sinatra at the opera, bring a blonde

As of today, I really quite like this. Listen.

Distant Relatives

Nas and Damien Jr. Collaborate on a full length for Africa.

watching her move

i'm the first to say he can get a bit too much with all that ey ah yah dum dum dum si mi ya vocalizing.

but whether you lust or loathe you can't help but see that he's making beats that will always go off.

and for that he deserves some support.

and in a few years people will be slating him like they do craig david. Even though everyone own's a worn copy of 'Born To Do It'

Poverty's Paradise

for some of you. . .

MP3: 24 Carat Black - Poverty's Paradise

Heavily sampled LP.

No ID No Entry

a beautiful selection from Blundetto. Not too sure where I came across him/her/them. .

but that doesn't matter. .

...in my dreams the Soprano's next series would be soundtracked something a little like this.

MP3: Blundetto - No ID No Entry

TL

Arthur Prysock "I need your love"

Gary Burton "Las Vegas Tango"

Shuggie Otis "Island Letter"

Harry Muddie "Jam #1"

Joe Pass "A time for us"

Curtis Mayfield "Hard times"

The Professionals "Back stabbers"

Tesfa Mariam Kidane "Heywete"

El Michels Affair "C.R.E.A.M."

Mahavishnu Orchestra "You know you know"

Cedric Im Brooks "Satta Massa Gana"

Joya Landis "When the lights are low" (Blunde' edit)

Irma Thomas "Hurt's all gone"

Nyah Earth "Knight of the long knives"

James Blake.

since hearing his recent myspace player update, my days have been full of feverish visions of how the songs actually sounded. .

some of what my brain threw up was no doubt greatly exaggerated, but that can only be compliment to the freshness of the original productions ...

Forthcoming 12" on Untold's Hemlock label. . And then just watch the journey unfold from there.

If my 2pence is worth anything, the 3rd and 4th quarters are Hemlock's.

Cold As Hell

MP3: Twista - Freestyle on Mike Love

I kinda feel like Twista should only be rapping over chipmunk soul samples or beats like the above.

Love Is Real

i'm a sucker for anything related to this project.

La Habana

wow.

Roberto Fonseca Live Performance from 1998.

so so tight. digging on youtube always reaps rewards. & seriously need to go Cuba again. such a passionate culture - and they always seem to find a way to communicate it fully . . whatever the medium.

Thats the one I got to get wit!

Statik Selektah - Talkin' Bout You (Ladies) (Ft. Talib Kweli, Skyzoo & Joell Ortiz)

Seriously, this is the way to pay homage to females. . . So much sexier than MTV semi nudity type. And so much more respectful.

On a Talib Kweli drive right now - slowly moving further into my top X emcees of all time.

Back To The Feature

MP3: Wale - Rather Be With You (Ft. J Cole & Curren$y)

Backtothefeature just dropped. Wale x 9th Wonder. Grab it here. . . Walemusic.com

above, above is a taster from the said tape - J Cole grew on me a lot. Curren$y sounds, for once, like he's got some non-substance dependent life in him, and Wale is correct as per usual. Just GOOD hiphop.

Albums looking bright.

Still haven't got over his last tape. Worthy of Album status.

Re: File Sent: Arecibo Message.zip

I'm not trying to beg any journalistic skill.

But a while ago I was lucky enough to link with Ireland's Boxcutter to ask him a few questions about his then forthcoming Planet Mu LP 'Arecibo Message' . .

Easily one of my favourite, and one of the most unique electronic producers making music at the moment..

if your yet to hear his music I can't recommend any of the albums enough. . Check him at Myspace / Boomkat . . .

------

Explain Arecibo Message. .

It's just a joke based on the film samples I used in the track of the same name. There's a line about electronic signals coming from a planet, it reminded me of the Arecibo Message transmission. I thought the actual image looked cool too, nicely primitive digital graphics, like an Atari 2600 game. It tied in with the feel of the music and was easy to get imagery for the cover too, the DNA spiral rising up into space.

So... is your background in science, or is it just one of those things you end up wiki-ing that stays with you.

Yeah, I studied and then done research in astronomy at university, I've been into it from I was really young. Proper brain-bending subject.

When did you start working on this LP?

I started pretty much as soon as I got the last one (Glyphic) finished. I'm still getting a feel for how to properly create an album... in the past I've always just made tracks on a whim, just doing whatever I was in the mood for hearing. If you're not relentlessly making big dance floor stuff then people tend to chalk you down as an 'album artist', but I don't really feel like I had enough consistency to warrant that sort of title... I tried to get this one to hang together from the outset though; I initially gave it to Planet Mu in a form that was pretty close to what we eventually agreed on. I wanted to make something trippy and spaced out, but not “deep” in the usual sense of long tracks and serious moods.... so everything is really dense with strange sounds, but the tracks are shorter and a bit more immediate.

& how did you go about putting these ideas down into sound...?

I'm pretty fussy about equipment; I tend to go for old stuff... I'm not into really slick modern dance music; stuff that sounds like an advert for itself, so old gear helps me avoid that. It’s easier to mess about with too. A lot of the time tracks will just naturally evolve from playing around with stuff... I really like Pierre Schaeffer's ideas, that musical activity should be based on play. Usually I start messing about, recording everything I do, then select sounds and ideas that are a bit unexpected and build on those.

So...you didn’t decide on this sound specifically as a ‘marked progression’ from the last LP?

Well there were things I did on Glyphic that I really wanted to get away from on this LP. I felt like I made a meal out of a few ideas used on Glyphic; that all the tracks took a bass line, or set of samples or whatever, and really stretched it out. So I wanted to make sure that everything on this LP was shorter, and that the tracks had more little one off sections, key changes, things like that... I think the 'space' theme started to come from working with the old synths, usually at night, and from the films I was watching... loads of stuff contributed.

I nearly always know a Boxcutter track when I hear it. . How do you think you’ve managed to keep such a distinctive sound, yet not get stuck creatively?

I've just got a notion in my head of what I want to do with sound. You can't hide anything from people with music; everything is there in the track... It's amazing how transparent it is, you can really hear a person's mindset in their output.

It’s interesting; in previous chats (and here..) you’ve mentioned being influenced by the stars, films and gigs but never by pieces of music specifically. . Was there any music that you were listening to throughout the entire production process...?

Yeah I'm always getting inspired from music, that's the main thing really... I listened to so much stuff it's hard to start singling things out, it's easy just to name things that I've been into the longest and still like, like Jimi Hendrix or Bootsy Collins. But I'm always checking out new stuff and going back over all the stuff I've missed. It's good to get a balance of old and new, I don't think that music expires or gets out-dated if it's any good to start with.

One thing I'll mention is an electroacoustic commission I got asked to make last year by Lyric FM, a southern Irish radio station, I was working on it alongside the LP stuff. I'd been checking all sorts of early electronic music already, but this was a good incentive to really dig into it all, so I've been listening to lots of Creel Pone reissues, lots of Parmegiani and the Radiophonic Workshop, Todd Dockstader, things like that... it's so good, it's a fairly obvious thing to name check but there you go.

Another thing that stands out from previous conversations are the slightly negative feelings you seem to have towards your last album Glyphic. Some listeners would surely see it as your strongest release?

Yeah I don't think it sounds very good to be honest, looking back, I think the files I have here of the music sounds better than what got released. My production was full of bad habits around then, I'd been in and out of shitty jobs for a bit after Oneiric came out, they left me a bit out of practice making beats. And then I was also getting my head wrecked with the whole dubstep thing around the time I was working on that LP, always getting bracketed into it. That was funny cos a lot of it was becoming very centred on engineering, souping up your car to have the bassiest exhaust... that mentality. Playing at gigs where that's the focus was pretty damaging to my esteem cos there's no way I could 'compete', I just don't have it in me... I want my tracks to have some sort of effect on your mind, not show off how big my fucking snares are. So the LP reminds me of that time a bit, trying to figure out what I should be making, how it should sound, what I should play in my sets...

For me at least, your last line really strikes home. . It seemed at a certain point that a huge number of dubstep producers were spending too much time watching others and not enough time thinking about themselves. . So you see this album as you coming out of that. You just doing you. . .

Yeah that’s the plan, I’m just trying to define my sound more and more with every new album, and show how it‘s changing and growing.

And I guess this kind of leads into the obligatory genre question, would you still class your music as dubstep. . Or do you feel it has progressed beyond the borders? Or do you refuse to enter the genre debate as it is?

I'm generally just full of angst about whether I can class it as any fucking good, never mind anything more complicated... I've learned a lot about genres and how they're defined in the last few years though, like for instance, the social side of musical scenes is a lot more obvious to me. That said, it's still something I consider less important than the actual sonics, probably just because I've always had a loner approach to production. I think it boils down to whether a track is of use to DJs. The thing about UK bass stuff is that you have to innovate but do it in a very particular way, certain key things can't be fucked around with too much... and I don't really have enough discipline to keep them in place every time, so I naturally make odd things that don't fit. Sometimes I wish I could consistently make really heavy club music though, I really like hearing my tracks in DJ sets.

I have the breaks album you did a while back under your real name. . What’s the story with that project?

Balancing Lakes isn't a breaks album! I just wanted to give a slightly more complete picture of all the sounds I'm into and have had a go at. I also wanted to release something that had nothing to do with fashionable sounds, just to see how it is for a record to appear with no hype, see who'd pick up on it... Back-story is, Mike at Planet Mu compiled 2 albums from the batch of stuff I sent him in 2005 after he asked for a release, one was Oneiric and the other was Balancing Lakes. It wasn't material that had been previously rejected; I read a harsh review that said as much. I compromised a lot with Mike on it though, I feel like I've much better stuff in my archives than some of what he picked...

Any fellow producers/artists who you will continually check for?

Yeah, too many to name! Name some people if you wanna go into this more... Curious as to who you think I was checking out, as I said music is transparent so I feel like some of it is really clear.

What do you want ideally from the rest of ’09? Personal plans for the future. Are you 100% on music these days?

I'm making a lot of new stuff lately, lots of different tempos, but I’m not sure yet what’s happening with them. I’ve done some remixes too, one for FaltyDL, and I’ve remixed / re-wrote a Robot Koch track as well. I'm just working as much as I can on tracks, hoping for the best...

Kinnego Flux label...? Where did this creation lead from..? Releases forthcoming?

Trying to get more stuff out soon, I'd like to get some stuff by other producers I like out there too. The label is just called Kinnego by the way, it's the name of the marina at the Lough near where I'm from. I used to get loads of mushrooms there until they built a fucking visitor centre on it. I wanted to have another way of releasing stuff aside from Planet Mu basically, nice to get full say on where things get mastered, what the art's like etc... I want to keep everything collectable and worth owning, seems like it's the best way to do physical releases now...

Do you think your location has had an effect on the music you make? Considering that a lot of ‘dubstep’ producers are coming out of...almost ‘hubs’ – Bristol, London. .. . Do you think you would be making a different sound if you were London or city based. . ?

This sort of location / city question comes up a lot in interviews, for a while I did mention that I wasn't in a big city / London, cos it was being focussed on so much whenever dubstep was written about, and I was getting mentioned in the same way. I think that location does have an effect, where you are and the people you’re round encourage certain things and that can have a positive effect… I think it can also spur on competitiveness more than it actually inspires though. And I usually find if I make a track because I’m jealous of something else, or just feel like I should be more prolific, it’ll end up more in a mould than stuff I’ll make if I’m left to just naturally fill up with ideas. The other side of the location question is the general effect on your whole psychology that a place can have, and being Northern Irish and having been exposed to everything that goes with that is really important too. But that's way too complicated to talk about briefly to be honest.

Dirtbag

By Silencer.

off of Run The CD.

It just clicked with me today.

International Amalgamation of Champions

Hold Box Flat

The Reckoner by holdboxflat

No hype. Just music.

Hold Box Flat

Fantastic 4 (30.05.09)

unoriginal I know.

but see the 'Music I Like' post below - mentioned this as the best funky set I'd heard in a while - every now and then hints at the true potential.

The fantastic four are Roska, Scratcha, D Malice and Ill Blu. and here they go b2b for a long while.

MP3: Fantastic Four - 30.05.09 (Rinse Set)

seriously. don't sleep on the Claude Von Stroke below either. Listening to the b-side and for the forthcoming long player this could be immense. This isn't TECH HOUSE.

Aundy

this is too big. Claude Von Stroke's new one.

too tooo tooo big. offbeat. dare i say it. . . funky.

coming soon on DirtyBird.

#1 the Music I Like

My new favourite Wiley album - some of the best things he's done in a long time. . - 'Eyes Of The Lord', 'Out Of The Game', 'Zip It Up' and that Danny Weed production 'Hummer Activity'. 'Music I Like' is real real nice too. They are all on youtube. And have been for about six months.

But what is 'Olly' - I can't imagine any audience, or anyone with an ounce of self respect listening to this out of choice. Means I can't just run the album in its entirety. But still putting together a Wiley Greatest Hits would own my CD collection.

But a seriously tight album bar the blip, and one that is certainly worth 11£ -

Yet to check Skepta's but heard that its pretty weak - nothing surprising seeing as all I've heard from him in the last year is the same bars about dry ankles and Ed Hardy Party's. Funny the first time.

We shall see. Oh yeah, and they are fighting for us now too.

I didn't check our favourite street commentator'S release yet either. Bashy. Did get sent some seriously poor videos though.

Instrumental wise - Butterz deejays have got you covered - serious serious selection. including Low Deep - Get Set Instrumental. . woaaah. D/l the show + tracklisting @butterz



- - - - - - - -

The new Soul Motive 12" split between Rossi B Luca and El-B is also worthy of a mention. I went nuts over the Joker 'snake eater' track on the same label a while back, mainly because it brought back memories of the Low Deep instrumentals I used to run together. . and this is worthy of the same amount of praise. Both sides predictably bass heavy but more echoing through the club walls than shattering your Kenwood stereo. Check samples at Boomkat. or on the Soul Motive Myspace.

- - - - - - - -

The anticipated Cooly G 12" on Hyperdub also finally appeared this week. Boomkat. She also let me know that there are a couple of brand new bits on her myspace. . . & for any in London area. . . Kode 9, Cooly G, Brackles, Lil' Silva line up at the Producers House in early August. . Details.

- - - - - - - -

FaltyDL is a name that has become popular pretty quickly, 2 months or so ago no-one had truly heard of him. Now with a slew of releases on Ramp Recordings and Planet Mu - including a remix package (U'ziQ, boxcutter and Vibert) from heaven and an album out yesterday - people are talking about him like he's been around for years. 'To London' is the track!

Further details can be found here

And there are new bits on his myspace player - He isn't hanging about. .

- - - - - - - -

Funky wise. have been listening a lot to the Emvee 12" on the Wireblock label. 'Glitch Dub' and 'Nocturnal' - ones hard, the other not so. Boomkat. People are talking about future Wireblock releases sitting on the funky side too - finally spreading from London.

Set's wise - haven't really caught anything too new that has been consistently exciting like the Mak ten sets of April. . With funky in its infancy, there is still the chance that you will be left unsatisfied or bored if the selections aren't right.

And i want a lot of emcees to step away from the genre completely. Grime is your vehicle, and if you can't ride that then you should career change.

One set that hinted at greatness was by the Fantastic Four (DVA, Roska, D Malice and Ill Blu) - which I'm sure is actually 5, seeing as there are two members of Ill Blu. They collectively have an EP out too. Ill Blu's 'Time To Get Nasty' is the choice cut. Hear at HTFR. I'll upload the set again if anyone should need.

- - - - - - - -

My eyes are still stinging. So i'll call this roll call off. & go find the coffee -

but, finally. . .

Martin Clark (Blackdown) did a proper round up of what's happening in London urban music here.

&

Dan Hancox featured some of the Bristol talents (Joker, Guido, Gemmy etc) in an article for the Guardian.

&

The Guardian also did this. Haha.

Barnet.

Wiley talking nonsense for 3minutes 45seconds. In the direction of Skepta.

In response to this , which was in response to this.

some 50 vs. Ross type thing, but this actually makes me laugh.

props to Elijahbutterz for the video. .

Wigflex 002

So another 4 tracks to follow 001.

Again pushing the unique sounds that were heard on that, Geiom makes way for Eleven Tigers - but the other three contributors remain the same. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all aliases for the same guy.

Intriguing electronic music which sits between any existing scenes or pockets of sound. Look forward to hearing them used out and about..

Available on the 22nd of this month. Digitally and Vinyl based.

I don't like to get pigeonholed into one artists, one label, or one sound on here - but I will continue to support when releases make me move/think/question as much as these.

News/Distribution Details here.

4am Sunrise Starts

a real work of art,as recently previewed by Gilles Peterson on the Brownswood Basement.

going to sleep as the birds wake up is not a good summer look. It sounds beautiful, but try it.

Need to hunt that LP.

premiere gaou

last night was the hypest night in my life. no neon lights. no superstar dj's. no VIP. no dress code.

stripped down. dancing in friends bedroom / lounge / wherever. you didn't want it to stop. Even when youtube started glitching people moved without complaint.

for me it's what it all comes down too. .

the real point of this. . . those that know me, will know that I'm the first to moan about Southampton . . but last night truly proves its the people that make occasions. Maybe an obvious thing to some of the more mature audience. But when your young and attracted by the bright lights of life - you can often forget it.

It's okay to aspire to move to the next stage in life. but we must not forget the beauty of the present.

so easily done.

& the song. Can't even remember how many times it was spun last night.

probably the biggest song in my life right now. . hahaha.

love to all involved last night, even though the majority know nothing about this music vice.

and never watch face. a few people were doing it last night.

You never see me stressed.

Even if they won't let me in heaven, i'l raise hell, till it's heaven

timeless. big L and Jay-Z going toe to toe on Stretch and Bobbito's when I was 6.

MP3: Big L & Jay-Z - Stretch and Bobbito 1995 Pt. 1
MP3: Big L & Jay-Z - Stretch and Bobbito 1995 Pt. 2

NONSENSE

No doubt the Unofficial Brainfeeder AfterParty. So you will have beats for days.

I'm About. I'm About.

yeah, thats right. Uni Yr2 is a wrap. And i can now spend the majority of my time guiltfree browsing record stores, sitting at the internet, watching Sopranos, sitting in coffeehouses. . . whatever I want really. I am more imaginative than that list.

I'm writting a larger post. but I didn't want this to get lost in the mix. Was a huge barrier to revision over the last week or so. Bok Bok one of the BEST at mixing everything up and coming out with something coherent. Seriously, the guy must be so hype live. Props to LuckyMe for having him in for a mixtape. You can catch the man here. . .on his myspace. . . or stay tuned and I'l be posting the forthcoming Nightslugs flyer - at which (I think) he is a resident.

MP3: Manara's Golden Fleece Mix - Bok Bok

refuge – u best believe
donaeo – love to happen
mosca – square one
dre skull – i want you ( bok bok remix dub )
alison hinds ft machel montano – ?
dj cleo – east rand funk
r1 ryders – rubberband
dorian concept – trilingual dance sexperience
short stuff & mickey pearce – tripped up
zomby – with lasers
electric red – drink in my cup
joker & ginz – purple city
terror danjah – sidechain
bok bok – crew dub
dj assualt – vandalism
mr de – time space scrilla
basutbudet - take them out to eat ( bok bok sundown edit )

Death. The best invention of Life.

sure some of you have seen this.

but really, we could all learn something from this speech. It wouldn't hurt to listen to it everyday.