Happa

Fahad, the sibling who most regularly posts on this family music blog, has a new baby :-) Many congratulations to Fahad and Bhabi, he is quite busy and will be for a while, so it might take some time for him to post again on The Ashraf Obsession.

Moving on, this post is about Samir Alikhanizadeh, aka Happa, a teenage producer from the UK. I believe his name stands for "half a persian prince and". I wish I could remember how I first heard of Happa. I heard his track "Bring it Back" a few months ago and was blown away that a 15 year-old kid made it. Have a listen, its quite layered and clever:


Resident Advisor just put up a short film about little Happa. He talks about his upbringing, how he got into music, what it's like to be an underage DJ, and his battle with Crohn's disease. Check it out:


For more on Happa click on these:
https://www.facebook.com/halfapersian/
https://soundcloud.com/halfapersianprinceand
https://twitter.com/HalfAPersian

chase and status

watch the vid
track is "eastern jam" by chase and status - LONDON duo! :-D

fierce dubstep, paris b-girls and devdas - my fave dance bit is around 3:34 - check out the camera movement! I need to do something like that.



This other track is also doing my head in. I like this tune a lot more actually.

"I'm pretty bad"

Couldn't find a direct streaming link unfortunately but check out this tune right here. It's "Bad" by Kode9, one of the foremost dubstep producers and label owner of Hyperdub, a dubstep label. This tune just really does my head in - I think its great how he fused dubstep and house together and came up with this.

This is a set by Kode9 from a few years ago - its one of my favourite dubstep mixes. I had this on repeat while in college and would unknowingly try to imitate the beats via beatboxing - I'd only realize what I was doing when I noticed my friend laughing at me.


For those confused on what dubstep is, its a new musical movement of the last decade. I disagree with Fahad on the notion that no new musical movements or genres emerged in the 2000s' - there was, and is dubstep. This is a good briefer on dubstep and features some great dubstep tracks (listen to the Burial and Benga links.) I consider myself lucky to have been in London in 06/07 just when dubstep was beginning to get more notice.

Yeah! Thoughts?

Discovered: Harmonic 313

Alright, well, I might be a bit behind here but I came across Harmonic 313 recently thanks to all the hoopla surrounding the Warp20 release (which I'm sure is excellent). The name intrigued me as 313 is the area code for Detroit, but apparently that's not where the name comes from. Instead Harmonic 313 is the alias for one Mark Pritchard, one of a few aliases. He's based out of Sydney and does some nice bleepy 8-bitty dubsteppy stuff which I am likin'. There are some mixes up on the web that are readily available (see links below) but I recommend picking up the album When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence as it's quite excellent and is an actual album, meaning you can hear it evolve as it plays -- very nice. Oh, and 313 is apparently the frequency produced by planets turning on their axes, so there you go.

There's a mix here.
And another one here.
And here's the myspace page for Mark Pritchard.
Oh, and check out the Harmonic 313 homepage, which is fun and if you win the word game you can get a free track!