SECURE SHOPPING
R&S have shared a new Pariah track as a preview of its forthcoming label compilation IOTDXI.
Some rather exciting aural goodness has just arrived in the form of Gold Panda being remixed by Not Not Fun artists Peaking Lights.
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Since its inception in 2008, London label History Clock have always operated well beyond the confines of genre pigeon holing – quite happily releasing main room revisions of late 70s sing alongs from Ivan Smagghe & Tim Paris alongside disco nuggets from Psychemagik and throbbing techno pulsers and EBM makeovers of Frankie Goes To Hollywood from Hardway Bros.
Given that History Clock is overseen by Nathan Gregory Wilkins and Joanthan “Capracara” Burnip makes this all encompassing approach understandable. The former has a long history of playing obscure records to the fashion set and was recently invited to spin some jams at David Lynch’s new Parisian joint, whilst the latter can count labels as varied as DFA, Fine Art, Soul Jazz and Unknown To The Unknown in his discography, and both have musical tastes that can be considered in a state of musical flux.
This much is evident on their latest twelve – their first in almost a year – which features the talents of Argentinean duo DJs Pareja. Close followers of Cómeme will know the duo from their 2009 split EP with label boss Matias Aguayo and this is a mighty if belated follow-up. “Psycho Rhythm” is singularly unique mid tempo house, splaying off kilter syncopation and deep set bass with heaving melodic hits and quite unnerving lyrics, whilst “Pampa Moon” perfectly captures the tropical rhythms of South America with the gritty drum patterns of London.
On the flip “Spanish Is Beautiful” is a gloopy, astral warehouse bumper – all loose, shimmering keys and crashing drum rolls over the heady acid throb. It’s given a glistening 4am rerub by Huntleys & Palmers’ Alejandro Paz, which could feasibly have emerged during the early days of Balearic.
Tony Poland
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Richard Oddie and Christina Sealey have been making music together for the best part of two decades, but despite having 10 albums to their credit, it is only in the last two years that the techno community became aware of Orphx’s magic. The reason for this is a series of EPs issued on Adam X’s Sonic Groove label that consisted of hypnotically dark, menacingly understated grooves. More club-focused than their previous works, Black Light and Traces in particular were inspired meetings of the duo’s abstract textures and an adherence to repetition that flowed with a uniquely addictive viscosity. So does their latest album make the leap into the techno sphere?
In many ways, Radiotherapy embodies what every techno album should strive for: rather than delivering a series of dance floor bangers, it sees Orphx focus on stepping rhythms, less direct than the Sonic Groove releases. But more importantly, it’s the duo’s exploration of texture that really impresses. “Compulsion” is a case in point; based on shuffling 808 drums, the visceral bass and eerie bleeps allow Orphx to provide their own take on old school electro. Blips and bleeps are also audible on “Radiotherapy 1″, but they are set to a droning soundscape so cold and alienating that it makes Throbbing Gristle sound like a bundle of laughs, while “Contamination” sees them tease out incendiary bass tones to a drizzling percussive backdrop.
At times, it’s almost too much, and the drilling noise on “Tensile” sounds like a patient having a tooth removed at the dentists. But this is only a minor digression and when Orphx’s cavernous, swarming acid, chilling strings and recoiling basslines take hold on “Lost Again” and “Radiotherapy 2″, such concerns fade into insignificance. With so many techno producers trying their hand at abstract sounds, it is ironic that one of the year’s best techno albums should come from industrial veterans.
Richard Brophy
Sandwell District, Blawan, Richard H Kirk and more remix Black Dog
by Juno Plus on 18.10.2011 at 15:43pm
Sheffield techno veterans The Black Dog have announced a star-studded remix package to accompany their soon to be released album Liber Dogma.
One thing that unites an otherwise disparate range of musicians – from guitarists and techno heads to drummers and vocalists – is the fact that, at some stage during the creative process, recording software will doubtless be called upon. For the uninitiated, DAW stands for Desktop Audio Workstation, which, as the name suggests, deals with a lot more than the once standardized job of sequencing audio and MIDI. In this feature we take a look at our five favourite DAWs – in no particular order – and outline the key features that will determine which of these heavy hitters becomes your weapon of choice.
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Popjustice’s Peter Robinson recently coined the term The New Boring to describe the Adele led charge of blandness that permeates the mainstream. However, it could be argued this “tedial wave” reaches far beyond and below into the underground. Shallow house is all too popular, disco has lost its throb and sex amidst the raft of beige software produced edits, whilst the current mutation of dubstep is rife with Ruperts marrying post-Burial dampness with perennially leaned-on R&B diva vocals from the 90s.
Within this climate, an artist such as patten armed with a debut album in GLAQJO XAACSSO reaffirms your desire and passion for discovering new music. There’s plenty to find difficult and obtuse about patten: the insistence on referring to him in lower case at all times; the near unpronounceable title of his debut album and the hugely chaotic nature of the music contained within, and a stubborn and steadfast disassociation with the standard media circus that precedes the release of an album.
The above and more has seen patten be compared to that other elusive electronic figure in Actress (whispers abound of him working on material for Werk as well) and makes him one of the most consistently intriguing artists to emerge this year. The rapacious desire to remain in the shadows ensures your focus remains on the music, and the music on GLAQJO XAACSSO proves to be quite captivating.
Much like how he eschews interviews by throwing up Wikipedia links or indeed flipping the script and questioning the interviewee, musically patten demonstrates a thrilling disregard for rhythmic boundaries and tempos, melodies seemingly plucked at random yet weaved into a coherent whole, perhaps best demonstrated on “Blush Mosaic”. At five tracks deep into the album and one of the longest running, it’s a stunning centrepiece, unveiling patten’s ability for programming beaten-up house tracks that drunkenly gallop along seemingly out of time yet don’t trainwreck like Thom Yorke DJing.
The denseness of sound throughout also impresses, with tracks such as “Out the Coast” and “A.M./Soft Focus” sounding like patten has recorded three different tracks cascading off each other. This approach never quite jars your senses given that GLAQJO XAACSSO has plenty of sketched out tracks that mostly veer between a minute and three in length. Indeed it’s the longer arrangements which hint at a more fully developed sound that resonate most. Along with the aforementioned “Blush Mosaic” – recently afforded a well thought-out video filled with coalescing and merging colours – the album’s other standout is “Fire Dream”, which steadily unravels from a rasping metallic percussive beginning into a massively druggy concoction of jagged edits and intoxicating viscous melodies set deep beneath.
GLAQJO XAACSSO should perhaps be considered the dictionary definition of a headphone album with the rich tapestry of fucked up sounds losing their impact when filtered through loud speakers, though the cover art is striking enough that there’s a temptation to indulge in the vinyl. Given the widespread critical acclaim for GLAQJO XAACSSO, the challenge for patten will clearly be to transform his music’s impact on a personal level to a live setting, something that will no doubt be quite thrilling if achieved.
Tony Poland.
Australian manufacturers Event have given the classic 20/20 monitor a new lick of paint, with the refurbished 20/20BAS active monitor unveiled this week.
Established UK house and techno imprint Third Ear will celebrate ten years of business in the perfect fashion; by releasing their first ever compilation, entitled In Yer Third Ear 01 and set for release at the end of November.
Techno has always been a medium that, in the right hands, offers both cerebral and visceral thrills. There is a long and distinguished list – the names Mills, Mike Banks, Drexciya and Regis immediately spring to mind – of artists who have imbued a deep sense of artistry into the brutalist leanings of concrete funk. At the coalface of the recent resurgence in abstract, concept-driven techno stands Luca Mortellaro – aka Lucy – and his Stroboscopic Artefacts imprint.
Since launching in 2009, the Berlin-based label has released material from the likes of Xhin, Dadub, Perc, Aoki Takamasa and Luca himself (who was also responsible for the label’s first full-length album, Wordplay For Working Bees, released earlier this year), and in the process has developed a formidable reputation. Wordplay For Working Bees stands as one of the finest techno LPs in a year seemingly flooded with them, and set a new benchmark in the fledgling label’s discography.
Mortellaro’s curatorial eye has been just as impressive as his studio nous – the digital-only Monad series has allowed a range of artists to explore their more esoteric side, with routinely jaw dropping results, and his open-mined approach to working with the label’s core artists is admirable. Juno Plus contributor James Manning caught up with Luca during his recent Australian tour for a lengthy chat about the inner workings of his label, his new live show, sampling koalas and much more.
Read the rest of this entry »
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To call Dutch producer Mike Kivits “prolific” would be an understatement. Under his now familiar Aardvarck guise, he’s released an impressive eight albums since 2002 alone, each with its own distinct vision. Variously, we’ve been treated to quirky beats (the Kindred Spirits-released Pigstyle), Detroit techno reinvented as downtempo bruk (Find The Cow on Delsin) and cut-up dancehall riddims and stoner hip-hop (Love Music on Mochilla). Each successive album revealed a little bit more about the talented Dutchman, not least his occasionally worrying obsession with style over substance.
It’s perhaps notable, then, that the first thing that hits you about this new full-length for now regular home Eat Concrete is its intense attention to atmospheric detail. While each track has its own distinct flavour, there’s an late night urban mood that permeates throughout. It could be the imaginings of a lonely insomniac trapped on the upper floors of a brutalist inner city tower block, or perhaps the soundtrack to too many stoned late night stumbles through vast, empty multi-story car parks; either way, it’s grey, hard and, at times, unfeasibly bleak.
That’s not to say that there’s not warmth or melody amongst this sprawling collection of fully-fledged tracks, sonic sketches and blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em interludes. Some of the producer’s dubwise basslines – particularly those used on the trio of tracks based on previous single Bloom – are deliciously heart-warming, while other tracks boast pleasingly comforting synth lines or glacial washes of sound. Listen carefully and you’ll find plenty of moments of glowing beauty – it’s just that you have to really pay attention to find them.
That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s always going to be hard to make sense of a set that variously touches on smacked-out dub, twisted Afro-electro, IDM, electronica, eerie ambience, eccentric breakcore, post dubstep rumblers, Detroitian futurism and scratchy techno. Yet, bizarrely, Anti-Concept makes perfect sonic sense. The concept itself – that it has no concept, silly – may be a little flawed (i.e. the idea of having no concept is a concept in itself), but it allows Kivits room to spin off in interesting new directions at each successive turn.
So, the spooky, symphonic ambience of “Dik Over Chord” is followed by the brutal rhythms of “Duh”, which is in turn followed by the curious, Autechre-ish IDM of “Gubby” and “Hassel”. And so it goes on. By the end, Kivits is indulging in twisted new takes on age-old hip-hop rhythms and re-imaging “Freak”-era LFO. It does, of course, make perfect sense in context. Basically, it’s an album and should therefore be listened to as such, in sequence, from start to finish. For all the stylistic concerns and schizophrenic programming, Anti-Concept is actually a very good opus. The tracklist might be vast and unruly, but it makes for a thoroughly engaging and entertaining listen.
Matt Anniss
R&S Records have posted a frankly epic teaser of what to expect from the upcoming Space Dimension Controller release, The Pathway to Tiraquon6.
Dan Snaith will continue his impressive new Daphni project with Ahora, a twelve inch release on Allez Allez’s Amazing Sounds imprint due out later this month.
Next week the Juno Plus editorial team will be decamping to the Dutch capital as part of the annual industry throng that is Amsterdam Dance Event, and in anticipation Rush Hour served up a timely reminder of just how much good music is bubbling to the fore in Holland with a sampler for their forthcoming Amsterdam All Stars compilation.
The Anglo Italian relationship established between Blawan and The Analogue Cops will be explored further as the trio collaborate on Cursory, a four track EP, the first release on new label Vae Victis Records no less.
As previously reported elsewhere on this here site, the ever excellent L.I.E.S. are preparing to release Hassan, a double vinyl album from synth auteur Professor Genius, no doubt the label’s most ambitious release to date in its fledgling existence.
News arrives today that Laid and Workshop regular Lowtec will return to the imperious Nonplus imprint for the label’s seventeenth release, which is due to drop early next month.
Listen: Galaxy 2 Galaxy – Live at The Forum Theatre, Melbourne
by Juno Plus on 13.10.2011 at 15:46pm
Something a bit special from the Red Bull Music Academy here: a live recording of a recent Galaxy 2 Galaxy live show, recorded last month at Melbourne’s Forum Theatre.
Edinburgh based producer Linkwood will release a new EP on the Firecracker-affiliated Shevchenko imprint, it has been announced.
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That one of this year’s best techno albums has been made by a Dutch dubstep artist and issued on a label owned by L.A. hip-hop figure Flying Lotus says a lot about the increasingly blurred boundaries within which the genre operates. Ironically, the backbone for Ghost People is the purist-influenced Berghain sound that has dominated techno production in recent years. In fairness to Martyn, he makes no secret of this, even going as far to equating his European DJ dates to sonic fact-finding missions that informed the album’s direction.
This should hardly come as a surprise to close watchers of the Dutch producer’s work. Like Cosmin TRG, Martyn’s releases have seen a gradual shift towards straighter 4/4 tracks in the past year, an intriguing progression from his early forays into dubstep, and, before that, drum and bass. It began with “MiniLuv”, his contribution to Ben Klock’s Berghain 04 mix CD, before gaining legs on “Is This Insanity?” and his collaboration with Mike Slott for All City. This was followed by the dense drum shuffle of recent single “Masks”, which is included here.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that Ghost People is merely a replica of unflinching Berlin techno. Instead, Martyn uses it as a backdrop to tease out a range of directions. The title track contains references to the heady rush of rave, while “Twice As” revisits the Dutch producer’s love of Detroit techno as sonic blips and spine-tingling melodies are married to more garage-style shuffling beats – perhaps the track’s title is a nod to the London 2-step institution. On “Popgun”, the producer briefly revisits lurching dubstep territories and there’s even a tribute of sorts to Vangelis on the glistening synths of “Bauplan”. That Ghost People covers so much ground while remaining close to the filtered rumble of tracks like “Horror Vacui” is an impressive testament to Martyn’s supernatural production powers.
Richard Brophy
