Daft Punk – Da Funk (Armand Van Helden's Ten Minutes Of Funk Mix)
More house goodness! I cannot get enough of this today. Throwing a party on March 25th with some special friends. More details to come…
Phoenix – If I Ever Feel Better, I'll Go to the Disco (Said the Buffalo Bunch)
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!
The year end list I wrote for Redefine Mag:
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.)
