Download here. Let’s a talk about colonialism in music, and about how much fun it is to dance to.
1: Cos Ber – Zam Ne Noya (Daphni Remix) [Jiaolong]
2: KH – That Track… [Text]
3: Kevin McPhee – Do [WNCL]
4: Elkin ‘Billie’ Longton – My Woman [Tide Pool]
5: Armand Van Helden – Witch Doktor (L-Vis 1990 Edit) []
6: Afrika HiTech – Out In The Streets [Warp]
Saw Rustie, Oneman, and Jackmaster last night, at Le Belmont. A delightful experience.
Jackmaster was on opening duties, and did a great job: starting with house and garage-ish things, and moving to breaks, dubstep, and etc: I’d very much like to see him in a non-opening context. Oneman followed with much more post/dubstep, trap, hip-hop, and a ridiculous Doves Cry blend.
Then Rustie, who, musically, I had really mixed feelings about: the really vocal stuff was not for me, even though everyone ate it up. But the video-game tracks and the dubbier stuff, ahhhh. Ahhhh! Just insane. I’ve not raved as hard as I did to Hover Traps in a long while.
On the subject of rave, I need to say two words about the crowd. Maybe this was just Le Belmont on a Friday, but the crowd was a treat: a posse of EDM bros, some EDM kids who were high as kites at 11:45, a man dressed as Freddie Mercury, a coven of ultra-classy, ultra-goth lesbians, two gay dudes who spent all night staring at each other and thrusting their hips slowly and meaningfully, a trio of hip-hop nerds with their caps down doing something like Gangam Style vs. the Harlem Shake, and so on. I don’t know if that diversity is an ‘EDM’ thing or a post-dubstep thing or what, but I sure think it is great.
Download here. For all the lovely picture and highdesertsoundsystem-ness of the title, this is a pretty urban and Detroit / London sort of take on house.
1: Py – Lungs [PyMusic]
2: Maya Jane Coles – Easier To Hide [I Am Me]
3: MoveD – Got2b [Electric Minds]
4: Tuff City Kids – Begger [Underton]
5: Discreet Unit – Twilight [Prime Numbers]
6: George FitzGerald – Every Inch (Deetron Remix) [Hypercolor]
7: Galaxy 2 Galaxy – Hi Tech Jazz (L-Vis 1990 4 da Floor Edit) [UR / Night Slugs]
8: Four Tet – Pinnacles [Text]
I need to geek out about science fiction technology for a bit, sorry.
I am surprised at all the commentary about how people won’t want to use Google’s black-magic Glass because of fashion concerns and catty rants about nerds. The reasons to not use Glass and similar tech are panoptical reasons and privacy reasons, not anything about aesthetics. (And here’s the nice Verge article)
This tech will be built into contact lenses within a decade, tops. The processing power will be in something like a necklace, which will probably include a throat mic for subvocalizations. Gear like Myo will be built into clothing for gestural control. Then this gear will be built into your body, and then we’ll really have something amazing and/or scary. This is a thing that is going to happen: anyone who thinks otherwise will be in for a shock. What it will do to our society is another matter.
It’s March. Beware the Ides of March!
– I posted a whole lot of music. There’s the short, quasi-trap EP, there’s my friend Heather singing two voice + string quartet things I did, and there’s the halfway point of my mix series.
– I saw the McGill Orchestra do a really quite rad program: Vivier’s Orion, a new piece by a doctoral student composer, Reiko Yamada, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, and a mindboggling percussion concerto by Jennifer Higdon. Great work all ’round.
– I found Daphne Oram’s book, An Individual Note, at aMcGill library give-away. It is filled with the best possible kind of British 1970s madness about electronics, acoustics, philosophy, biology, and music. Highly recommend.
– Did you ever wonder what 100 copies of The White Album would sound like all at once? Well, we’ve solved that problem.
Download here. A sideways, psychotic love-letter to the city of Miami and its soundsystems and love for low-end.
1: Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe (Hrdvsion Bootleg) []
2: Rauden – Obsession [Get The Curse]
3: Nouveau Palais – Over You [RBMA]
4: Girl Unit – Ensemble (Club Mix) [Night Slugs]
5: Destiny’s Child – Nuclear (Math Rosen Remix) []
6: Kingdom – Stalker Ha [Night Slugs]
7: Fractal – Strictly Ballroom [Primal]
8: Hrdvision – Right And Tight [International DJ Gigolos]
– Went to a great space called CFC to hear the first all-skwee set of my life, care of the Ancient Robot crew. Was interesting. Also heard a group called Master Choice play, who will be great if they can figure out that dance music doesn’t need every track to have a long, slow, tear-down outro.
– The Ninja Tune guys have outdone themselves with Beat Delete. Is this the future of vinyl? I really do suspect so.
– The Harlem Shake. I’ve seen some people talking about the ‘obscuring of culture’ around the original Harlem Shake vs. the Baauer-based meme. These are true and good comments. I feel the need to add that this has always happened with dance music, with music, and with culture in general – and it has especially happened with marginalized cultures: black, gay, latino, any sort of underground, etc. In terms of my entrance to dance music, trance came from high energy which came from disco…and if you had told any of the trance bunnies of the late 90s that they were actually dancing to music from the 70s, they would have looked at you like you were insane.
To tangent a bit, A gent named Alan Kay, who invented a very important programming language called Smalltalk made the comment that “pop culture holds a disdain for history”. This is deeply important in dance music. I don’t know if this requisite disdain for history has to go hat in hand with cultural appropriation, but they certainly reinforce one another.
Download here. Not so much a future garage set as a future set. Let’s call it xenon, not neon.
1: L-Vis – Lost In Love [Night Slugs]
2: Nouveau Palais – Drama [RBMA]
3: SecondCity – You Feel []
4: Citizen – Members Only [MadTech]
5: Cardopusher – So What U Want Me 2 Do [Classic Works]
6: L-Vis – Not Mad [Night Slugs]
7: Floyd Campbell – Drifted [Body High]
8: xxyy – Ordinary Things [Ten Thousand Yen]
9: onefourfiveone – D [Tide Pool]
Not much happened, in terms of things worth blogging about: saw lots of friends, kept my nose to the grindstone on some other things.
One of those things I have to mention here though: The Echo Nest Remix.js testbed is live.
If you ever wanted to, in your browser, write code to re-order the beats of a song based on timbre, I’m delighted to say that you can now do that. More where that came from soon.