House Is A Feeling

Here and here, of Fabrice Lig on Versatile and Rhadoo on Cadenza. More to come very soon.

So it’s been ages since I did a proper chart. There is a wealth of good music around and I’ve been steadily buying stuff even while I wasn’t blogging. This is a chart of mostly new stuff with a few old tracks thrown in.

1. Losoul-Raw Beauty (Playhouse)

Losoul can almost always be relied upon to make really interesting off kilter house, but this loose groove is the best thing he’s done in a couple of years I think. What I find interesting about this kind of house music and the current wave of enthusiasm for it is how drunken this music sounds.

Where minimal was associated with wild drug excess, regardless of the fact that nobody has ever had to do bags of drugs to like any type of music, the house sound that’s so popular at the moment seems like real drinking music to me. Of course that’s not to say anyone going on all night binges is going to be disgusted by this stuff, far from it!

2. Loco Dice-La Esquina (Desolat)

I like two tracks from Loco Dice’s new album, which isn’t a bad return for a dance LP I guess! The first is the Oslo-esque “How Do I Know”, and the second is this fairly shameless house-fest. This is a bit like Julien Jabre or somebody, though thankfully not quite as evocative of Chris Rea’s “Driving Home For Christmas” as Jabre’s “Swimming Places” was.

People often will say “Oh it’s all Martin Buttrich” about a production team like this, but I think Buttrich’s own stuff is pretty disappointing a lot of the time, and I like several Loco Dice tunes. Maybe the ideas guy does really matter.

3. Drei Farben House-Menswear (Brut!)

I’m pretty bored by a lot of melodic trancey Dial type stuff these days (apart from the Pigon and Carsten/Carsten tracks off that last EP), or anything that has that kind of Kompakt sad swoon to it, but this is an exception. There’s just enough house in this to grab my interest, and I guess I loved that style enough in the past that I still am partial. Also I challenge you to listen to this and not feel a bit wistful. This reminds me of Cassy a bit, it has that same sort of warm fragility to it, and sounds so spaced out and lost, it takes a real journey to arrive at a sound like this.

4. Robert Hood-And Then We Planned Our Escape (Music Man)

The tube. Hot and stinking at the best of times. On Sunday I trudged up a few flights of stairs after 6 days work in a row, listening to this track as a strong draft flew towards me from the outside. I turned this up to deafening volume and fought my way outside where the sun was beating down. With the wind in my face walking through the underground, this was the first “wow” moment I’ve had in ages, though in my teens I’d feel like that listening to music all the time.

That anecdote doesn’t say a lot about the record I guess, but it does make you wonder. Could another record at that time have had the exact same effect? Who can say how much of this is context and how much is the sounds themselves? It was damn good though. Nice to see Carl Craig singling this out in the Wire recently, I like it above and beyond anything else on the recent Hood Music releases. The track title is really evocative too.

5. Tadeo-Cosmos (Cassy Movin’ On Mix) (Apnea)

This one is really special. I suppose this sort of track is the holy grail for dance producers, in that it that doesn’t noticeably change at all over 10 minutes after the intro, yet demands your interest. The changes are stealthy, the whole thing locks you into that cage of repetition that’s synonymous with really great dance music. Like Drei Farben House this sounds sort of desolate and detached, it’s funny, there’s nothing “fun” about this music, yet people party to it.

That conflict seems to go right to the heart of dance music, the intensity of the party is such that the music is often very serious, no matter what genre it is. When you think about it, it’s quite a weird cultural evolution that has led to this type of music soundtracking parties.

6. Marcus Fix-You Don’t Know Me (Below)

This one sounds a bit like Moodymann’s “LiveinLA1998″ gone a little minimal, with that same live piano feel. I really like the drama of this, and the way digital elements are combined with a trip aboard the musicianship. Often that’s a boring journey full of rules and reverence but Fix isn’t afraid to mix the keys with less organic elements.

7. Lemos and Kreon-Lyly Shere (Anthony Collins Mix) (Resopal)

Paul Ritch’s close collaborator Anthony Collins has had a ton of big releases, but I found his style a bit formulaic fairly quickly. This track is serious though. People are mixing instruments and digital production techniques in way that’s so exciting, it actually makes a mockery of the rhetorical divides between “real” instruments and digital ones. Here Collins takes Kreon and Lemos’s excellent original and spins it out into a blurry and woozy ten minute anthem. Again it’s so loose and sloppy. This is just begging to be played as the sun comes up.

8. Macida Yayo-Sleepless Night (Mossa Remix) (Monsterecs)

Both sides of this remix EP are really worth having. The Mossa remix above is a slightly less submerged piece of dub-techno in the Basic Channel style. It also reminds me of Aphex Twin’s “Analogue Bubblebath” quite a bit. I know very little about Macida Yayo or Monsterecs but this EP (with a great Miss Fitz mix on the flip) is one I can imagine myself playing for months.

9. Lucy-Downstairs (H.O.S.H Remix) (Meerestief Ltd)

This is my favourite Diynamic associated release in a long time. It’s a bit more straight up than a lot of their stuff, though the general feel is still pretty wacky and dramatic. Diynamic couldn’t really have been around at any point except now could it? I mean, these guys really do make trancey deep house, a genre that was probably unthinkable for many years, and for many people still is!

10. Blaze-Lovelee Dae (Playhouse)

Many songs have many remixes, but “Lovelee Dae” must have more worthwhile remixes than most. There are two amazing Eight Miles High remixes, the slamming uptempo house one plus an ultra-slow jaw rattling dub version that’s such a summer track it’ll have the skin peeling from your arms. (Check it out on this amazing compilation, from one of the best compilation labels around.)

I’ve included the original in this chart though, because it seems a good place to start. When the weather is like it has been lately, can you imagine anything better than being up to your neck in sound in a field or club somewhere listening to this record? An all-time classic.

Expect another chart by early next week at the latest, got to make up for lost time, and I just realised I want to blog about 15 or 20 other tracks too! Let me know what you think of these, or recommend your own stuff if you like.

PS: You can buy all of these tracks on MP3 at Whatpeopleplay or Beatport, and most likely on vinyl too at Juno or Phonica or Decks.

From Beatportal:

After a 10-week hiatus celebrating 10 years of Minus, the collective has unveiled a new concept in community.

Beginning with a date in Detroit during Movement 08, fans of Minus will have the chance to interact with the The Cube — a method of registering their live presence within the Minus environment — and will then have access to exclusive tracks, will be able to upload demos and will have the chance to win some quality gear, including Native Instruments’ Traktor Scratch System.

According to a conversation with Richie Hawtin, founder of the label, The Cube explores “how technology allows us as artists — and the audience — to make further human contact than would have been possible in the past.”

So what exactly is The Cube?

According to the press release, “What is apparent is that the Cube is a highly advanced communications device that responds positively to the presence of humans and interacts accordingly.”

Put into terms that most earth beings can understand, it’s a concept that’s both virtual and physical.

Seriously are these guys trying to make people detest them now? Or make their fans feel ashamed? Or do some people love this kind of thing? I suppose they must. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against people doing something conceptual, but M_nus has the feel of a juggernaut rock act at the moment, as it blasts out these projects where the concept seems pretty empty.

Maybe the problem is that conceptual projects just don’t work when you’re already hugely successful. There’s just no possible subtlety, it’s like the size of the artist drowns out what they’re actually doing. Also in this case I just think: “Why are M_nus doing this?” and I can’t think of what it says or means beyond the kind of vague references to the wonder of modern communication usually used to sell us mobile phones.

And THAT photo . It defies ridicule. Anyone want to try and make a good caption for it?

Here’s an idea, if you want to make human contact with your fans then why not communicate with them outside of these endless pompous press releases? Or by releasing some records that people like?

For me this may be the best Chicago track. Still sounds like it has unchartered depths to it. (NB: I probably blogged about this at some point in this blog’s history as it’s an obsession of mine, but it bears repeating!)

So this weekend I went to just one club, and it was the End/AKA on Saturday.

Some Irish friends knew Fish Go Deep (an institution in parts of Ireland) so I went along to see them, with Efdemin a good lure on the bill too. Unfortunately the sound in the sideroom for Efdemin was pretty crap and made it difficult to enjoy his set, apart from “Orbitallife” which still manages to trump that kind of problem.

I hadn’t been in the End since seeing Derrick Carter sometime around 2004 or earlier, so it was strange to be back, and just a taxi ride away. I saw bits of Fish Go Deep, with Chez Damier’s “Can U Feel It” (MK Dub) going down really well right at the end, but I can’t say I’d be rushing to spend time in AKA again. The End itself is okay, though Layo and Bushwacka were playing that brand of minimal that seems to be just drums and reverb in the main room, and so that wasn’t great.

Unfortunately Secretsundaze was sold out so I didn’t make it there yesterday, did anyone else? Would be good to hear how that gig went. I hear talk of Rhadoo playing on a Sunday in London too soon, which should be a lot of fun if it happens, I’m due to get his new single on Cadenza to review sometime soon, which sounds interesting enough and quite experimental.

Check out that Chez Damier tune below, if you’ve not heard it already.

Chez Damier-Can U Feel It-MK Dub(KMS)

So straight out of Switzerland comes Chaton of Plak Records, with a 90 minute mix of old and new house music. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while as I got my net connection in London sorted, but I’ve also been listening to it on the way in and out of work. Chaton already has an Irish connection, having given John Daly one of his first few releases, and Plak will soon release an LP of sorts from Daly.

As for the mix, feel free to comment on it below. There’s no tracklist for this one, so you’ll have to work it out for yourself. More guest mixes coming very soon, one from across the Atlantic and another from across the channel. If you’ve any ideas for people you’d like to see featured, let me know below.

Chaton-The Lost Library

Edit: Here’s the tracklist:

DJ Shadow-Transmission 2-Mo Wax (Intro)
Pan American-Place Name-Vertical Form
Ali Kuru- A Long Way Down-Plak
Dennis Ferrer-Touched The Sky + Luciano-Tones (Chaton Edit)
Gavin Herlihy-Professional Exit-Kindisch
Dan Ghenacia-Garden-Freak N Chic
Blaze-My Beat (Derrick Carter Mix)-Slipnslide
Deepah-Blaxrotation-Farside
Kreon-Shake N Make (Reboot Remix)-Below
John Daly-Falling Angels-Plak
Roman Fluegel-Mutter-Klang
Langenberg-Traffic-Sthlmaudio
Stimming-Radar-Diynamic
Ali Kuru-Asmali Mescit-Plak
Shackleton-Death Is Not Final-Skull disco
Peter Grummich-Movin-Lesizmor
Seth Troxler & Patrick Russel-Doctor Of Romance-Circus Company
76 79-Six Ten-Comfortable + Foremost Poets - Moonraker (Accapella)-Soundmen On Wax
Chaton-Mylessizmorethanyours-Lesizmor
Mike Dearborn -New Dimension-Djax Up Beats
John Daly-Juno Skies-Plak (Outro)

PS: Podcast working okay for this?

 

 HIAF Guest Mix 7-Chaton-The Lost Library: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Friday: I can’t see anything in the listings that I want to go to on Friday, but then I’ve been in Birmingham all this week training, and missing work due to having food poisoning or something. Being stuck in a Holiday Inn in Birmingham while you can only consume bread and water is a rung below what the Taliban do to hostages. Worse weather too.

Saturday: Lots of options here. Loco Dice and Jay Haze amongst others at Fabric, could be fun though not sure I want to go to Fabric itself. Vera at T-Bar is a lazy man’s option for me, but I do like her music so it could be good. This seems to be a residency of sorts connected to Monza Club. Anyone been yet? Worth a look? Elsewhere Pepe Braddock and Efdemin are in AKA, which some friends are going to. Anything else good?

Sunday: My first UK May means two Bank Holidays, and this is the first one. Some good gigs too, I have to say I really like the idea of going to see the Mole and Mountain People on a Sunday afternoon at this Secretsundaze 2008 opening party. It’s the Sunday afternoon part I like. I imagine a room of people reading the paper eating bacon rolls while wispy German house plays. Though in the back of my head I hear the voice of a certain RA colleague calling the Mole and Mountain People boring. Still, I love the latest Mole single with its 90s French House goodness. (more on that soon.)

Sunday also could be a good chance to go to Dig Your Own Rave for the first time, where Hector and Rob Mello are playing with some special guests, presumably whoever has a late Sunday flight.

Monday: If you’re still out, I’m too old. Actually though one gig that I noticed here is Ralf Kollmann of Mobilee playing at a venue I’ve never heard of before. Not that my London knowledge is anything but novice. Ralf is a former HIAF guest mixer (there are just 6 in the entire world!) and if you liked those mixes then this could be a good gig to see.

If I’ve forgotten something good, and no doubt I have, let me know. If I go to half those gigs I’ll be doing very well. Feel free to mention anything fun going on where you’re living too.

If you haven’t checked it out already, then go and read this interview with Theo Parrish. It doesn’t really matter if you love his music or have never heard it, it’s one of those interviews that has enough ideas to bounce off. In these times of house and techno holy war (with a small d) I often feel like a biblical scholar reading this kind of thing.

By that I mean that I look through comments made by artists percieved as “hardline” for quotes and ideas that are incompatible with that perception, or that dissect the tramlined partisan views that can bog down house and techno discussion. In the above Theo Parrish piece, I quote thee this piece of holy verse:

“You’re regurgitating, you’re not talking about anything current. Some people just want their “house” award, recognition for being the housiest one of all. What’s funny about most of that is that these biters wouldn’t be able to steal and these 20-and 25-year old “house purists” wouldn’t feel so haughty if it weren’t for technology making it easy to claim an experience they otherwise couldn’t. Hell, there are plenty of amazing people playing now. Go experience them. Get some floor time. That’s really what it’s about – getting out and going to the nearest place where there is good music, a good atmosphere and enjoying yourself. Keep your blend critiques and enjoy some people first. Then decide if it works for you. Then ask what’s wrong. Then decide: What’s your take on what’s going on? What do you want to call it?”

Of course, in the rest of the piece Parrish indicts plenty of other ideas too. I’ve just been selective. If anything comes across in the end it’s that he does things his own way. That’s a trait for which artists are permanently slapped on the back, even though for plenty of musicians spinning tough talk is as easy as chewing gum. There’s a decent amount of substance to Parrish though.

It never ceases to amaze me how much more interesting these “legends” are than the way they’re presented by their disciples. As a teenager, and still to some extent, I was constantly switched off Detroit acts by the way in which their hardcore fans served them up. It always seemed to be about what they weren’t. They weren’t commercial or they weren’t cheesey or they weren’t middle class white kids or they weren’t whatever. People want to know what an artist is, not what they aren’t. Then they’ll listen. No wonder techno acts end up with self hate complexes with fans like this.

While I’m linking here’s a really great piece from Philip Sherburne in the Wire where Carl Craig listens to some records and talks about them. Where so much dance writing is as short as an Irish club night, this piece is 48 hours in Berlin. Well, maybe 2 hours there. It’s practically a bore if I lament the fact that so few dance artists give up their time to do these kind of pieces, but it is a shame.

PS: Any English readers ever been to Birmingham? If not, don’t.

So since coming over here I’ve been in and out of Uniqlo a bit, which is basically a Japanese version of H&M. The reason I mention this is that the music there is really strange for a high street shop.

It’s like the 00s never happened, like the hiphop and R&B and electrohouse and “new rock” played in every other shop never happened. Instead Uniqlo plays this airy house music that doesn’t really seem to fit with anything current. But it isn’t simply house muzak either: I heard Swayzak’s “Another Way” the last time I was in there, in amongst lots of stuff that sounded a bit like those old Digital Disco compilations on Force Tracks.

Some of the other times I’ve been in they were playing a sort of Classic/Music For Freaks style, but I didn’t recognise any of it. It’s the weirdest but perhaps least annoying music in any high street store. It’s a sort of culture shock to hear music that isn’t brand new in a shop like this.

That idea of incongruous sounds in global chain stores reminds me a bit of working in Carbon Records inside Urban Outfitters in Dublin, when occasionally you’d play something completely insane just to see the effect it had on a large department store.

I’m grateful to Optimo who included the theme tune from Twin Peaks on a mix CD, allowing me to play it one Sunday afternoon. If it didn’t quite halt the gears of consumerism with a screech, at least it completely weirded people out for 3 or 4 minutes. Another high point was finding some ancient promo vinyl of Mark Morrison’s “Return Of The Mack” behind the counter and playing it in all its erm…glory. I like to think we damaged the Urban Outfitters brand that day.

But beyond dumb workers messing around, I can’t understand a big clothes store playing music that isn’t the usual blend of the fashionable and the populist. There’s nothing fashionable whatsoever about the stuff being played in Uniqlo, not that I can see. Maybe that’s the point.

That said, there is plenty of talk of (a slightly different) funky house making a comeback in the London urban scene. There’s even a “Pure Funky House” CD which was recently released by the people who made the “Pure Garage” series. What a weird rebrand of a genre that is!Could Uniqlo’s strange selections be somehow part of that trend? I’m not so sure.

If I had to guess I’d say they’re just hedging their bets. This is a shop that refuses to be locked into any one particular aesthetic clothes wise, and has picked this brand of pleasant house as a musical unifier. It certainly seems likely that a worldwide shop like decides these things with clinical attention to detail, and you’d even imagine there are studies done to see what music is more conducive to sales or catering to a target audience, with the answers changing all the time.

I guess I’d still like to know how or why faintly 1990s sounding house is seen as the 2008 answer?

So I’ll have a reliable internet connection by the end of this week or early next week, and with it will come guest mixes, charts, and a general return to regular posting.

At the weekend I had my first late night/early morning since moving to London. I went to T-Bar on Saturday night to see Solomun play some records. It was quite a fun night, about 1000 times more fun than T-Bar the night before, when I got the date of the Solomun show wrong and ended up watching some guys play disco classics. Not sure who they were but it didn’t do a lot for me, even though there was some great music played.

My general dissatisfaction with it crystallised when I heard “Funky Town”, looked around, and realised “this is what Tamangos would have been like if it was open in 1982″. (Tamangos is the name of the local ninth circle of hell nightclub near where I grew up in Dublin.)

Going back to Saturday, I didn’t recognise too much of what Solomun played, though there were some seriously dramatic tracks that could only be future Diynamic releases. He also used the vocal from “If I Ever Feel Better” by Phoenix over “Feuervogel” which was pretty interesting. That old Buffalo Bunch remix of that track was always a favourite and I reckon the accapella was from that version.

After T-Bar it was on to Fabric, where I think I saw Tiefschwarz for most of the night, though my memory is pretty hazy as I was pretty drunk. As far as I know I didn’t set fire to anything or get in any fights but between 5am and 8am or so all I can remember is a lot of pretty monged trancey minimal and some stumbling around. I didn’t get into the music that much while I was there, I’m not sure I remember one moment or track which really connected with me, but I’m not listening to much of the style that was being played lately.

As for Fabric, that was actually my first time there, which means I am late to the party! I used to go to London a lot a few years ago but before these recent job interviews and now living here, I hadn’t been for a while. Fabric is weirdly smaller than I had imagined. I think I thought it would be this vast cavernous space. I don’t mean the actual entirety of the club, more the rooms themselves. The building is big and there are tons of nooks and crannies, but I had this idea that Room 1 was absolutely vast.

I can’t say I really got a good feel for the club as I wasn’t able to focus on the music that much when I wasn’t getting a massive kick out of it. I might go back in a few weeks for Zip and Thomas Melchior though. If there’s as much room in there as there was on Saturday it’ll be fine. That’s the other thing, I’d heard horror stories about how busy it gets but it wasn’t that bad at the weekend.

I got home at some early hour on Sunday, and managed about 2 hours sleep before going to pick up a TV I bought on Gumtree. I made up for that by going to bed at about 7pm last night, and I’m glad to say I felt good enough in work today to actually do my job!

It was great to get some music again and I’ve tons of ideas for things to do around here once I get my net connection, including some new stuff I haven’t tried before!