The more that I listen to this, the more that lusty sheen starts to wear into a Zen-style koan- ‘I give myself to strangers, I bully round the streets.’ Dreamboat Mag has been transmitting on my wavelength for a while now, I recommend you check that blog out.

More house goodness! I cannot get enough of this today. Throwing a party on March 25th with some special friends. More details to come…

This house remix by the Buffalo Bunch encapsulates the original mix’s mood in that perfectly cut “I can’t try” sample, cut up and repeated. The addition of a thick, rolling bass line gets that lower half of your body moving in ways that the original never could!

This is a short list of the most exciting music in 2009 from new artists and producers. I kept track of a fraction of all the CDs, torrents, and YouTube videos out there this year, with playlists, journals, and emails. This is the view of 2009 from where I stand, looking over techno, house, dubstep and electronic dance music. A lot of very talented and accomplished musicians released some of their finest material this year. Their work will be well-received by their fanbase and earn them many new admirers, without a doubt. But who were the artists that took 2009 as an opportunity to break out, to point us in new directions? Here are a few voices that I’d like to hear rise above the din and lead us into the future.

Instra:mental
Leave It All Behind/Forbidden
Apple Pips

“Leave it All Behind” favors a more straightforward techno beat over “Forbidden”’s evolved drum and bass groove. Long bass pulses emit from the stereo speakers like deep space communication. Cool, Neptunes-style synth lines accent the vocal melody along with shakers and snares. Combining dubstep, techno and other styles, Instra:mental have shown their range in putting out dance music that lends itself to reserved introspection as well as late-night dance parties. Instra:mental released a few more vinyls this year, including “Watching You” for the Nonplus+ label, another release that fans of hollowed out synths and The Knife will be sure to appreciate.

Floating Points
Vacuum Boogie EP
Eglo Records

Deep house had big strides with repetitive, jazzy melodies placed tenuously over drum machine kicks and bass. Whereas other producers favored congas and chanting, Floating Points moved closer to more familiar styles carved out by Detroit producers from years past. On “Argonaut”, a smooth organ line saunters across a 4/4 kick while the limelight is divided up amongst a divine mixture of melody and rhythm. The group also put out “J&W Beat” on Planet Mu, another release that I recommend picking up. The rhythm of “J&W Beat” is a broken seizure of a groove, taking apart tired dance beats and splicing time. These are wholly new vibrational frequencies, for playback on the loudest stereos possible.

Nosaj Thing
Drift
Warp/Alpha Pup/disques corde

Nosaj Thing’s album begins like a Tim Burton Christmas movie-cum-electronica soundtrack. Heavy bass beats and handclap percussion evoke West Coast hiphop with a feeling of desolatation and dread. “IOIO”’s synthesizers pumps back and forth, altering the feel of the tempo while his signature sirens echo like sonar beacons. Like Flying Lotus’ Los Angeles before it, Drift is an amazing record where no single track stands over any other as distinctly better than each other.

Mount Kimbie
Sketch On Glass
Hotflush

“Sketch on Glass” springs about on keyboard shrieks between ultrasonic cooing. The dynamic range on this track spans all the way to deep bass rattle, while sounding astonishly clear and vibrant in all of its colors. Alternatively, “William” rides full moon on skateboards around fingersnap percussions submerged in a clotheswasher tub. Melancholy, distorted singing somewhere down the hallway crowds hazy Boards of Canada tones. This feels like the indie-electronic crossover from Morr Music for alt kids in 2009. The wide range of rhythms and melodies found here shows promise for this versatile duo.

Joy Orbison
J. Doe/BRKLN CLLN
Doldrums

The follow-up release to the stellar Hyph Mngo is no less shallow, opening up dimensions in time and space in just a few minutes’ span. Cyclical R&B vocals snatched from an R&B song comprise the focus of “J.Doe”. The heavy repetition sets off the difference engine capabilities of your mind — it’s not long before you find yourself separating the trance-like swells from the sound of electricity arcing, levers latching, and rim knocks. The debut track from Joy Orbison, “Hyph Mngo” on Hotflush is a dubstep variant in the style of house: insistent, bright tambourines and tons of female vocals. Both of these releases, along with his remix of Four Tet, stand out in the changing landscape of dubstep and bass music.

Honorable Mentions
Big Spider’s Back – Warped [Full disclosure: I'm helping release this artist's music on CD on my label.]
Black Dice – Repo
Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
King Midas Sound – Waiting For You
The Angry Orts – The Purple Rhino Squad Versus The Blue Whale Super Heavy Assault Troops
Wale – Attention Deficit

Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads had this to say about drum machines:

In information theory, the theory that was developed by Claude Shannon, there is this idea that in any given message the amount of information in that message is reflected in by how expected the message is. And if its close to 100% that the message is going to say ‘yes’, then a message that says ‘yes’ is giving you far less information than a message that says ‘no’. And I feel that the mind, which is trained to see differences in our environment(because danger is usually a change in an environment), that when we listen to music with drum machines, that actually because it becomes totally expected when a snare drum beat is, or kick drum beat is particularly in disco music, your mind begins to tune out the drum machine itself and hear the music around it. And that it’s almost like the drums could be ultra loud and yet you would still hear everything around it. If those were real drums you would say ‘the drums are too loud, I can’t hear that,’ but because of your mind’s ability to say, ‘I know that’s there, what else is there?’ that it kind of changed the dynamic of music.

You can listen to his words in context online from a BBC Radio archive- the original interview with Roger Linn is available for streaming and download.

The complaint that I hear most frequently from people when I play them dance music is that it ‘all sounds the same’. A lot of 4/4 music does sound similar. But you could make the same complaint about lots of music when it comes to forms and shapes, so that remark doesn’t really hold up in my opinion. I often share lunchtime discussions with Yair about music and criticism and he had a few thoughts on how people approach art and music. Coming from any background, a person brings their own set of experiences and knowledge to bear on a subject, and dance music is ontologically different from rock or punk or rap, just as different as those styles are from each other….

…I’d really like to take Ishkar’s Guide to Electronic Music and expand it to include the last 5 or so years of electronic dance music. Ishkar’s guide is a wonderful guide to the history and many different styles of electronic dance music, thanks to Ponce de Leon for the tip.)

Throwing a party at the Rendezvous this month. I’m hoping that you will all attend(it’s free!) I’ll be spinning dance music along with Big Spider’s Back, and DJ D’Nelski (aka Alex Ruder) on February 25th. If you’re in Seattle, do stop by.

Missed out on those Shed Remix 12″ on Boomkat, but the Steppas Delight Vol 2:Dubstep Present to Future has what I need: Martyn’s 131 Remix of Shed’s “Another Wedged Chicken”: Video removed!

Chatted with a good friend about the development of Animal Collective’s career, calling them the most successful and most dishonest and fake indie rock band. I wouldn’t disagree with Animal Collective’s decision to move towards more textural and ambience- I think that they, along with Black Dice and Ariel Pink are moving indie into more sonically exciting territory- there’s something to be said about their earlier records. When the band traded in their yelping and howling and chaotic sound attacks, they lost a little bit of that immediacy, that raw, emotive angst that was so attractive and alluring to me, as a fan of noise music. Hearing Merriweather Post Pavillion, it seems like the denial of those rebellious tendencies is dishonest- maybe the band has grown up and my development was arrested, or I’m nostalgic for my own childhood, one that chillwave does not fulfill.

Black Dice though, are completely uncompromising in their assault. They continue to excite me with their creative output.

Black Dice – La Cucaracha, from “Repo”

Black Dice – Scavenger, from “Load Blown”

Black Dice – Street Dude, from “Broken Ear Record”

Download Black Dice – La Cucaracha
Download Black Dice – Scavenger
Download Black Dice – Street Dude

If not for the Internet, techno music might never have been affirmed by a large ”mainstream” audience in the United States- not that techno music is about gaining widespread acceptance so much as maintaining a fiercely underground and independent spirit. Alexander Omar Smith, aka Omar-S, is rumored to sign his FXHE records with the same marker he uses from his GM factory job, for example. The Internet has allowed me to play catch up a lot faster and more thoroughly with the underground than I ever thought possible. I’m just trying to spread the love on behalf of the producers, the DJs, the promoters. Because if you’re going to set out to make robot rock, then at some point the rest of us are going to have to step forward into that discotheque of the future…

Omar S – Lift Him Up (ft. Don Q) – Buy

Jinder – Youth Blood (Bok Bok Remix) – Buy

Fool – Real Thing (Various Production Remix) – Buy

Younger generations may not be able to appreciate the novelty of moving the radio dial left and right, catching a second or two of audio and moving on to the next station. As a high school student, I definitely wasn’t listening to dance music, but still, I never could find what I wanted, it seemed like nobody was playing the music I liked to hear. Akufen (a play on the word acouphène) aka Mark LeClair put together a project based primarily on tiny samples of music he had recorded off the radio. The complex layering of samples here are a clever play on the medium where, at least in America, the radio had largely dismissed electronic dance music. In 2009 with the destratification of radio, TV and media, it may not seem like a clarion call so much as an abstract sound collage, but putting it in a larger context it has a certain gravity to it, not unlike Kutiman’s ThruYOU project and his samples of home-made videos.

I posted a list of records that I enjoyed from 2009–mostly electronic dance music– for Redefine Magazine. I think I’ll take up a post in the future to examine some more records from this year, but for now, I hope you’ll skip over to Redefine Magazine and review some of the standouts in techno/house. After reviewing the other lists, I can’t believe I was in the dark about Nurses for so long. Thankfully, the other editors have bulletproof taste.