deeptime

Didn’t realize that MTL Funky mix link was 404. All fine now…

You might remember Mr. Bump from early on in the Blogariddims series – bottom-heavy, a bit rowdy.  He dredged up those old swung beats with the rude basslines and sugary vocals – dance tunes – back when everyone was half steppin. Next came a very brief but thrilling career as a pioneer of the UK Funky thing in North America. Road trips, thronging dancefloors, specials from the likes of Sticky and Lil Silva. But Bump is fickle, and just as things were picking up, he went into deep hibernation.  Rumours followed: solder addiction, more important things to do…

But just when it looked like he’d disappeared for good, up pops Bump on a bill with his old Skull-and-Bones buddy in Montreal, care of Komodo Dubs.  Feb. 20, 2010 at Société des arts technologiques (SAT), Montreal.

Here’s an 80-minute live set from Bump’s triumphant appearance at MTL Funky back in April (later featured on Kuma’s Art of Beatz radio show out of Vancouver).  Some rare bits, dubs and custom edits in the mix. The recording’s a bit crunchy in spots and some good bits got lopped off either end (Heatwave ‘Do You Mind’ reggae refix, Crazy Cousinz ‘Go,’ and a dark stepper by Restless 1).  Toronto Funky’s MC Plain English gets on the mic at about 28min.  It was big night…

mp3 – Mr. Bump w/ MC Plain English live @ MTL Funky April 2009 (96 Mb)

TRACKLIST:
[00:00] Terry Hunter – Flying
[01:00] Lil Silva – Different (special)
[04:00] Kenny Dope – Do It (O Gutta Rmx)
[06:05] Perempay & Dee – Buss It
[08:45] Addictive – Girl Like Me (DJ Naughty Mix)
[10:45] Donaeo – Devil in a Blue Dress Instr.
[13:00] Donaeo – African Warrior Instr.
[15:10] Sticky – Jumeirah Riddim (special / Bump edit)
[17:55] Sticky ft. Simi & Lady Chan – How Very Dare U (special)
[20:50] D Malice – Monopoly Refix
[21:20] Princess – Frontline
[22:50] Lil Silva – Season
[26:30] NB Funky – Riddim Box
[28:30] Geeneus – Into the Future
[31:45] Kode9 & LD – 2 Bad
[33:35] Crazy Cousinz – Inflation
[36:30] Cooly G – Dis Boy
[37:50] Swift Jay – Toppa
[40:20] NB Funky – Compromise
[42:00] Grievous Angel – Loser Refix (special)
[44:15] DJ Gregory – Klappa
[46:30] Geeneus – Yellowtail
[49:00] Roska – Climate Change
[50:00] Lil Silva – Funky Pulse
[52:00] Hard House Banton – Reign
[56:45] Dj Gregory – Don’t PAnic (Karizma Dub)
[57:15] Lighter – Skanker
[58:50] D Malice – My Joy Refix
[62:45] Fingaprint – The Print
[64:00] Fingaprint – Takeover
[66:15] Tadow – Jump Up
[68:00] Tadow – Cowboy
[69:30] Hard House Banton -  Sirens
[71:40] Wookie – Loco
[72:45] Dennis Ferrer – Touched the Sky (Quentin Harris Dub)
[75:30] Roska – Gone to a Better Place
[77:20] Roska – Elevated Level
[78:45] Aaron Carl – Oassis (Nick Holder Dub)
[80:00] Ear Dis – I Feel
[81:55] D Malice – Keep On (Bump edit)

Very promising looking new magazine in the works. The Queitus – “[catering to] the intelligent music fan between the age of 21 and 73″ – is set to launch a print version in the next couple of months. For now, they’ve got an already impressive blog where Melissa Bradshaw’s unleashed this gem on Sonic Warfare.

Funkineven is good.  ‘Kleer’ – woozy moog funk, dash of wonk, hazey vox, namechecking Plastic People. ‘Mad Swing,’ same deal. ‘You’ is drunk-paced vocal science – Todd Edwards at -8.

Exceedingly literal example of SF Capital from Native Instruments with their new ‘Sonic Fiction‘ soft synth.  Finally, someone has translated Eshun’s Afrofuturist conceptronics into something we can all buy enjoy: a feature rich, user friendly addition to NI’s prosumer-oriented Kore Audio platform.  Developed by Jeremiah Savage… “SONIC FICTION uses concepts and scenarios from the world of science fiction as its creative source.”  According to the literature, “Jeremiah’s passion for the philosophical hypotheses in the best of sci-fi literature and film translates into 100 evocative, otherworldly and yet always highly-playable instruments, with 800 individual sound variations.” Deep.  If only Sun Ra had had ones of these.

I got hacked a couple of weeks ago, which has set me back a bit.  That Mr.Bump/Funky post and others are coming but I had to do a lot of damage control after an iframe injection attack that left all of my sites quarantined by Google/Firefox.  The good news is that the blog and Dark Disco were easy to rescue, but I ended up destroying Riddim.ca in order to save it.  Long story, but it’s currently being rebuilt (something I wanted to do anyway) and should back online by the New Year at the latest, possibly with a substantial ‘director’s cut’ of my Dusk & Blackdown interview for Woofah #3, plus some vintage mixes and scans.

In the meantime…

Two debut books coming in the next month from k-aliased CCRU alumni whose writing has left a mark on my thinking over the last few years.  In Capitalist Realism (Zero Books), Mark Fisher questions why we can more readily imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism, while Steve Goodman begins from a very broad definition of Sonic Warfare (MIT Press) to examine constellations of sound, affect and power.  I’ve been especially anxious to see Steve’s book in print, as my doctoral work covers related conceptual territory (not too related though – I’ll admit to a sigh of relief after scanning the index) and we’ve had various, usually too-brief, discussions about this stuff in three different cities since I first met him at FWD» in 2005.  For the curious, MIT has generously posted two sample chapters (titles like ‘1993: Vorticist Rhythmachines’ bode well) along with back and front matter.  Both books can be pre-ordered now.

Stand up bit of archival work over at Uncarved. I love this kind of thing – unearthing and scanning in old fragments from before the www info deluge.  John really nails that feeling you’d get when an unexpected bit of print could open you up to a whole new realm of music and ideas.  There was more detective work – more suspense and surprise.  Instead of wiki and an evening’s downloads, I’d pore over pieces like this, extracting whatever clues and partial leads I could.  Sometimes it would take years to sort out connections or hear things I’d read about.  Other times it would be some massive, sudden revelation via print or tape.  I’d be hard pressed to get sentimental over anything in my browser bookmarks but I’ve got 20-year-old clippings I treat like gold.

3×12″ Vinyl
Perlon (PERL76)
October 2009

‘Not an album’ from Sam Shackleton but a coincidental set of ‘EPs’ packaged together by German techno label Perlon.  The following is not a review.

A1  (No More) Negative Thoughts
B1  Let Go
B2  It’s Time for Love

In some other version of now, it was Mala’s ‘Conference’ not Coki’s ‘Haunted’ that proliferated like rhythmachinic spam filling up the shops and forums.  There, it’s all about delirious, teasing rhythms, percussive texture, weird incantations, flailing arms in dark rooms decorated by chthonic slide projections.  Ongy bongy, etc.  Space with your weight.  Shackleton is iconic of the whole thing and ‘Splash‘ goes for £100 on Discogs.

Several years on from the first Skull Disco releases, ex-pat Shackleton keeps a studio in a former East German broadcast centre. Like fellow travelers Mordant Music, his idosyncratic catalogue is easy to see as a genre unto itself.  Its sounds and themes are nurtured and re-crafted from record to record but they never settle.  A languid rhythmic psychedelia – first fully explored in 2007’s ‘You Bring Me Down‘ – has become his specialty.  ‘Let Go’ sees him back in 140bpm territory, beats halting and skipping, almost Jungle-like, around an agitated bass pulse.  It’s hazy, radios are squealing, and something keeps attacking from above.  Down in the runout groove German cartoon men talk about pants.

C1  Mountains of Ashes
C2  There’s a Slow Train Coming
D1  Moon Over Joseph’s Burial

‘Moon Over Joseph’s Burial’ – Skull Disco’s conceptual start point was the intergenerational necrorave – dig up your kin and get down.  ‘Moon…’ goes deeper.  Loose earth, lost footing.  Tricky slopes from a pitchbent organ.  Rhythms from bones and trinkets. Viscous drips that chatter across long corridors before flooding forward, leaving all the percussive bits to slosh around in a subterranean tide.  Scrapes and struggle.  Body-swelling pressure.  “Oh… oh .. oh. ..” a step out of time and repeating vacantly.  A mournful chorus responds but it’s out of reach and its song makes no sense anyway. Altogether it brings to mind a mind lingering longer than we’d like to think – after the end – shuttling between earthly ego panic and uneasy calm: Joseph perched at a threshold between the corporeal and a none-too-inviting Something Else.  Dim panic and glimpses through decomposition, and then it’s over, constantly, forever.  Liminal calm in lockgroove catatonia.

E1  Asha in the Tabernacle
F1  Trembling Leaf
F2  Something has got to Give

“He’s got the whole wide world in his hands…,” pitched down like a chorus of Jolly Green Giants.  What do you make of ‘Asha in the Tabernacle’?  ”Sense it, know it, let it be.”  It’s another disorienting micro-epic: trip-you-up drums and bass, breathy pads in distress, and rapturous chants.  Somethig big is happening but we’re not meant to know what it is.  On the F-side, ‘Something has got to Give’ amplifies the tension and the noise.  More voices, more difficulty breathing, then quieter, into Photek-like suspense scene of reverberant percussion and an insistent, muted throbbing.  Recommended!

Buy Three EPs at Boomkat

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Next: The surprising reappearance of Mr.Bump and the circumstances surrounding his equally sudden return to obscurity.

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“After the initial call for contributions some ten months ago, I am now delighted to announce the launch of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. The first edition of Dancecult, a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC), is now live, with downloadable PDFs accessible at http://dj.dancecult.net. Alongside Managing Editor Eliot Bates and Reviews Editor Karenza Moore – who have thrown themselves headlong into the journal – I am happy to see the EDMC research mothership slide down the sluiceway to begin her maiden voyage.”

- Graham St John, Executive Editor for Dancecult

I joined the dancecult listserv a couple of years ago and, while there have been some sparks, the discussion never kicked off with the intensity I’d hoped for (not that I helped much).  It also became clear, watching those discussions on one hand, and the whole (let’s say) Dissensus-FACT-WIRE-etc. axis on the other, that a lot of people with similar interests weren’t really on each other’s radar.  But, judging from its impressive advisory panel and the diverse list of contributors to the first issue, the new Dancecult Journal looks like it could be a major step towards something more rigorous and productive.  Take for example, the whole hardcore continuum debate [three links from the multitude], which has gone on ad nauseum in Dissensian circles without seeming to accomplish much more than a retrenchment of positions.  If, as some defenders of the concept have argued, opponents of the HHC haven’t offered up adequate theoretical alternatives, then DJ issue 1 makes a step toward soliciting new critical responses by including a pair of HHC articles from Discographies co-author Jeremy Gilbert and Mark (k-punk) Fisher.

All in all, it’s a good start: a theory-focused venue for discussions that are too often reduced – in the blogosphere, etc. – to arguments over the merits of theorizing culture at all.  And, as a peer-reviewed e-journal, it can be both rigorous and nimble, keeping better pace with accelerated music culture than slow-moving print journals usually manage. So, congratulations to the editors.  Hopefully I’ll add something to it myself in the near future.

The full contents of Volume 1, Issue 1 are available here in HTML and PDF formats.

Erkki Kurenniemi
Computer Music
19??

Erkki Kurenniemi
Electronics in the World of Tomorrow
1968

These days I’m more solder and flux than diamonds and wax, if you know what I mean. This one’s for Gutta because I think he’ll like it.  Last winter I was supposed to release some of my early electronics-and-tape experiments on his netlabel Bleepfiend. But, regretfully, I bailed after losing confidence in the material.  After keeping it to myself for almost 15 years it was difficult to imagine people listening to it.  Now it seems the label has been mothballed, which is too bad because it was a great idea with some really promising stuff lined up.  I hope he tries again in the future.

Illuminated Man

For those who didn’t catch it, ‘Deeptime’ is a nod to JG Ballard’s first neuronic odyssey, The Drowned World. And the last ten minutes of my 2007 Blogariddims mix was also a partial tribute to the book, meant to work as a soundtrack to its closing lines.  Ballard died of prostate cancer in April and it’s really good to see some projects popping up in his memory.  His death nearly brought me back to blogging, and I actually sketched out a couple of different posts, but it felt unnecessary as more eloquent tributes from those who knew him began to accumulate at Ballardian.  Still, I was struck by two things.  First, how strange it seemed to enter an era ‘after Ballard’ knowing that a ‘Ballardian’ condition only seems set to become more the norm in coming years.  That’s what oracles are all about though isn’t it?   Second, was just a fascination with his time in Canada: training and discovering science fiction, in the early-1950s, at the same RCAF base where my grandfather (who died in a similar fashion) had been a flight instructor during the war, and then, writing his first stories on a 3000 mile winter train ride through every place I’ve lived between Alberta and Quebec (by which time my grandfather was working those rail lines as an engineer tasked with tidying up after crashes and derailments).

In any case, now that the brief wave of mainstream media memorializing/recuperation has passed, we’re starting to see artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers collaborating on works in his honour.  Ike Yard’s Stuart Argabright has been at the centre of it all, and he’s given this loose itinerary of upcoming projects and events…

Read the rest of this entry »

After lurking around the edges of Funky (see last year’s enticing vocal number ‘How Very Dare You’), UKG / Grime don Sticky lobs this grenade onto the dancefloor. Fierce as all get out – easily an 11 on the ‘African Warrior’ Scale .  You wouldn’t want it all to be like this but it’s perfect peak set material. Loads of vocals forthcoming, apparently.

Sticky – Jumeirah Riddim

So today is the end of Blogariddims. Eleven of us have contributed ~6-minute mini mixes to mark the occasion and it all kicks off right here. Thanks again to Droid for asking me to be a part of this amazing series. I know it’s taken a lot of work on his part and I think it’s fair to say that the results have exceeded everyone’s expectations: 200 000+ downloads to date, a 23-hour Blogariddims orgy on WHRB Cambridge, and lots of positive responses from listeners. Out to all the contributors and thanks for putting me on to so much music I’d have never heard otherwise.

LINKS: Last post (Droid intro) / Next post (JEPM: Eden + Meme) / Audio link (Blogariddims 50 mp3)

Musical Astronauts

This piece is actually a much condensed version of something I’d been putting together for Rayna Modifyer’s Process podcast series. The idea there was a Sun Ra-laden sonic fiction adventure, inspired in part by paul.meme’s Fusion Dub Blogariddims mix, but pulling together bits of futuristic disco (think Instant Funk’s ‘Dark Vader’), moog funk, and very early hip-hop, with grainy documentary parts layered in. Unfortunately, that fell apart. But the pieces gave me this.

What it is: Last winter, I finally got the chance to methodically read through just about every Afrofuturist text I’ve ever been able to track down, from manifestos and fiction to academic work. It was dark and we were being buried under more snow than the city had seen in forty years. Winter is the best time to hibernate on an alternate plane and one result was a new obsession with Sun Ra, whose records I began devouring with help from Ian down at Sounds Unlikely, and Graham Lock’s book Blutopia. Ra’s project is Alter Destiny, and he finds it between an Egyptian (not Israelite) past and a galactic future: the dawn of the Space Race. But before he was an aviator, Ra was strictly avian, named for a falcon-headed God, his space chants reworking celestially-themed Baptist sermons with Egyptian bird imagery. By the late-1950s, though, Ra had found that B-movie science fiction offered better vehicles for space travel, and so his bird-gods receded into the background.

This little mix stays with the birds. In the beginning it’s drums and forest singing together, then the calls detach into dub space and circuitry. Into the future, the beat comes back as a robot and so goes the bird. But then that fades into an unforeseen alter destiny in the shape of an urban samurai whose best friends are an obsolete communications technology.

Tracklist:

Sun Ra – The Magic Sun (Phil Niblock, 1966)
Spring Morning, 31 Birdsongs (Peter Kilham, 1963)
Ruanda: Tambours Royaux (Infor Congo, ?)
X Clan – Earth Bound (4th & B’way, 1990)
Sun Ra – Voice of Space (Saturn, 1963)
Ed Rush – Bludclot Artattack Remix, Lick II (No U-Turn, 1994)
Field Recording
Funkadelic – Get Off your Ass and Jam (Westbound, 1975)
Fab 5 Freddy – Cuckoo Clocking (Wildstyle, 1982)
Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch/RZA, 1999)

Terminus:

0- Droid Intro blog post
1- Autonomic (6:01)
2- JEPM (eden + meme) (8:41)
2.1- JEPM (eden + meme)
3- Matt B (6:33)
4- Rambler (7:09)
5- Wayne (7:00)
6- Droid (7:44)
7- Gutta (6:02)
8- Heatwave (6:04)
9- Hal (8.01)
10- Flack (6:15)
11– Slug/Droid outro blog post

I’m behind on a lot of things right now thanks to a bad case of RSI, but I’ve been meaning to post about this.  Dusk and Blackdown’s album Margins Music has finally been released and, along with it, a stunningly produced video.  It’s not a music video in the usual sense – it cuts together multiple tracks from the album set to lush but quick-shifting visuals from the streets of London. The cuts caught me by surprise at first, but in the end it works because this five minute clip is like a condensed version of Margins Music itself: a set of looping trajectories and rough juxtapositions that make up Dusk and Blackdown’s personal geography of the city.

I was lucky enough to get a preview of the album in the spring and it’s been a rotation all summer.  By no means is it the quintessential dubstep that some might have expected from the pair. Dusk and Blackdown took a chance when they decided to base an album largely on their shared love of grime and desi beats. But it works well thanks to solid, creative production work and some of the year’s best vocals, provided by Farrah, Teji, Durrty Goodz and Trim.

I’ve got a hefty interview with Dusk and Blackdown forthcoming in the long-awaited third issue of Woofah (and I think there’s a review from Gutta), with a ‘director’s cut’ likely to follow sometime later at Riddim.ca.  In the meantime though, Melissa Bradshaw’s done an excellent two-parter with Blackdown, Dusk and Farrah over at Decks in the City.

* * *

Last note – things haven’t been totally quiet the last couple of months.  With help from Siah Alan and Tim Finney, I’ve tentatively revived Riddim.ca to cover rumblings in the fast-mutating UK House/Funky scene which I’ve been quietly obsessing over more and more since the last winter.  I haven’t wanted to add to the hype machine by gushing about it here but, like I said a while back, it’s an exciting ‘wot do u call it?’ moment right now and I’m not sure we’ll even quite grasp it until it’s nearly past.

First up, an interview with Roska.  Check back for more in the coming weeks.

Reading: JG Ballard High Rise
Listening to: Theo Parrish First Floor

Iain Sinclair in the LRB on the razing of East London for the 2012 Olympics:

The scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin in 1936 to Beijing in 2008. Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals returned by disgraced drug cheats to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason).

‘Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.’ One of those caveats from A Thousand Plateaus that people forget when they get too wrapped up in their rhizomes and nomads.  Derive without a map.  According this post over at Vimothy’s House of War that’s where the Israeli IDF found itself after after shelving Sun Tzu for Deleuze, Guattari and Debord ahead of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon.  Apparently there was something to the Frieze article from that year which claimed that smoothing was the IDF’s new strategy for overcoming complicating striations like the walls between people’s homes.  Doors and streets are obsolete, just smash and move – up, down, sideways – invisible from the outside.  Now, Vimothy links to an analysis of the 2006 disaster published in The Journal of Strategic Studies which claims that Israel’s fatal blundering had something to do with commanders getting so wrapped up in post-structuralist theory that they forgot how formulate straightforward commands and objectives.

So many people doing cool things right now…

Gutta’s Bleepfiend label kicks off with 10 attic recordings, circa 1993-95, from No. 1 Astronaut, aka, Bob Bharma, “slightly better known today as one half of ’space loop’ composers Data 70.”  Artwork by Woofah contributor Doppleganger and it’s completely free.  »»  Paul ‘Grievous Angel/777/Shards and Fragments’ Meme’s debut full-length CD has landed at Boomkat after many months of preparation.  I’ve had this on a CD-r for a while (’Move Down Low’ was in that Mutantextures mix I did in the winter) and I’m digging Paul’s ‘Ragga Techno’ thing.  Looking forward to the reaction and to the non-album 12″ ‘Lady Dub’ which has to be one of my favourite dubstep tracks in the last year.  Too bad I lost my 320.  »»  My Fellow Americans – Dan ‘Lower End Spasm‘ Hancox and Tom Humberstone’s blog about touring through the US during the Democratic primaries – has turned into a book of Dan’s writing and Tom’s original art.   Independently published and available online at Vented Spleen.  »»  Finally, it looks like Woofah #3 is nearing completion and the contents are just redonkulous. Watch for my Dusk and Blackdown interview.

Also recently launched is Grimetapes.com.  For years, some of us have been pining for early grime adopters like Luka and Silverdollar to digitize their stacks of pirate tapes and put them online.  Dissensus’ slackk has finally set the ball rolling with a dedicated web space and contributions coming from all over.

And, look who’s back: patternloader, sodiumnighlife, and loveecstasycrime.

Clever. Eden tricks me into posting again by naming me in a blog meme. I haven’t quit, I just haven’t had anything to say.

From Transpontine:

‘List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to’.

1. Sun Ra ‘Voice of Space’
Bit of a toss-up here, I’ve been listening to a few records pretty incessantly. You could spend a lifetime getting to know this stuff. Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy – that’s the basic theme.

2. Dusk & Blackdown ft. Durrty Goodz ‘Concrete Streetz’
Love this.

3. Dusk & Blackdown ‘Rolling Raj Deep’
Don’t call it deski. Seriously. But these desi-grime-dubstep tracks on Margins Music are killer.

4. MF Doom ‘One Beer’
I’ve probably listened to more MF Doom than anything else in the last year. I’d been a big fan of KMD and was just getting into the Doom material when grime abducted me. Five years later I’m picking up where I left off. This one’s from MM.. Food. ‘Beef Rapp’ probably wins the day on that one, but it’s sunburns & patios season now and ‘One Beer’ has been knocking around my head lately.

5. Parliament ‘Flashlight’
Zapp’s ‘Dance Floor’ was a contender too. Love that deep, subby, moog funk.

6. Ramadanman ‘Blimey’
Reminds me of Musik-era Plastikman. Wooden, clompy percussion and barely a hint of a bassline. Hessle Audio – Freshness Guaranteed.

7. Ghettovets ‘Lecture’
The Rammellzee in session. Go get a late pass. “If you can find this in your logic banks, then press code 2, and do what it says.” Sneeze with me.

And I’m tagging…

gutterbreakz
paul.meme
loveecstasycrime (you still there mate?)
dense media domain
dot-alt (alex or dan)
patternloader
sodiumnightlife

I’ve been meaning to post this all week. Exciting news from Bristol as Gutta launches a new net label called Bleepfiend devoted to lost-found tapes of homemade electronic music. Paleo-techno. The contributors, he notes, will tend to be of a certain vintage – old enough to remember cable tangles, 4-tracks and tiny LCDs, but young enough to count things like hip hop and house as major instigators.

As the blurb says…

This is music made at subsistence level, harnessing whatever technology was available or affordable at the time, from analogue synths to cheap home keyboards, extinct micro-computers to domestic tape recorders. It is the sound of struggle – the creative urge pushing against limitations, forcing the artists to develop their own recording strategies.

The music on offer was recorded in a time before the Internet made it possible to upload, share and promote work to a wider audience. This is music that never had a chance to be heard by anyone outside the artist’s immediate circle of friends. But still it exists…it’s forgotten potential locked in the ferric particles of dusty cassette tapes…

Bleepfiend operates a strict ‘No Soft-Studios’ policy.

I love the prospect of these long-hidden, private electronic worlds being unearthed. Looks like Patchwerkman and Ed DMX releases are already lined up. Who knows what else is out there in the boxes and basements of the now-famous and still anonymous alike.

Oh and it’s all free on a Creative Commons license. Very nice.

Bleepfiend Home: http://www.bleepfiend.co.uk/bleepfiend/
Bleepfiend Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/bleepfiend

Above: J. Mourinho, kode9 and Burial in a press briefing. Not pictured: Burial.

Just a few short notes because I’m too deep in comp studying to do any more for the next while:

John says the long-awaited second issue of Woofah is currently at the printers and should be hitting shops shortly. More of the same stupidly good editorial content now wrapped in a sexy full-colour cover. Number 1 sold out fast so don’t sleep on this.

Issue 8 of the MONU the Magazine on Urbanism is also out. This time the theme is Border Urbanism with articles on cultures of liminality that emerge in political edge-zones. Also interesting-looking is mu•dot (’the magazine for urban documentation, opinion and theory) which split off from MONU in the fall and (a bit confusingly) kept the old domain name.

And I should have posted this earlier, but if you’re in Ottawa tonight, it’s worth trying to penetrate the blizzard to get yourself to Ladies in the House @ Babylon. It’s an all female lineup of DJs (CPI, Kareyn, Jas Nasty, Ruby Jane and Mz Revolution) and B-girls in celebration of International Women’s Day. A lot of work has gone into this party and proceeds are going to Harmony House, a second stage shelter for women and their children, so it would be a shame if the weather ruined it. Doors open at 10.

Mostly built from promos and CD-Rs that people have been kind enough to send over the last couple of months, along with some older bits that seemed to compliment them. The emphasis is squarely on mutant styles and experimental tangents. I cobbled it together fairly quickly so it doesn’t have quite the polish of previous ones. Also, the mixing style is much more relaxed and less layered than before with a bit more emphasis on effects work, lots of EQ-shifting, etc.

Download
[18 tracks / 50 min / 70 Mb]

Shackleton ft. MC Tenfold Vengeance ‘The Branch is Weak’ (cd-r)
Shackleton ft. MC Tenfold Vengeance ‘Death is Not Final’ (cd-r / Skull Disco)
Grievous Angel ft. Rubi Dan ‘Move Down Low’ (cd-r/edit)
T++ ‘Tensile’ (Erosion)
The Bug ft. Flowdan ‘Skeng’ kode9 remix (Hyperdub)
Exemen ‘Far East’ (Manchu)
2562 ‘Circulate’ (Tectonic)
2562 ‘Kameleon’ (Tectonic)
T++ ‘Space Break’ (Erosion)
Appleblim and Peverelist ‘Over Here’ (Skull Disco t/p)
Pinch ‘Dr Carlson’ (cd-r / forthcoming Punch Drunk)
Untold ‘Purify’ (cd-r / forthcoming Hessle Audio)
Pangea ‘Nest’ (Hessle Audio)
Shackleton ‘Death is Not Final’ T++ remix (Skull Disco t/p)
Pinch ‘136 Trek’ (cd-r / forthcoming Punch Drunk)
Untold ‘Kingdom’ (cd-r / forthcoming Hessle Audio)
Ikonika ‘Please’ (Hyperdub)
Amen-Ra & Double Helix ‘Demon Slayer’ (cd-r)

In a similar vein, be sure to check out this excellent mix from the reborn Patchwerk Man. Also Nick’s introduction to T++ from a couple of months back.

TOGETHER AT LAST! Islington’s favourite Elvis and Shackleton make it warm-n-easy on a New Year’s Eve.

Thanks Sam!

“And you’ll never hear music like this again”
- MC GQ (AWOL tape, 1993)

Maybe it’s time to revive ‘Forward Sound,’ though maybe in the plural. Circa 2003 that was the open-ended term that used to describe what eventually became dubstep, along with a tangle of threads that split off or got left behind. Just like house first meant “what they play at the Warehouse,” it was a reference to the club night itself, the only place where you could hear as yet unnamed new mutations of the garage machine, whether in the form of Ghost, Landslide, Menta, kode9, Plasticman, Hatcha, Slimzee, etc, etc. And of course it was hardly a ’sound’ at all. Virtually every artist operating under that banner was a sound unto themselves and the Forward style could only ever be a snapshot of those trajectories out of UK garage that happened to be coinciding on a given Thursday night or in narrow bands of pirate ether.

Forward Sounds: mutant offspring straying into the house, swiping tools from the garage, and hallucinating new machines. For my money, the most exciting times in music are always the ones without names, when refugee styles get promiscuous in the zones between the trodden paths. Seven years on from the first FWD», I think it’s fair to say that the most interesting things in dubstep are increasingly outside. The D is contested territory, expanding around the world while, at the same time, narrowing its musical ambitions. Dubstep’s new mainstream seems happy enough to keep their options limited while more experimental types are left to decide whether they should cling to the name or cut themselves adrift.

In fact, the seismic rumblings seem to be getting louder across the entire spectrum of late-UKG these days. It’s not just dubstep that’s breaking up again. Grime’s undergone its own identity crisis in the last couple of years, struggling with quality control and losing venues over real and imagined violence. Now it’s bleeding into funky/UK house, last year’s bogeyman, death knell of “nuum” (or was that dubstep again?) which itself is slowly turning into a source of tentative optimism. Producers like Apple are hinting at the sort of mutations that originally made UKG into an interesting local product. Meanwhile, D1’s forthcoming track I’m Lovin is being billed by Tempa as a “Dubstep/funky house mutation.”

RWD Mag founding editor Matt Mason recently had this to say on the ‘Maybe Funky House will turn out OK‘ thread over at Dissensus:

It seems like there is a real convergence going on between all the (not so) different London scenes; grime, dupstep, UKG, bassline and funky house are all being appreciated by DJs and clubbers who claim to be into different sounds.

To me a set of all these styles played together doesn’t sound too different from a 1997 UK garage set, when producers, DJs and clubbers were, imho, far less conservative about what they considered appropriate for the dance floor. Which meant you had a scene with the broad mindedness to include everything from DJ Zinc to Masters at Work to TuffJam to Groove Chronicles to TJ Cases. I think this diversity was part of UKG’s (then) mass appeal.

Is this something people could see happening again? It sounds like it might be already.

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Tommorow: Roll Call (edit: delayed but coming soon)

I was a bit surprised, a couple of weeks back, to be offered a review copy of Caspa and Rusko’s forthcoming mix CD from Fabric, the offshoot label of the trendy London nightclub. Surprised because I’ve made no bones about my distaste for the brand of dubstep that the disc seemed to be showcasing. Still, I kept an open mind and gave it a go. Maybe it would reveal some new energy bubbling in the mainstream of the genre that I’d been missing since my retreat to the fringe.

Now up to #37, the FabricLive series has been churning out high profile mixes from the likes of Diplo, High Contrast, Andy C, Ricardo Villalobos and Herbaliser since 2001. This is their first dip into the D, which I suppose makes it some sort of 00’s answer to 1995’s A.W.O.L. Live at the Ministry of Sound. Caspa and Rusko might seem a bit of a surprise choice for the job, especially when someone like Skream is only just putting out his first commercial mix and other early innovators haven’t yet had the chance. But maybe that’s the point: take two heads who sum up the sound of dubstep’s new popularity and let them mark their territory. Visionaries they’re not though, and what we get here is a profoundly unidimensional display of tweakhead bass churn and little else. Unfortunately, Dissensus’ Noel Emits hit the nail on the head when suggested it’s “like a concentration camp for all the big wobblas. Just get it out of your system so you don’t have to worry about it again.” If only they’d go away.

Who stole the soul?

Titles like Big Headed Slags, Well ‘Ard and Cockney Thug seem to sum up what Caspa and Rusko are all about when then get behind a mixing desk. And in case you forget that they lace it all with some well ‘ard cockney vocal samples, distilling the technique to minimalist perfection in Thug’s fack! hook. Brilliant. Their combined 15 track contribution to the mix sets the tone with L-Wiz, Cotti, Matty G, The Others, and a few more, mostly drawn from the Dub Police and Sub Soldiers catalogues, filling in the rest.

Early on we get some well-worn dubstep-isms: Caspa’s Cockney Violin does the Hero-esque ‘Eastern’ thing to the hilt and the Tes La Rock remix of Uncle Sam’s Round the Way Girls is one of those dull exercises in fitting a reggae tune into a dubstep template. L-Wiz’s Girl from Codeine City is inoffensive enough but the saxophone bits are a little too 80s soft rock a la Jerry Rafferty, for my tastes. We also get Matty G’s 50 000 Watts VIP, the original of which seemed to become a hit largely on the basis of it being the first instance of someone copying Loefah really well. From the sixth track on we’re treated to a parade of harder-than-though metallic wobbles. It’s the march of the funkless farting robots. And that’s fine if you like that sort of thing, but I really don’t understand this sound’s tenacity. Some have called this a collection of ‘dancefloor bangers’ or ‘crowd pleasers’ which supposedly reaches its pinnacle in the can opener wobbles of Coki’s Spongebob. But what exactly is the appeal of being in that crowd, on that floor? Granted, I haven’t heard Spongebob at full wattage but I can’t see that helping. All it brings to mind is bad nights out in a crowd of over-macho young guys, and that state of dissociative numbness that floods in when it seems as though the sound system has turned against you, personally. Coki, like Loefah, has taken maybe more than his fair share of criticism for stubbornly pushing a singular sound up to and beyond its best before date. But credit to both of them for developing something unique and working to perfect it. This disc reminds us that it’s the acolytes who’ve taken over the man’s sonic territory, kicked it down a notch, and expanded it into a stifling monoculture.

One of the few bright lights here is utterly out of place D1 track I’m Loving from his forthcoming Tempa release. I’ve often found D1 too cold and clinical but less so lately. I’m Loving is outright garage-y – and I mean overtones of New York – but by this point it’s a bit like waiting until injury time to trot out your star player. The one Skream track is barely distinguishable from the rest of the disc, though it does have that extra bit of rhythmic panache that sets even his lesser work a little apart from the pack. The Buraka Som Sistema remix of Cockney Thug provides some brief flashes of joyous energy, though the buzzing dnb-syle synths are grating, at least after an hour of wobbles. The last few tracks are aimed at smoothing things out and, while they veer into New Age synth washes, they at least provide a bit of variation. The most successful of this lot is ConQuest’s Forever which, despite its Lonely Planet tinge, also pares itself down to a nice conga-driven pulse that’s reminiscent of Loefah’s Truly Dread.

What this CD needs from the outset is more of the rhythmic, sonic and emotional breadth that’s kept in reserve until the end. And that doesn’t seem like too much to ask from Caspa and Rusko who, according to the press release, both grew up surrounded by diverse musical influences, including classical training, punk collecting dads, tips from Iration Steppas and a mom who sang in a “weird kind of country/folk” band. Bring all of that together and you could have something that really turns the D on its head rather than a summary of the stagnating trends that have turned mainstream dubstep into an emotional cripple.

That said, this will undoubtedly sell well because, in late-2007, it pushes all the right buttons with the dnb-affiliated demographic that Fabric is openly be courting. If you think ‘cold wobbla’ when you think dubstep, then this is the one for you. If you’re like me lately, you might have found yourself qualifying the term ‘dubstep’ when people ask about your tastes.

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Tomorrow: Forward Sound Part 1