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Author Archives: Gabe Meier

Premiere: Rushmore – “Silent Melody”

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October 13, 2014
New Music
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Throughout a series of free releases and EPs for the likes of Unknown to the Unknown and his own Trax Couture imprint, Rushmore has gained a penchant for crafting the sort of free wheeling club tracks that defy both time and genre. The free “Air Trax” series is the perfect example of the London-resident’s stripped-back approach and resembles something in between the raw, feverous energy of ghetto house and the tightly-wound proficiency of UK techno. Unlike many of his contemporaries Rushmore doesn’t stab at concepts of futurism or technological progress, instead working towards the sort of machine-led dance floor proficiency that originally led to the rise of dance music in Chicago. Rushmore’s newest EP, his third on Trax Couture, is raucous at times, but also sees Rushmore adopt some of the paranoiac spirit that pervades much of the capital city’s output. Kicks, toms and stomp boxes are still in order for much of HOT004, but so are cut up violin bits (akin to Dark0’s recent work) and other video game soundtrack-derived melodic content. “Silent Melody” still embodies the gleeful linearity of Rushmore’s past productions, but trades in ghetto house for Jersey club’s rumbling kick pattern and grime’s melodrama. It’s metallic and slightly obsessive in its repetitious melody, source material drawn directly from post-Olympic East London, but also from the growing figurative diaspora of UK and American club sounds. HOT004 will be out on vinyl and digital on October 20, but can be pre-ordered through the Trax Couture website now.

ISLAND Presents Mixtape Ahead Of Debut Crazylegs EP

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October 10, 2014
Mixes, New Music
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island-joints

When Bok Bok spoke about the feel of the Night Slugs aesthetic and its relationship to architecture in an interview with FACT a few months ago, he seemed to pin point an attitude that has proliferated en masse in the club music community. Its an attitude and an aesthetic, a hyper-real structure that blends the natural with presupposed neoliberalism with breathtaking affect. It’s no surprise that graphic designer-producer hybrids have had some of the most resounding success in crafting the hyper-real. Welsh duo ISLAND have been making noise through their feverish Soundcloud oddities for several months now and have finally found a home for their incandescent productions on Bristol-based label/party Crazylegs. Like Crazylegs contemporary Gage and the Her Records fellows, ISLAND have taken the bare bones impact of classic grime and East Coast club music and melded it with their science fiction-derived grandiosity. On ISLAND Joints, a collection of originals, bootlegs, etc., the duo have grafted a polychromatic mixture of trance synths, plonking synth pop beats and ruthless club percussion into a dissociative, but highly enjoyable concoction. It’s hard to predict exactly which elements from ISLAND Joints will appear on the upcoming Crazylegs EP, or if the duo will even distill their sound at all, but their polyglot attitude is an exciting premise in the too-often-monochrome world of contemporary dance music.

She’s Drunk Mix For The Astral Plane

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October 9, 2014
Mixes
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she's-drunk-press

These days, producers often make the transition into the deejay game as their songs, bootlegs, etc. gain traction online and calls for their physical presence (read: tour money) reach a fever pitch. In the United States, this trend has become the norm as prodigious, young beatsmiths garner tens of thousands of online fans before they even touch a CDJ or Technics, but in Europe and the UK, the trend is, by-and-large, reversed. Consciousness altering, outer belt raves have become the stuff of obituaries as of late and DJs, especially in the realm of ‘ardkore, jungle and drum & bass, have been forced to seek out new contexts for their music, or worse, a day job. Hailing from Besançon, France, David Monnin is one of the many refugees of the rave scene, a ragga jungle and hardcore DJ in past life who now lives in Berlin and produces under the She’s Drunk moniker. Unlike most former rave denizens, Monnin has metamorphosed effortlessly into the world of cross-genre and cross-generational club music.

With everything from mid-120s electro-styled drum tracks to Special Request-esque jungliest riddims in his arsenal, Monnin has tailored the She’s Drunk moniker to his own omnivorous music tastes, gathering influences, both contemporary and not, from across the Continent and beyond. Like some sort of dysfunctional Rube Goldberg machine for the dancing masses, the She’s Drunk sound is teetering on the brink of collapse, pinging endlessly and almost always unhinged, relying more on recognizable sound signifiers than any existing rhythmic  structure. On releases for his own Through My Speakers label/party/collective and the always-excellent, London-based Liminal Sounds blog/label, Monnin has developed a sound that reflects his years on the jungle circuit in its frenetic nature, a raw energy that can’t be attained through sitting in a room working in Ableton.

And while the usual signifiers (Jersey club, ballroom, grime, etc.) criss-cross, She’s Drunk’s Astral Plane mix, the kinetic spirit is readily apparent, mirroring the polyglot madness of his recent Physical EP (out now via Liminal Sounds). Monnin might have entered the contemporary club-verse from another time, but his real life experience playing out and open-face attitude towards production is easily discernible in his output.

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FACT Mag Announces ‘Heterotopia’, Premieres Kid Antoine’s “Nightvision”

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October 8, 2014
Heterotopia
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For the past several months, The Astral Plane team has been working towards releasing original music and the day has finally come to announce our first compilation. Heterotopia is a collection of twelve songs from twelve of our favorite artists, but also an investigation into club space, both figurative and literal, and an attempt to give voice to so-called fringe voices of the dance music world. Artists from New York, London, Chile, Copenhagen, Sydney and beyond contributed and while the tape is firmly rooted in the club music continuum, our goal in coalescing a global group of artists is to stretch, perforate and dissolve the physical and rhetorical limits inherent in the contemporary dance music discussion. Tom Lea at FACT Mag was kind enough to announce Heterotopia and premiere Kid Antoine‘s “Nightvision” today, stating that “if you’re looking for future key players from the underground this is as good a place to start as any.” Jesse Treece contributed the incredible album art work and Riley Lake, who also contributed a song to the compilation, worked diligently on the mastering to bring the best in every track. Heterotopia will be released on October 21 and over the coming weeks we’ll release much more music and information regarding the tape. In the meantime, get down to the ruggedly beatific sounds of “Nightvision” and peep the full track list below.

Track list:
Arkitect – Foucault’s Dream
Kid Antoine – Nightvision
Jacque Gaspard Biberkopf – Public Love
Air Max ’97 – Chasm
Victoria Kim – Apgu Freeway
Imaabs – Cautiverio
Rushmore – Moment X
Divoli S’vere – Free Bitch
Mike G – Limestone
Celestial Trax – Illuminate
Riley Lake – Euclidean Riddim
Iglooghost – Wood Farm

Premiere: RUEGD – “Figy (Jackie Dagger Kick Mix)”

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October 3, 2014
New Music, Remixes
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jackie-daggerIt’s always a pleasure when stylistically coherent crews from across countries, oceans and language barriers collide. From the arrival of the first Kraftwerk records in Detroit (and vice versa, the first Isley Brothers records in Dusseldorf) to the widespread influence of Jamaican sound system culture in the UK ‘nuum, these clashing moments have become some of the most formative events in dance music history. The meeting of Belgrade’s Mystic Stylez with Los Angeles’ Private Selection might not carry the monumental connotations of the aforementioned gatherings, but it is remarkable for anyone who partakes in the percussive club trax, beat-less grime and analogue dreams the two respective labels/parties/crews peddle. Last October’s Advanced Rhythms Vol. 1, featuring crew leaders Dreams, Arkitect and Aerial as well as Jean Nipon, Vin Sol and other club mavens, is still a must have for any listener/producer/DJ interested in the various mutations of grime/Jersey cub/ballroom/kuduro/etc. Mystic Stylez started out as a humble Belgrade-based blog covering juke/footwork, but under the tutelage of Jackie Dagger and Feloneezy has grown up into the Balkans’ answer to Chicago, London, New York, et al. And now the two meet with expectedly ruthless efficiency with Mystic Stylez’s Dagger taking on RUEGD’s tuff-as-nails “Figy” (off of Advance Rhythms Vol. 1). Dagger’s “Kick Mix” is a simple addendum to RUEGD’s percussion-less original, both refreshing and adding some easily digestible propulsion to one of the most original tracks on the Private Selection compilation.

Decibel Festival 2014 Recap: Arca, Hyperdub, Andy Stott Highlight Seattle Festival’s 11th Year

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October 1, 2014
Festivals
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decibel-festival

Decibel Festival, like many other contemporary festivals that straddle the dwindling line between underground and overground forms of dance music, was heavy (to say the least) on four-on-the-floor house and techno. In fact, the festival’s adherence to technical linearity was so strong that one could posit that the steady pulse of a kick drum defined Decibel 2014. From the late night Ostgut Ton showcase at Q Nightclub to Phuture’s TB-303 jams, house and techno from the world over could be found at Decibel, but the respective genres’ British and German constructions took center stage. This created something of a dilemma for a team looking for more rhythmic variance and, shall we say, a global purview than your standard techno bro fest. Fortunately, the Decibel lineup provided pockets of brilliance in the form of jungle, footwork, grime and kuduro, allowing us to indulge in gaudy, kick drum-heavy performances from T. Williams, Wolf+Lamb, Nadastrom and more.

On Wednesday night, Arca and Total Freedom, with music video art auteur Jesse Kanda providing visual accompaniment on a huge LED screen, took to EMP’s Sky Church with a vengeance, weaving syncopated kuduro and dembow rhythmic patterns into a number of contemporary pop hits. The Sky Church, a massive room in a corporate music mausoleum, is an odd venue to hold a genre and gender bending performance from three prodigiously talented artists, but a small, dedicated crowd, equal measures repulsed by and smitten with Kanda’s Vine compilation-meets-high concept body art, was up for the challenge proffered by the CDJ wielding deejays. A percentage of the crowd was even made up of holdovers from Max Cooper’s technically proficient, but disappointingly linear performance (the following night’s dancer-assisted showcase featuring Cooper was supposedly far superior) that preceded Arca’s takeover, a less surprising development than one might expect considering the breadth of interests and knowledge among the Decibel crowd.

Hit the jump for the totality of our Decibel coverage…

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Grandmixxer Mix For The Astral Plane (w/ Interview)

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September 30, 2014
Interviews, Mixes
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grandmixxer

With just over ten years under grime’s belt, journalists and historians have spent a good amount of time navel gazing about the genre’s origins, eulogizing the demise of its piratic origins, and prophesying about its gun clad future. Since its modest, wheel-filled beginnings though, grime’s story has always been best told by its constituent members and crews, whether through formal means of official histories and interviews, or the contemporary platform of the Twitter screed. We were lucky enough to speak with a modern legend in Grandmixxer and the former Rinse (and current FLEX FM) DJ was kind enough to drop off an hour of palette wrecking instrumental grime for the occasion. As a label curator (Wig Power Foundation), tour DJ (Big Narstie), mentor (Novelist, DullahBeatz) and producer in his own right, Grandmixxer has inextricably involved himself into the fabric of grime’s rich past and its effervescent future. And the man himself can obviously tell it best so without further ado, a conversation with Grandmixxer.

Over the years, you’ve played out on a number of radio stations and you currently have a weekly slot on FlexFM. Do you have a favourite memory or set of memories from your time in radio?

My first ever radio appearance on On Top FM. A locally big pirate at the time with crews such as N Double A, Roadside G’s, South Soldiers, Mastermind Troopers and basically any one who was big at the time in grime from south London.

Appearing on there was a big deal to me and I will never forget the tension, shaky hands and all of that! Luckily for me it went well and I was given my own show a week or two after my debut.

The Nasty Crew show was my first grime experience and I used to lock in every week. More recently I got to host a show with Mak10 at FlexFM. It is not an understatement when I say I would not exist today if it was not for this guy, hearing him manipulate sound made me want to own my own turntables so being able to do a show with him was just a very special moment for me

Continue with interview, Grandmixxer’s favorite trax to rinse, and track list below…

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New Dreams – “Face off”

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September 22, 2014
New Music
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dreams

Over the weekend, Private Selection co-heads Dreams, Arkitect and Aerial threw a party in Los Angeles at a venue that could be considered part warehouse, part sweat lodge and part greenhouse. The party featured a rampant b2b set from Dreams and Arkitect and a debut live performance from CalArts students and hardware virtuosos Bodymasters, a combination that set the sizable crowd off despite the necessity for near-constant breaks to escape the overbearing humidity. And despite Los Angeles’ predilection for the smoother end of the house spectrum, the Private Selection sound has appeared to find a home among a certain, warehouse-party attending, longsleeve black tee and basketball short wearing crowd. Dreams’ latest cut, titled “Face Off” comes soon after the manic joy of his DJ Mujava edit and features an altered derangement born out of exactly the sort of party that occurred over the weekend. Claustrophobic, hi-pitched synth notes establish a sense of paranoia, but not quite enough to stop the ever-propulsive kick pattern so while the heat and enclosure might be infringing on base mental health, the feet won’t stop.

Decibel Festival 2014: Hush Hush feat. Kid Smpl, Hanssen, Slow Year, and Cock & Swan

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September 19, 2014
Festivals, Mixes
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hush-hush-showcase

For the next two weeks, we will be featuring different facets of Seattle’s crown jewel of an electronic music event, the consistently excellent Decibel Festival. Considering that Seattle is our hometown and Decibel is one of the most tactful curators of electronic music in the United States, the annual gathering is one of the highlights of our year and more than deserves the praise heaped on it in recent years. The festival runs on a showcase structure, featuring different labels, promotion groups and other tastemakers flexing their creative muscle at Seattle’s best venues. Over the past 11 years, Decibel has grown from a small neighborhood gathering to one of the premiere dance music festivals in the world and over the next few weeks, we’ll parse through the dozens of events to highlight the best and brightest talent the festival has to offer.

Over the past week of Decibel Festival coverage, we’ve pointed our cursors at two showcases, Kinesthesia (Arca + Jesse Kanda, Max Cooper, Total Freedom) and Modern Love (Andy Stott, Millie & Andrea, Demdike Stare), that stopping through Seattle in the midst of truly global tours that will hit dozens of other cities before 2014 lets out. And while Decibel’s growth has allowed the inclusion of highly touted live acts like the aforementioned Cooper and Stott, its roots are still firmly planted in the lush Pacific Northwest and a heartening number of the festival’s key acts hail from Seattle, Portland and the surrounding region. Natasha Kmeto, DJAO, J. Alvarez, The Sight Below and many more local artists will be displaying their numerous talents across a number of showcases, but the single, most condensed collection of local talent at Decibel comes in the form of the Hush Hush Records showcase. Still a relatively young outlet, the discography of Alex Ruder’s label reads like a storyboard of against-the-grain beatwerk, from the fabric (and heart) tearing UK-derived work of Kid Smpl to the richly textured guitar + voice compositions of Cock & Swan.

Hush Hush will be bringing the core of its roster to Decibel and the showcase, taking place on September 26 (Friday) at EMP’s JBL Theater, will feature live performances from Kid Smpl, Hanssen, Slow Year, and Cock & Swan. And while the label ostensibly started as an outlet for the sort of “night bus” sounds intended to soundtrack long, lunar rides on public transportation, this bill has more than enough propulsion to bring any listener out of their doldrums. For a taste a what’s to come next Friday, Hush Hush core man Hanssen was kind enough to contribute a mini mix of key and upcoming label material, all influenced by gauzy hip hop, found sound collage art and rich R&B dynamics. The Hush Hush showcase will not feature the biggest names or stage productions at Decibel, but you won’t find a better representation of the festival’s DIY spirit, inclusive ethos and overall quality control.

If our insistence on attending showcases at EMP seems odd, it’s only because the venue will play host to many of Decibel’s most dynamic performances, dancefloor oriented and not. On any one night, you could witness the hellish choral work of Oneohtrix Point Never, the brilliant harmonics of Cock & Swan and the West African-derived percussive workouts of Millie & Andrea in Seattle’s usual home of rock & roll kitsch. Get single tickets to the Hush Hush showcase here.

Decibel Festival 2014: Modern Love feat. Andy Stott, Millie & Andrea and Demdike Stare

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September 17, 2014
Festivals
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decibel-festival-modern-love

For the next two weeks, we will be featuring different facets of Seattle’s crown jewel of an electronic music event, the consistently excellent Decibel Festival. Considering that Seattle is our hometown and Decibel is one of the most tactful curators of electronic music in the United States, the annual gathering is one of the highlights of our year and more than deserves the praise heaped on it in recent years. The festival runs on a showcase structure, featuring different labels, promotion groups and other tastemakers flexing their creative muscle at Seattle’s best venues. Over the past 11 years, Decibel has grown from a small neighborhood gathering to one of the premiere dance music festivals in the world and over the next few weeks, we’ll parse through the dozens of events to highlight the best and brightest talent the festival has to offer.

Coming straight out of Manchester, Thursday night (9/25) at Decibel Festival will feature heavyweights from the Modern Love roster, namely Andy Stott, Mikes Whittaker and Miles’ and Andy’s respective side-projects Millie & Andrea and Demdike Stare. Of course, reducing Millie & Andrea and Demdike Stare, the former Stott and Whittaker’s fellowship and the latter Whittaker and Sean Canty’s effort, to a footnote is silly and the collective’s performance at Decibel is slated to be one of the most explosive, driving events of the week. Born out of the ashes of the Peicanneck record shop (which would later become Boomkat), Modern Love was founded in 2002 and has formed one of the key pillars of the city’s dance music avant-garde. Equal parts grave/minimalist and overblown/maximalist, Modern Love has gone through a number of incantations and the most recent has been dominated by Stott and Whittaker. The former’s dub techno epic Luxury Problems transcended its own genre label and is still percolating through the popular consciousness two consciousness while the latter’s work on Demdike Stare has garnered an affinity from noise fans and dance music devotees alike.

On Thursday at Decibel, the Modern Love-ians will take the stage at EMP Level 3, the upstairs area of the museum/concert space. All three acts are bringing out their live sets and Stott’s solo set will feature a full a/v component. The showcase will surely feature its share of intrigue from the three acts, but expect a hard-hitting, percussive backbone, masterful dynamics between performers and a singular aesthetic defined by a yearning be somewhere else that defies each respective act’s disparate source material. And while Stott’s solo material and the Demdike Stare project have proven to be two of the more captivating sonic projects in recent years, Millie & Andrea’s set has this particular writer impatient with excitement. Ostensibly “less serious” in the musicians’ own words. Millie & Andrea’s performance is sure to feature the percussive acrobatics that have become the sound du jour of club music producers in recent years. The duo’s debut LP, Drop The Vowels, was released earlier this year on Modern Love and is one of the most comprehensive accounts of percussion I’ve heard in a long time, bringing breakbeats, electro, house and techno, played out on numerous classic drum machines, into the same singular melange. After the clanging affect of Millie & Andrea, I have a feeling that Stott’s solo headline performance will sound downright angelic.

Buy single tickets for the Modern Love showcase here.