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Glaswegian art, music and party collective LuckyMe today announced its own online advent calender, with a 320kpbs quality download to given away every day until Christmas Day, starting tomorrow (December 1).
If you were asked to reel off the most revered clubs in electronic music history on one hand, you’d get to Tresor well before you reached the pinkie. The club, originally situated in the vaults of a disused department store occupied around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, helped shaped the sound of contemporary techno. The likes of Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Robert Hood and Blake Baxter left their Detroit homes to become part of the musical revolution; many more were to follow. Berlin of course remains a bastion for techno, thanks in no small part to Tresor’s ongoing legacy, and this year the club’s record label celebrates its 20th anniversary. To celebrate they enlisted Detroit’s Mike Huckaby to curate and mix a compilation showcasing some of the label’s finest moments, with some of the aforementioned Motor City luminaries featuring alongside other Tresor stalwarts such as Surgeon, acid legend Bam Bam and Drexciya. To mark the compilation’s release here at Juno Plus we called on two of Tresor’s most influential figures – club founder Dimitri Hegemann and in-house record label chief Carola Stoiber – to select their five favourite Tresor releases, in no particular order, and discuss the stories behind them.
Listen: Roots Manuva – Here We Go Again (FaltyDL remix)
by Scott Wilson on 29.11.2011 at 18:23pm
Those who may have wondered what UK hip-hop legend Roots Manuva might sound like remixed by FaltyDL should wonder no more, as Ninja Tune are offering just that for free download.
Smithson Martin announce KS-1974 multi-touch Kontrol Surface
by Juno Download on 29.11.2011 at 17:43pm
Following the release of the transparent Emulator DVS controller, which was premiered by Marc Romboy earlier this year, innovative DJs Alan Smithson and Pablo Martin will step back into the arena with the KS-1974.
With Christmas drawing ever nearer, the Juno experts have selected out 2011’s key pieces of DJ and studio equipment for your festive perusal. As always, we’ve looked across the board, singling out the most essential items and catering for all kinds of DJs (software users, vinyl fetishists, CD loyalists), with everything from the latest software programs to mixers, decks, headphones, studio monitors and much more besides.
Belgian duo FCL (aka Red D and San Soda) have announced a follow-up to their 2010 retro house hit, Vocals For Everyone.
Dutch producer Legowelt has announced that his recent album The TEAC Life will get a richly deserved vinyl pressing.
Strut add another reason to get excited about 2012 with news that the label has tapped up well respected former Output Recordings honcho Trevor Jackson to compile his favourite industrial, post punk and EBM tracks from the 1980s for the forthcoming Metal Dance.
Richard James aka Aphex Twin was commissioned to write a piece of music for this year’s European Culture Congress in Poland, the fruits of which are now available to digest online.
Husband and wife duo Peaking Lights released one of this year’s most brilliantly hazy, sun-flecked albums in 936, and one of its highlights has been given the video treatment.
Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never – live at La Casa Encendida, Madrid
by Juno Plus on 28.11.2011 at 14:26pm
Brooklyn based musician Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never was one of many established producers to give illuminating lectures at this month’s Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid.
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Mickey Moonlight has always seemed out of place on the Ed Banger roster, but then he’s remained something of an under appreciated musical savant on these shores for well over a decade. For those of a certain vintage why not cast your mind back to the days when Jockey Slut was a living, breathing, pithy fountain of dancefloor knowledge and you might recall Moonlight appearing under his Midnight Mike moniker on their excellent Disco Pogo cover mount CDs.
Those who matured too late to know what this writer is talking about can at least bask in the fact Moonlight has a new album out soon on the grizzled Parisian imprint. Mickey Moonlight & The Time Axis Manipulation Corporation is framed as the debut opus from Moonlight, though some might recall his ill-executed Midnight Parade karaoke covers album from a few years back. A chance to bask in what to expect from the album is offered by lead single Close To Everything, which features the vocal talents of Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jnr, surely one of the most flamboyant front men currently operating.
The title track neatly echoes the early days of Chicago House, where heartfelt emotive male vocals regularly lined the basic, rough hewn drum machine patterns and steadily intoxicating bass line. At less than four minutes it’s also the kind of track which might easily cross over into wider acceptance and is surely more worthy of attention than the Guetta led march of idiocy that currently dominates popular culture. Alongside it, “This Son” ensures Moonlight is making no concessions with regards to his avant garde nature, it being a short excursion through delicate Tropicala featuring esteemed steel pan player Fimber Bravo.
This being an Ed Banger release there are naturally remixes involved with Dirtybird familia The Martin Brothers present and correct for the main room clubbing clique, and Moonlight also contributes further renditions. Of far more interest here is the remix from Trevor Jackson, returning to his Playgroup moniker for the first time since a remix for Tiga last year. Obviously inspired by the nascent house sound of the original, and perhaps poking fun at the current vogue for exhuming forgotten gems and remastering them, his “Back To 86” remix is produced as a live bootleg, heavily saturated and with crowd noise intact. It’s debatable whether you could get away with playing this to an unassuming crowd, and by the time it’s over you kind of want to hear the untainted version, but it’s an ingenious effort from Jackson.
Tony Poland
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As the bleak 1980s turned to the hopeful 90s, a new sound was taking shape in a handful of shellshocked Yorkshire towns and cities. In makeshift bedroom studios in Bradford, Leeds and, most famously, Sheffield, young producers were crafting a sound that would announce the arrival of Warp Records and change British electronic music forever: bleep.
Although largely forgotten, bleep – sometimes referred to as “Yorkshire bleep and bass” – remains one of Britain’s most thrilling and eccentric musical developments. Personally, I would argue that it was the first example of a truly homegrown British style of dance music. Previously, British house and techno music had largely offered little not provided by the titans of Detroit, Chicago and New York. Even the most famous British house records of the era, for example “Voodoo Ray” or T-Coy’s 1987 Latin-themed “Carino”, sounded like they could have been made by Americans.
Bleep was like nothing the world had heard before. Alien, sub-heavy, otherworldly and unashamedly bassy, it sounded like the party-minded soundtrack to terminal industrial decline. The exact catalyst for this musical revolution remains a point of much discussion – not to mention inter-city rivalry between Leeds and Sheffield – but the genre’s unique aesthetics appear to have risen from the cross-pollination of dub soundsystem culture and contemporary electronic music in both cities’ underground clubs (most notably, perhaps, Occasions and Jive Turkey in Sheffield).
While Bradford natives Unique 3 started it all with their 1988 12” “Only The Beginning” and subsequent hit “The Theme” (1989), the record that would become the blueprint for an entire genre was Forgemasters’ “Track With No Name”. Partly produced by a Sheffield soundsystem builder and studio engineer called Rob Gordon, it sent shockwaves through clubs not just throughout Yorkshire, but worldwide. It also announced the arrival of a label that would become synonymous with bleep, Warp Records.
It wasn’t long before other Yorkshire DJs and producers began to make their own bleep records. There was LFO and Nightmares on Wax from Leeds, and Sheffield’s own supergroup, Sweet Exorcist. Arguably, it was the latter who left the greatest legacy in terms of authentic bleep productions, as RetroActivity, a long-overdue anthology of their productions, attests.
Sweet Exorcist had credentials. It was a collaboration between one of Sheffield’s most visionary and celebrated electronic producers, Cabaret Voltaire man Richard H Kirk, and Jive Turkey resident DJ Parrot (later of the All Seeing I, and soon to release new material on Classic). The fruits of the duo’s first studio session were dynamite: “Testone”. In many ways, the suite of “Test” tracks released in 1990 are the best remaining examples of bleep in its purest form. Raw, spooky, uncompromising and focused on the twin attractions of unfeasibly heavy sub-bass (provided by accidental bleep overlord Rob Gordon) and a simple but devastating melody, “Testone” through “Testsix (Toneapella)” remain powerful and unique dancefloor records. RetroActivity showcases them – alongside an early demo of of “Testone” minus its famous melody – in remastered form. It goes without saying that they sound fantastic.
But Sweet Exorcist didn’t stop there. Over the next year, they released a couple more 12” singles for Warp and an album, C.C.I.D. While the latter – included here in its entirety – largely featured 808-heavy house productions with the duo’s distinct bleep touch, it’s their techno productions that still bristle with clanking industrial intent. Check, for example, “Samba”, “Bonus Samba” or the various versions of the eerily dystopian “Clonk’s Coming”, which recast Xon’s “Midnight Express” (a lesser-known bleep-era collaboration between Kirk and Rob Gordon) as an uneasy fusion of star-gazing futurism and clattering industrial percussion. Whether the empty factories that then dominated Sheffield’s Wicker and Attercliffe districts were an inspiration is unknown; to these ears, at least, it certainly sounds that way.
RetroActivity is a fitting tribute to both Sweet Exorcist, whose star burned all too briefly, and bleep techno – a revolutionary genre whose stark, post-industrial narrative offers a uniquely British story to match that of Detroit’s earliest electronic pioneers. The Attercliffe Two doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Belleville Three, but Kirk and Parrot’s influence on British techno was almost as great.
Matt Anniss
Of the many highly limited one off pressing twelve inches that pass across our desk on a weekly basis, Justin Velor’s Super Disco Drums has remained one of the most enduring, effortlessly transporting us back to the heady days of nascent punk funk via the superb 13 minute title track.
Luke Slater is a techno survivor, one of the few UK producers to emerge during the early 90s whose contemporary output sounds relevant. While his back catalogue boasts music as diverse as the windswept ambience of 7th Plain, through the nosebleed severity of his X-Tront releases and the widescreen techno of his Morganistic project alongside his more recent dubby outings as LB Dub Corp, it’s Slater’s Planetary Assault Systems project where his creative genius is most pronounced.
The 61st Fabriclive mix will come from revered Bristol-based producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch.
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When esteemed New York label RVNG Intl revealed they had added Brooklyn duo Blondes to their roster back at the turn of the year, a collective licking of figurative lips occurred across the globe. The promise Zach Steinman and Sam Haar had shown on their debut album, the Merok released Touched, was going to be explored in typically unique fashion for RVNG with a series of twelves based around themes of duality.
As we draw ever nearer to the close of the year, label and artists present the final chapter of this trilogy of releases in the shape of Wine/Water. For this writer, Blondes’ first episode in the series, the all encompassing Lover/Hater, has remained one of this year’s most enduring releases – not least the intoxicating “Lover” whose crafty usage of a Meredith Monk sample echoed the duo’s previous standout track “You Mean So Much To Me” but demonstrated a maturity and freedom of expression in production that was thrilling. Whilst no less accomplished, Business/Pleasure seemed like the slightly unassuming mid section to a story which lulls you into a false sense of security before being hit with the magnificence of the final act.
It’s a sensation that plays out with aplomb here, as the opening track “Wine” unfolds immaculately into an expansive array of textures and sounds. Again it’s the usage of vocals amidst the trademark Blondes sonic hypnosis that lifts this track into the upper echelons of their canon to date, with stretched out intonations dissipating rhythmically, panning across the channels and grasping to the track’s thick, widescreen rhythmic qualities. As with all Blondes productions, there’s a sense of welcome infinity to “Wine” that totally captivates. The decision to base the accompanying video on the art of gloving (aka treating clubbers under the influence to a display of flashing light embellished gloves) seems wholly appropriate as the track filters out.
“Water” begins in subtler fashion, creeping from the silence with typically aquatic textures gradually forming around the gently oscillating bass line and fizzing, staccato percussive touches. The arrival of chiming synth patterns seemingly marks the onset of an increase in energy and change in mood as the rhythmic elements come to the fore, increasing the yearning to be experiencing this not at a desk, but in a dimly lit basement space with barely decipherable faces for company. Such a feeling clearly makes this a triumphant finale to what’s been one of 2011’s most beguiling stories, and an intriguing precursor to what might follow in the next twelve months with rumours of some monolithic remix commissions just the cusp of what RVNG Intl have planned with Blondes.
Tony Poland
Whilst all may seem calm on the Juno Plus website, behind the scenes chairs have been thrown and harsh words exchanged as the annual end of year list decision making dragged into the midnight hours. To make such matters even more complicated, record labels seem intent on releasing excellent new music as the year’s end draws ever closer.
German techno imprint Prologue will release the debut album from Donato Dozzy and Neel’s Voices From The Lake project in January 2012.
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Even in the era of looking backwards to move forwards, Ultramarine are not one of the most familiar names, one of the forgotten gems of 90s UK house. The post-punk, live band approach Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond took to house music earned them quiet reverence amongst more switched on listeners from the early 90s, while the Real Soon label they curate has always stood strong as a bastion of the highest quality 4/4.
Thank your lucky stars for the switched on ears of Bob Bhamra, as he snaps up the newly invigorated duo for a release on his ever-strong WNCL imprint. From the offset it’s clear why the West Norwood Cassette Library man would be feeling these tracks, as the quirky strains of “Acid” bubble into action.
Aqueous flecks of synth and a lean broken beat provide the crust to a molten 303 filling. The title obviously indicates the order of the day, but this really is a worthy excursion into that most well-worn of dance tropes. Rarely has that resonance tweaked sound come on so expressive and fluid as it oozes in amidst the laid back funk of the track.
“Butch” meanwhile goes further out into the otherworldly realms that Ultramarine inhabit. The 303 is back again, in a more perfunctory role alongside all manner of sci-fi bleeps and squeaks. The beats are hardly present at all, and yet everything moves with such force it would be hard to fit any more rhythm in there. The end result is a kind of classic techno approach, sporting a wide-eyed fascination with the freaky noises and transcendental moods that incessant hardware tweaking can bring.
Oli Warwick
