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2010: albums of the year

December 20, 2010 · by · in ,

Bethi Ferguson – NEWVEMBER SONGS

Yeah, so my friend Bethi finished this song-a-day-recorded-into-Garage Band last November. Yes, the audio quality is often awful. Did I listen to anything else more this year? Not even close – I cannot recommend all 32-some songs enough.

Flying Lotus – COSMOGRAMMA

FlyLo keeps providing justification for electronic music as a celestially high artform. That he does so while keeping things funky as fuck is just more testament to his genius. COSMOGRAMMA takes off from where L.A. left off, and goes further, futher, and further again.

Bibio – AMBIVALENCE AVENUE

Again from 2009. I am slow and stupid, please forgive me. But this one sure is worth listening to again. Drowned in folk noises, foundsound, and gorgeous instrumentation, AMBIVALENCE AVENUE proves, again, that us techno people can steal from wherever we want, whenever we want, and make it sing.

Honorable mentions to: Clark – Growls Garden, Luke Abbott – Holkham Drones, Hrdvsion – Where Did You Just Go, and Four Tet – There Is Love In You.

sunworship

December 20, 2010 · by · in

Happy Solstice – we made it ’round one more time, somehow.

get your lounge on

December 15, 2010 · by · in

I will be playing briefly (8 to 9) at Whitebird this Saturday, with the mighty Natron, for his and Mr. B’s Common Ground deep house / lounge soiree. My set is so short because I then have to sprint to Hush to judge the Hush DJ Contest finals. Life is hard.

Then, in DEEPEST JANUARY, the 15th to be exact, I am tagging with Davin ‘AFK’ Greenwell at the third volume of CRUSH at Sunset room. Also on the bill are Toby Emerson and Nima Saeedi from Lotus in Vancouver. More on that as we move closer to it.

tempus fugit

December 7, 2010 · by · in

This is a mixtape that I just had to get out. It’s short, it’s simple, it’s sad, and it’s for people I miss. Get it here.

1: Ralph Vaughan Williams – Wither Must I Wander (Alex Granat & Bethi Ferguson)
2: Samuel Barber – The Desire For Hermitage (Heather Harker & Karl Hirzer)
3: Olivier Messiaen – Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (Tashi Quartet)
4: Igor Stravinsky – The Firebird – Berceuse (Janos Sandor & the UVic Orchestra)
5: Igor Stravinsky – The Firebird – Finale (Janos Sandor & the UVic Orchestra)

the city, she don’t like you

November 30, 2010 · by · in

I finished China Mieville’s THE CITY AND THE CITY recently: it’s kind of like Borges meets…well, Borges, really, but slightly less elegant and much more tense. It also reads very oddly for someone who spent a summer living in Berlin, with a visit to Budapest thrown in. Mieville plays his fantasy very straight, as befits the noir / detective style, but it’s still fantasy: there are organizations with strange powers, nods to elder forces, and so on. And all of this works, and I recommend it highly.

However, after walking over the Berlin Wall several times this summer, this got me thinking: what if there’s no fantasy involved, no magic powers, except the boundless ability of people to fool themselves? What if a city could be split in two by sheer will and propaganda, with no need for walls, magic, or anything else? Having been through small portions of the former Eastern Bloc, this doesn’t seem so unlikely to me anymore.

the second derivative

November 27, 2010 · by · in , ,

Many thanks to Sunset and Hush for having me out last weekend – both gigs were fun and gave me a chance to push wildly different styles of music.

I’ve had a note in my files for about a year now to write a thing about “Rates of Change”, as applied to DJing in specific and music in general. So:

In DJing, the rate of change is pretty static, and is, in general decided by the style of music one is playing; deep techno and deep house move pretty slowly, hip-hop and dubstep move pretty fast, at the moment. (This touches on the timeless DJ question of how much respect one should have for one’s music, but we’ll mostly ignore that for now.)

What we won’t ignore is how this motion can be manipulated over time and over the course of a set. A DJ who mixes slowly at the beginning of a set and quickly at the end has set up an increasing curve not only for the velocity of his set, but also for the acceleration of his set. Appleblim and his 110-to-140-to-70 BPM sets spring to mind here.

However, it can be REALLY hard to manipulate this in ways that are not linear. Having a DJ flash through three records, then play two looong tracks, then play two more fast ones will, 90% of the time, not work. Steady ramps are best, when talking about acceleration.

This also applies to composition, especially in dance music. If you’re making a track with dramatic changes every sixteen bars, you need to keep that up, or risk people getting bored. Likewise, if you’ve set up a massive, 32-bar groove, any fast changes will feel like a break before the groove comes back. This leads into points about moving just outside people’s expectations, as opposed to totally outside their expectations…but I’ve made those points before, so I won’t do so again.

In conclusion: change is good. Changing your change is also good – but do it most carefully.

resistance and faith

November 17, 2010 · by · in

Make with the download.

1: PVT – Light Bright Fires (Nathan Fake Ambient Remix) []
2: Caribou – Bowls (Holden Remix) [City Slang]
3: Agoria – Grande Torino [Infine]
4: John Talabot – Matilda’s Dream [Permanent Vacation]
5: Etienne Jaumet – For Falling Asleep (Carl Craig Remix) [Versatile]
// Andre Kraml – Safari (Holden Remix) [Crosstown Rebels]

I guess it’s good that I’m old and busted these days….because it means I can DJ 116 BPM deeeeeeeeeep tech in my bedroom and dance around like an idiot.

tunes, tunes, tunes

November 13, 2010 · by · in ,

I’m a million years behind here, so:

– Four Tet’s Angel Echoes is probably the vocal of the year.
– Holden’s Caribou remix is faaaaaantastic.
– Limbo’s Phoenix remix is also fantastic.
– Gudio’s album indicates that he, like me, played too many Super Nintendo RPGs growing up.
– Agoria is a genius.
– Isan’s little 7/4 number, Catagot, is also genius.

Another set coming soon, and then I’m practicing for my tech/deep/haus marathon on Saturday the 20th, and my disco/eclectro/dubstep throwdown on Monday the 22nd. Come one, come all.

SCULPT

November 10, 2010 · by · in

The SCULPT EP is done! Victory!

SCULPT – SCULPT by Fractal

SCULPT is an downtempo/ambient/hip-hop project, with samples from vinyl recording of classic orchestral musica, beats from classic drum machines, “vocals” improvised by a variety of my friends and comrades at UVic…all sliced, diced, and edited to suit my nefarious purpose.

This EP runs four tracks, and covers ice cold ambient, neck-snapping hip-hop, jazzy 808 jams, and a breaking wave of post-dubstep reverb. There may be an album-length project in a similar vein – we’ll see how this one does.

I am deeply, deeply indebted to Claire Stewart, Nathan Friedman, Heather Harker, and Shima Takeda for their time, skills and patience with this EP. The next one won’t take me over a year, I promise.

wind me up

November 6, 2010 · by · in

Books again: Paolo Bacigalupi’s THE WIND UP GIRL is fascinating. The plot, in this case, is a vaguely Frank Herbert-esq tale of conspiracy, people submitting to their baser instincts, and nations being moved by the actions of individuals. However, the MacGuffin here, of a post-collapse Thailand run by biotechnology is staggering: Bacigalupi’s world-building is maybe not as razor tight as some other authors I could name, but his conceit is enormously satisfying. Reading the book has the same bewildering effect that reading NEUROMANCER must have had in the 1980s. All we can hope for is that he’s not as prescient as Gibson.