In my expert opinion, three songs have touched on pop perfection this year (so far): Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You”, Miguel’s “Adorn” and AlunaGeorge’s “Your Drums, Your Love”. It’s no surprise that each one of these has been remixes countless times, with very mixed results. “Your Drums, Your Love” is the most recent of the three and has already seen the release of an official remix EP featuring Lil Silva and Duke Dumont, as well as numerous unofficial remixes. Unfortunately for all the rest of you producers, Friendly Fires have entered the building. Clear your palm pilots, surround yourself in cushy pillows and let this track envelop you. The Aluna/Aaliyah comparisons are no accident and Friendly Fires don’t miss a beat. This is pop music transcending pop music. Stream below.
My apologies on being AWOL from this URL for the past month and change, hopefully you’ll hear a thing or two about what I’ve been working on recently in the next few months.
Anyways, full disclosure, barring possibly my middle school obsession with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, James Blake is the most influential musician to ever reach my eardrums. I keep coming back to his work. Thus, I was tickled pink to find that he released a single and b-side under the old Harmonimix moniker (he released these with rapper Trim, who I won’t focus on here, but still deserves a lot of recognition for his vocal contributions). If I may, I’m gonna take the opportunity to say a few things about JB, his new tune, and how he has changed the way I think about music.
Music these days seems to be splintering into a camp making tunes meant for big speakers and disorienting dancefloors and one making the tunes you wake up to, walk around to, and fall asleep to at night. Although this is far more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, it is difficult for a musician to place him or herself firmly in both of these camps.
Although he isn’t the only one to do so (cough cough Mount Kimbie, Disclosure, Probably Countless Unheard But Incredibly Talented Producers Toiling In The Depths Of Soundcloud), James Blake has created a characteristic sound that feels equally at home in your laptop speakers/headphones and the most absurd soundsystem at a festival headline stage. I’ve spent a lot of time dissecting the music he makes, so oblige me sharing a few of the observations I’ve made.
Confidence Boost (which you oughtta be listening to by now via the attached youtube video) opens with reverb-soaked drums that possess two important qualities: they are both ambiguous and engaging. The sound is amorphous, but nuanced, as bursts of condensed white noise that will continue permeate the song flit among the cloudy drums. Suddenly, Trim’s voice comes to your attention. “Look”.
James Blake is a student of pop music as well as an accomplished practitioner of sound design. This double degree manifests itself in how well his music translates to different contexts. I have spent days slaving over logic pro as well as enjoying music as a casual listener, and both of these sensibilities are appeased with the opening of “Confidence Boost”. All of a sudden, the soundscape is subjected to a sort of vaccuum. Only the clearest, most salient elements remain, and sitting directly in the center of the mix is a rather unprocessed human voice. Like much of Blake’s vocal work, Trim’s lyrics speak to a personal pain that has a universally applicable quality. JB keeps the voice a lucid center of the piece, but by adding pitch shifted wisps and subtle manipulations of timing, the lyricist becomes less any particular person and more a unorganized chorus of empathetic listeners. The third time around, the vocal has sunk into a cacophony of emotion and energy that gradually recedes, leaving the listener with one last clear “strike a pose”. A similar balancing act of vocal and feeling-soaked instrumental made me tear up while listening to the Wilhelm Scream live, and it works again.
As far as Blake’s work with the instrumental, if I told you everything I wanted to about how perfect I think the construction is, how finely tuned and polished each element is, how well all the elements complement each other, how the arrangement manages to be utterly left field and yet as familiar and listenable to the acclimated listener to any pop song, this article would move just way too far into tl;dr status. Instead I’ll tell you this. I don’t think I would even listen for qualities like this in music if it wasn’t for James Blake’s pop tunes drawing me into their complexities.
Thank you for reading this far, I’ll leave you with this. One time I smoked way too much DMT, thought I was developing rapid onset multiple personality disorder, and felt like the world was closing in around me. Then all of sudden, inexplicably, the opening chords to the Wilhelm Scream started playing in my mental stereo and the psychedelic purgatory quickly faded into a warm light blue color, and after about a minute of the song playing out in my imagination, I opened my eyes and everything was fine. Why this happened is beyond me but what i do know is this: I’ve listened to James Blake’s album enough that I could basically recited the Wilhelm Scream to myself, arrangement and all, while utterly incapacitated, and just the thought of that song was one of the most incredible musical moments I’ve ever had.
And another Lianne La Havas remix rolls through. By my official (unoffical) count, La Havas is the most remixed songstress of 2012. At this point, you should know that Ryan Hemsworth is one of our favorites and a true Astral Plane-ian. Hemsworth drenches “Ages” into synth molasses here, giving it a n incandescent vibe. Unlike most, Hemsworth’s use of video game samples and 8-bit sounds avoids sounding nostalgic and/or corny in a way that I can’t put my finger on. Dude just manages to rise above with every original and remix he’s done to this point. Head over to Earmilk to stream and download the remix.
Everyone has a posse these days, but few are as vile as Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade. Hopefully as a precursor to a full-length, Brown, Dopehead and in-house producer SKYWLKR let loose this EP via Scion A/V. For some reason I can’t even begin to comprehend, the EP’s four tracks are all edited, with that obnoxious warped sound throughout. Fuq dat. Anyways, with Brown at his lugubrious best and Dopehead playing the littler brother role more than capably, the EP is a nice primer to the crew, although hearing from Chip$ would have been preferable. Remixes from Ryan Hemsworth and Lockah prove that one of Brown’s most overlooked assets is his esoteric beat selection and willing to experiment. Those Gucci samples on “Errthing”? Yeaaahhhh. Wouldn’t mind a full project from those two. Head over to Scion A/V to grab the full EP.
When I look up The xx’s 2009 debut in my iTunes, I’m almost always taken aback by the sheer number of talent that lent their hand to both official and unofficial remixes. Pariah, Dark Sky, Mount Kimbie, Nosaj Thing, John Talabot, Four Tet, and of course Jamie xx himself, all put forth impressive reinterpretations, with “VCR”, “Basic Space” and “Islands” (by my count) being the most popular remix fodder. Even that Biggy mashup tape was quality and highlighted Jamie xx’s handle on hip hop percussion. Surprisingly, despite Coexist being released over two weeks ago, there has been a dearth of quality remixes. It’s not like the album isn’t remix-able either. With even more empty space and sparser production, the album is arguably more open to reinterpretation than xx. Enter Kieran Hebden. Four Tet’s sprawling remix of “VCR” was one of the two or three best from the debut and his take on “Angels” might be looked back on in a similar fashion in a few years. Unlike the nine minute shoegaze exodus that was “VCR”, Hebden’s take on “Angels” is charming and beatific, maintaining the restraint of the original. The remix could appear on an EP alongside a Jamie xx remix of a recent Four Tet jam. In the meantime, stream “Angels” below.
It’s not easy to distinguish oneself from the crowd of beatsmiths who make up Los Angeles’ famed Beat scene. With Low End Theory as Mecca and bastions like dublab, TeamSupreme and Brainfeeder filling out the rest of the Holy Land, young producers from all over the nation (and world) flock to the City of Angels. Clearly it’s a good thing to have such a massive talent-base although wading through the unquantized fuckery can get frustrating. TeamSuprme contributor and general badman Colta is on the cusp of breaking out of the fuckery and making it to the Promised Land. All religious metaphors aside, this rising young producer is making huge strides every week in his solo work and in his contributions to the TeamSupreme tapes. His latest effort is a flip on Jeremih’s sensual “Fuck You All The Time”. Stream the remix below and download it while you still can (only 14 left).
Remix albums generally follow a pretty standard formula: enlist like-minded producers (and maybe one or two odd balls) to riff off of concepts devised on the original EP. Alex Ruder and Kid Smpl take a different approach on the newly released Dope Pac SE, the second release on Ruder’s Hush Hush Records. Grabbing talent from literally across the globe, the EP is an across the spectrum exhibition in exercising the Night Bus sound. Bay Area native 88:88 flips “Relief” into a club track, properly suited for some dank underground dancefloor filled with paranoiacs. Seattle’s own DJAO (of Dropping Gems) also takes on “Relief”, first mutating it into his own version of Night Bus, that is until the percussion mounts into one of AO’s most captivating rhythms yet. The tape is a look into the multiple ways that Kid Smpl’s music can be mutated into different forms by producer’s that align themselves with Hush Hush and Night Bus (Anthony Elect has a release on Hush Hush coming out late 2012/early 2013), as well as producers who come from entirely different spheres of influence. The EP is free so you have no excuse not to grab it.
First off, White Ring sound (and look) a lot like Salem. A lot of people fucking despise Salem. If you’re going to reflexively hate on this because of that association, stop reading now. I wouldn’t blame you. You’d be missing out on one of the best Flocka flips this side Shlohmo though. The New York duo avoid taking “Murder” into that extraordinarily obnoxious reverb-y/goth range, instead simmering it in a gauzy synths and machinegun 808’s. It really shouldn’t work, but it does. Unfortunately free downloads have run out so you only have the streaming option
Ryan Hemsworth’s work to this date has covered much of the ground where hip hop and dance music meet, often extrapolating into unknown territories. This willingness to experiment with new sounds has allowed Hemsworth to effortlessly traipse across the electronic music landscape, mastering sounds as divergent as soul-based house to straight up wavy hip hop. As both his best and most complete product, the Last Words EP (out now on Wedidit) stands as a signifier of the hard work Hemsworth has put in over the past several years. Of course, Hemsworth isn’t going to stop experimenting and progressing. His latest remix is of label-mate Groundislava’s Bath-assisted “Suicide Mission” and sees Hemsworth trying his hand at juke. Taking the original’s sanguine rhythms and warping them into hyper-speed, Hemsworth creates a sort of distended dance track, not really fit for a club, but also a little too hyperactive for normal headphone listening. It’s like if you ingested a bunch of cough syrup and dexedrine at the same time. Or something like that (not that I would know). Anyways, the remix is presumably part of an upcoming single, which will hopefully include other Wedidit members. Stream below.
There are few bands in the contemporary music landscape that completely defy description. In the internet era, just about every band, album, song and bar can be attributed a descriptor. Unfortunately, this isn’t due to music critics’ vastly improved vocabularies. Instead, there is a need to assign genre names and other descriptors to everyone and everything. Enter Black Moth Super Rainbow. Just try and define the Pittsburgh group, I dare you. Wikipedia calls them “neo-psychedelia” for fucks sake. Most people fall back on the “____ on LSD” cliche, but BMSR don’t fall into the confines of any hallucinogen, at least not one known to man. Anyways, if you weren’t already squealing in anticipation for BMSR’s upcoming Cobra Juicy (looking at an October 9 release), then the Windshield Smasher EP/Maxi-Single might just make your eyes bug out and your stomach do a few somersaults. Featuring remixes from a cohort of screwballs including Odd Nosdam and Zackey Force Funk, the package is an exhibition in off-kilter rhythms, lead by Nosdam’s draped up and dripped out submission. All centered around Tobacco’s vocoder mastery of course. BMSR continue to make the weirdest pop music around, evoking technicolor patterns more than coherent emotions. Stream Windshield Smasher below and ready yourself for Cobra Juicy.
The Astral Plane 