, as much as you keep forgetting it’s happening.
Closing track “The Hollow Organ” is far the greatest of the four tracks. Imagine after having your brain scrambled in the song before, you wake up and find yourself laying out on an examination chair in the middle of an empty room. You get the strange feeling that something isn’t right with you, and you vaguely remember something happening but you can’t quite place it. You head to the only exit, a large steel door that sits slightly open. Pushing the door open it’s obvious you’re in some underground location. Darkness surrounds you, save a couple of dim lights that flicker from the ceiling. The hallway in front of you extends for quite some distance. Doors are on your left and right, but most are locked, those that do open reveal rooms that have been caved in. Your footsteps echo in the most ominous of ways. You reach the end of the straight hallway with a daunting choice: Left or right? In the current haze you’re in, you choose left. As you go down the black hallyway, you eventually hear an organ being played above you. It’s very disorienting, but you push on regardless. The organ fades slightly, but you finally see light from around a corner. You head up the stairs from which this light is coming from and find yourself emerging in an alleyway. Next to you is an old warehouse you were apparently underneath. The location is familiar. You pass the warehouse all the time on your way to work, but never pay any mind to it. With the sound of the organ still faintly playing, you gather yourself and head home, not quite sure what just happened.
When I think of Glasgow and music, two things come to mind: post-rockers Mogwai who put out their eight studio album recently, and party starting LuckyMe, who probably ubiquitously predicted the trap movement. Mogwai is the long lasting post-rock group that as of recently have invited synthesizers into play. Menacing at times, and melancholy at others, Mogwai has proved to have lasting power in their almost twenty year career. In Contrast, LuckyMe has been around since 2008. The label started the career of Hudson Mohawke, and featured releases from Lunice, Rustie, Baauer, as well as the debut of TNGHT, and many more. So for two musical forces so vastly different, how do they come together? These two otherwise opposite forces come together on Sevendeaths’ Concreté Misery.
Concreté Misery combines the sensibilities of Mogwai along with Sunn O))) with sparkling synthesizers and just a dash of fear to create an amazing release. How does LuckyMe tie into this? Well, they released it. While it’s not that surprising to see a label try something new, it is definitely still unexpected. This album doesn’t amp listeners up with machine gun hi-hats, but rather sends rushes to the adrenaline by layering noise on top of noise. The paranoia builds and builds until you literally can’t take it anymore, and only then do the songs very politely come to a close.
Sevendeaths, aka Steven Shade, knows when to end it though. While drone can be fun in a punishing way, this album only lasts 34 minutes and is very nicely broken up into six songs. While we all love hour long drone records consisting of three 20 minute songs, Concreté Misery is very digestible. Unlike the type of art music the title takes after, elicits actual emotions and doesn’t feel like your run of the mill avant-gardish musique concrète.
In the early 90s, electronic music was still in it’s infancy. House and techno had been around for roughly six years with little variation coming out of it. While house saw it’s heyday out in Chicago with Frankie Knuckles as it’s pioneer, his former disco buddy from the Continental Baths, Larry Levan, was the head of the garage (sometimes referred to as Garage House or US Garage (as not to be confused with Garage Rock or UK Garage)) movement in New York City. Techno was born in Detroit but didn’t stay stateside for long after the Roland TB-303 was found to be an essential weapon eventually bringing acid house to the UK. Out of these eventually came styles of rave music for the kids with smiley faces on their shirts and vacant looks in their eyes. With all the influence of electronic music, as well as ragga, hip hop, and hardcore the genre of drum & bass (or Jungle depending on who you ask) was born, seemingly out of one sample.
In 2013 drum & bass came back in a big way. After electronic music had it’s flirts with pop culture (mainly big beat back in the late 90s, the short lived electroclash of the mid-aughts, and more recently dubstep’s claim to king) drum & bass made a big name for itself without sacrificing integrity. Not only has drum & bass come back as a force to reckon with, it brought the ghettohouse offshoots of juke and footwork with it. Not only have all these genres worked well separately, they flirted with each other in an unprecedented matter.
dBridge (one half of Instra:mental) curates on of the best drum & bass labels with it’s eye towards the future in Exit Records. While the first Mosaic comp is something of legend (featuring dubsteppers Scuba and Skream getting a little more loose with the drums) Mosaic Vol. 2 is the vision of what’s to come. Featuring the likes of Machinedrum, Synkro, Dub Phizix, J:Kenzo, Fracture and more, the comp takes the traditional ideas of drum & bass and breaks them down. The above song from Om Unit & Sam Binga is a strong highlight from a deep compilation.
Special Request is the not so secret alias of Paul Woolford and he definitely turns an ear to the past while pushing himself forward. This white label cut is almost so definitively old school it hurts, but Woolford’s debut full length under his Special Request alias, Soul Music, is something of beauty. It adds the old school appeal of jungle and even touches of hardcore and techno, but always moves forward with sound design. Although Woolford has also been keeping busy under his own name with more house oriented releases, Special Request truly owes a bit to the warehouse.
While being most often billed as a producer of dubstep or the ever ambiguous “UK bass”, Addison Groove has made his name on hyperactive drums and a crushing low end. While a move into drum & bass proper hasn’t happened yet, Addison Groove marries many genres together to act more as a transitional in between piece rather than anything that can be easily labeled. “Footcrab” makes all the more sense now days.
You can’t talk about drum & bass without talking about juke and footwork. And you definitely can’t talk about footwork and juke without talking about DJ Rashad. Rashad has released two EPs and one LP on the always forward thinking Hyperdub Records. Where most footwork and juke suffers from a fairly repetitive lifeless structure, Rashad blows life and soul into it. “Let It Go” acts as a perfect piece to bring you from D&B to the world of juke.
Speaking of Hyperdub, the boss himself, Kode9, has recently become infatuated with the Chicago sound of footwork and juke (check out his Rinse 22 mix CD where he plays no less than eight DJ Rashad songs). The man known for championing the weirder side of dubstep and Burial has really found himself in this new sound. Kode9’s creates something hectic and crazy, giving a distinctly new voice to footwork. Between running a label, using his PhD in philosophy to teach at the University of East London, and touring, Kode9 has still found time to turn out a proper banger.
This conversation wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Machinedrum. After finally finding his groove in 2011 with his album Room(s) and his work in the group Sepalcure, Machinedrum made one of 2013’s definitive 160bpm tunes. Although my initial impressions led me to believe this album, Vapor City, was nothing more than “what if Burial made footwork” the sound of this album is tightly coiled and well put together, there really is no equal for Machinedrum. The Berlin based American producer is definitely top dog these days.
Four Tet has had quite the illustrious career. He’s released six albums of his own, four collaborations with Steve Reid (under his birth name of Kieran Hebden), three collaborations with Burial (one included Radiohead’s Thom Yorke), four EPs, five mix CDs, 18 singles, over 50 remixes from artists ranging from Aphex Twin, Bloc Party, Hot Chip, Bonobo, Radiohead and more. Along the way he has become known as one of the most innovative and forward thinking electronic artists. He released his seventh album Beautiful Rewind (pictured above) this week with almost no fanfare. Near the end of July, Four Tet said that Beautiful Rewind would come out “soon.” On September 30th it was announced that Beautiful Rewind would come out the very next day.
Let’s flash back to earlier this year. Daft Punk and Boards of Canada both announced new albums, the first for both groups in eight years. Both groups launched extensive if not completely different media campaigns. Daft Punk had giant billboards and posters featuring their signature helmets as well as a 15 second teaser during SNL, a trailer at Coachella (video is above), and an album premiere in a town of 2,000 in Australia. Boards of Canada took a much more mysterious route, releasing a single record on Record Store Day with a snippet of music and mysterious numbers (video of which is below). More mysterious numbers appeared on BBC Radio 1, NPR, Adult Swim, and more. A link found in the source code of a banner on the Boards of Canada Youtube led to a website where the numbers were the mysterious numbers were used as a password that let you access a video and pre-order link to the album.
So which method of hype is better? Do you go for the prolonged marketing campaign or quietly drop an album with almost no press? If you prolong a release it’s going to build up hype for an album with tons of people talking about it. The expectations then becomes that album must be phenomenal and one of the best of the year. Anything short of amazing is simply a dud in the eyes of the listeners. Having no press at all does quite the opposite. It sets absolutely no expectations which can make a listener inflate the actual quality of the album. Having no press as well doesn’t guarantee huge success either unless you have a huge fan base.
What do you think? Are either strategies good for releasing an album? How would you release your album?
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