Wednesday, November 29, 2017

"I had good intentions"

So since 2013 we've been blogging about Disclosure. It's funny to see how massive these brothers have become - MASSIVE. They're part of the mainstream in America, which is really saying something I think, for a dance act from the UK. But it goes to show how much ground house music has broken here in Yankland in recent years...and yes even though house music has been American all along, being born in the gay black scenes of Chicago.

For the last week or so I've been listening to both of Disclosure's albums. Laugh at me for writing this way late, way past when these albums have been released - but I don't care. "Settle" from 2013 really seems to be just 24/7 house, while "Caracal" is more pop and r&b focused. I won't post up the links to the songs here, since they're so well-known and easy to find, but my favourites from "Caracal" are "Jaded" (even though I think it has too many lyrics), "Good Intentions" (I infuse some Sufism into it) and the closing track "Masterpiece", which is a real surprise.

Excerpt from a pitchfork interview (laugh, I don't care):
"The thing that got us into garage was dubstep. And once you’re into dubstep, you just start tracing it back. Because dubstep is obviously stemmed from grime, and grime is from garage, and garage from house. That’s the path we found.
 
In college, I had loads of friends who were into grime and I went to grime and dubstep raves. After a while, DJs just started playing old house and garage records again! We were going to watch Oneman, Jackmaster, and Ben UFO, back in 2009, and those guys were dropping old-school garage records—every third song would be an absolute classic. And we had no idea what some of those songs were. That’s when we decided to buy all that stuff and learn about it. Just because we were 10 years old the first time around doesn’t mean we can’t listen to it now; even though we got to it late, we still discovered it naturally, through buying records."

Man, 2009 both seems like yesterday and also a really long time ago. Time is elastic, I've thought for a while now.

Monday, November 20, 2017

Gorgon City Rinse FM mix from February 2015

House music is THE BEST WORK MUSIC.

THE BEST.

I love mixes and I've loved this one since it came out. God, it's 2 hours of PURE BLISS.

ENJOY.

Thank you Gorgon City! Muah.
(I also have exciting news regarding music and me...ooh la la).

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Memories of the Future*

* RIP The Spaceape


Self-loathing a go go
I grew up in the 80's and 90's and one thing I'm still pretty nostalgic for from my youth are tapes, cassette tapes -- TDK D90s and the like.  They have an appeal to me that vinyl and CD's don't.  I was at home today and I stuck on an old tape just to have something to listen to, one I dug out from a box in my parents' basement on one of my Michigan trips.  Didn't look at the tracklist or anything, just put it on.  While listening I guessed it's from the late 90's as most of the tracks seem to have been taped from CD's I was reviewing for my old college station.  All electronic, including some euphoric trance!  A couple of the tracks made me look at the tape to figure out what they were though.  First up is 'Rae' by Autechre.  I was surprised when I saw it was them as in my mind Autechre are very angular and harsh, where as this is a very pretty tune:



The other track I looked at the cover for is by an artist I cannot remember at all anymore -- Chistoph De Babalon.  Here are some nice breakbeats:





While I'm at at, I'll put something by Genaside II up as well.  A very mysterious act I came across on a cover mounted free cassette with the long-defunct Select magazine.  This was basically pre-internet so I never really knew a whole about them, but they had some crazy imagery, I remember that.  I'll do some digging tonight.  This version of the track, a vocal version, is actually hard/impossible to find outside of that cassette -- so hard that I've just recorded it to wav from the original cassette and am putting it on soundcloud (actually that didn't happen, so I'm using another random site, god knows how long this'll stay up).  Appreciate!



Try this link if the player doesn't work