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Archive for the ‘d**step’ Category.
Buried Treasure, Excavated Shizzle
wayneandwax.com » Excavated Sizzle.
Wayne with some interesting thoughts on dubstep artists sampling reggae vocals. And how not to do it.
dubstep reviews
No, this isn’t some kind of road to damascus conversion, I just happen to have been given some dubstep tunes that I actually like for a change. I admit this is a surprise after several years of slagging off most of the genre for just not being good enough.
But as usual there are people working at the edges who are doing good stuff. In my own biased way I am still prepared to check stuff out if it is recommended by people I respect or if it’s made or released by people I like. The latter is true here, so the usual disclaimers apply.
Subeena – Boksd/Znare/Pepepe – Agosto Morado /2080 12″ (Imminient IMM004)
We gave Imminent’s previous release by Wagawga a nice review in Woofah, so I didn’t groan when this promo slipped through the letterbox. “Boksd” is a filmic night drive tune which is right up my street. Some of the melodies remind me of slightly melancholic techno like Colin Faver used to play.
“Znare” is much harsher – the opening made me worry about an incoming wobble fest. But my fears were displaced with the arrival of female MC Violet who I think is spitting in Portuguese (the language I have had the most troube with)? Subeena seriously messes with her voice throughout the track, giving it a nice glitchy feel. No doubt this will get played out the most, but despite its undoubted quality it’s my least favourite track on this release.
“Pepepe – Agosto Mordo (Subeena Remix)” – reminds me of the tale of a Czech canary called Pepik which I read to my daughter. Whilst Pepik is flying over the old town of Prague having escaped his cage, he may well hear the odd chiming melody. If you liked Orbital’s more ambienty tracks circa “The Box” then this is for you (it’s not a rip off, it’s just shorthand – I have to finish this entry before the other half shows up in a minute).
“2080″ is very special indeed – more great chiming, but this time laid over a great understated crunchy rhythm track.
Subeena knows that you don’t have to smack someone in the face to make an impact – everything here is in the right place at the right time.
Spatial – 80207 / 70810 10″ (Infrasonics Infra001)
I met Mr Spatial at the Highpoint Lowlife Xmas bash I played some records at (and indeed at the previous affair at Shunt). The only word for this is minimal. And abstract. Right, the only two words for this are “minimal” and “abstract”. OK? Even the packaging gives little away, and I had to guess at what speed to play this at (33 and a third, in this house. If you want to do a Paul Meme and play everything at +8 then feel free, but not round here sunshine).
“80207″ kicks off with what could be an off key keyboard skank from a classic uk dub tune. But it isn’t, especially when accompanied by a glassy, brittle click track of a riddim. It would be too easy to dismiss this as another Basic Channel lite – I think there is a lot more going on here. The very simple female vocal refrain anchors everything and allows the deceptively simple beats to build up and gain in complexity. Where Subeena uses minimal ingredients to produce a joyful landscape, Spatial is far far colder with his tools. But then, as the good Dr once said, it is cold in Babylon…
“70810″ – “is that weird music or is something knocking?”. Well it’s both really. It’s an orchestra stripped of most of its instruments trying to get in, it’s a stoned cosmonaut trying to reconnect to the mothership. It’s…
http://infrasonics.net/dubs/infra001
[at this point the review was terminated so that we could watch "Special Needs Pets" on More4]
That’s Not My Name
Roughly a decade ago the seminal breakcore and experimental label Praxis produced some t-shirts. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary there, you might think. Except Praxis were committed to creating a counter-culture (or “sub-net” network) of people who didn’t wish to become celebrity DJs or producers.
Instead people were encouraged to adopt pseudonyms and to find new ways or working collectively. To not play the “business” game. The use of the “DJ Jackal” multiple name was one example of this. Inspired by the Luther Blissett and Karen Eliot phenomena, DJs were invited to adopt the same name for flyers, records, projects.
The t-shirts themselves were not designed to promote the Praxis label. They had the label logo printed on them, for sure. But printed on the inside of the t-shirt where nobody would see it. Printed on the outside of the black t-shirt, in black ink, was the slogan “Visibility Is A Trap”:
“It’s actually a quote from Foucault, from ‘Discipline and Punish’. It refers to surveillance, ie. being controlled through being visible to the authorities. So it has that meaning from the original quote but it also has what I think is important, that what I do is part of a collective and there is a certain degree of anonymity, so that it’s an invisible situation.”
Interview from Deadly Type zine
Burial photographed by Georgina Cook / drumzofthesouth
I was thinking about this earlier today when ruminating on last week’s chicanery regarding Burial’s identity. Burial (for those who don’t know) is a producer operating at the more atmospheric, less “dancey” end of dubstep. He’s released two albums on Kode9′s Hyperdub label to much acclaim.
Burial has gone some way to refuse the role of being a “star” by not revealing his name or being photographed. He is interviewed rarely, and then only by trusted journalists. This has lead to some speculation about his identity, with most agreeing that the lack of a face or name to pin the sounds on makes a refreshing change in the days of flickr, facebook, Hello, DJ Magazine, myspace, and all the other DIY-surveillance which is now all-pervasive.
But then Hyperdub put Burial’s “Untrue” album forward for the 2008 Mercury Music Prize. Whilst this was a courageous move, potentially catapulting the music to a vast audience (and creating some interesting opportunities for collaborations…) it was obvious to everyone that this drift towards mainstream conventions would necessitate a compromise about Burial’s anonymity.
Sure enough The Sun, in the form of tedious knob-end Gordon Smart and his “Bizarre” column began sniffing around:
“Help me dig up the real Burial
A MYSTERY is rumbling through the music world which could threaten one of the biggest nights in the showbiz calendar. Mercury Music Prize nominee BURIAL is the chart equivalent of graffitti artist BANKSY.
Hardly anyone knows the true identity of the producer, widely tipped for the gong in September. [...]
Conspiracy theories are rife as to who is behind the tunes, with producers NORMAN COOK and APHEX TWIN in the frame. [...]
Know who he is? Get in touch by calling…. email …. or text BIZ (space then message) to …”
Burial responded to this by posting a photo of himself and stating his real name on his myspace.
Kode9 seemed as sanguine as ever, posting this entry on his blog.
This, you would think, would be the end of the matter. But it’s easy to forget the frenzy the media gets into over identity. Smart managed to pad out the Burial non-story into a further four episodes.
Gordon Smart considers his next earth-shattering expose. Photo by Stuart MacKenzie.
William Burroughs pointed out that in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the only way you can progress through the afterlife is by knowing the names of the correct spirits. Smart’s obsession with uncovering Burial’s name (and promoting his own by association) shows us that the world of tabloid journalism stinks of death. It is a very real form of Zombie Culture. Subsequent writing by Smart has even latched onto the names of people who emailed him to criticise his first piece, such is his mania to traverse the underworld.
Whilst we should pity Smart for being trapped in such a barren landscape, a more pressing issue is the need to build an arsenal of techniques to resist Zombie Culture. My colleague Boris Karloff has made some suggestions here, but in these days of instensified speculation about our private lives, there is a great need for more.
Footnote 1: Comrade Joe Muggs has written a fuller account of the debacle here. It includes details of Smart’s advanced state of zombified degradation – with the full symptoms of pissyness, plagiarism and pique. By now he will have latched onto some other “story”, but be careful not to reveal your name should you have any dealings with him.
Footnote 2: In the late 80s I had cause to visit the legendary London body-piercer and tattooist Mr Sebastian on a few occasions. He was a lovely man, entirely unaffected by his towering status in that world as far as I could tell. Seb unfortunately (and through no fault of his own) became embroiled in the Spanner Trial, in which various consenting adult S&M practitioners were had up for assaulting each other. Essentially he was charged with assault for conducting a piercing on a paying customer who was entirely happy with the results (more info on this at the wiki link above).
The case came to trial at the Old Bailey in December 1990 and I got a call from someone I didn’t know asking if I could help. I was delighted to be able to do so and managed to rally a few friends to turn out. Watching the trial was a completely bizarre experience, but that is for another time. Our most important contribution came at the end of each day when the judge (Judge Rant, he was called!) had retired.
Our aim, through a variety of tactics, was to get Mr Sebastian home safely and without being photographed by the paparazzi who were lieing in wait. I use the word “safely” advisedly. One of the other defendants in the trial was knocked to the ground by a mob of photographers and suffered a broken arm. It became a bit “cat and mouse”, but we succeded in our objective and no recognisable contemporary photo of Mr Sebastian appeared in any of the newspaper coverage of the trial.
Whilst Mr Sebastian ended up with a suspended sentence on those bullshit charges, he was really happy with the support and solidarity he’d been shown.
I think the main lesson I have learned from this is that you need to surround yourself with people you can trust – you can’t battle Zombie Culture on your own.
Paul Meme interview in Pitchfork
dubstep doubt
Simon Reynolds on dubstep’s disconnection from danger.
Plus – his Grime Primer for The Wire now online!
Hold tight for a big post from me later today, with audio.
a “narcoleptic, mordant trough of despondency”…
…is what Paul Meme is fighting against with his latest mix.
Some nice bits of grime vocals amongst the wohm wohm wohm of the dubstep.
BASH#7
Doing a bit of extra publicity had clearly paid off – the place was filling up just after me and a slightly worse for wear Martin had arrived and grabbed seats.
Jason-From-Transition-Mastering-Studios treated the early crew to a nice set of 90s ragga classics and finished up with Sandra Cross’ “Country Living” and Janet Kay’s “Silly Games”. Great selection and I think there was some mic action in there as well. MC-ing and ragga usually appear later in the evening so BASH was definitely hitting the ground running…
I’m not sure if Loefah was on for very long but I pretty much missed all of his set because people I know kept turning up and we were chatting…
So – Mala and YT – where do you start, eh? I guess on the shallow level of appearances. I never twigged when YT appeared with Digital, but you never see black DJs with white MCs in reggae. Now, I reckon YT has totally proved himself, so I won’t be receptive to purist arguments about him being a white bloke using patois. Even with that settled, I wasn’t sure if this set was going to work. Mala and YT are two talented blokes working in different genres who obviously have different visions of where they want to go. A recipe for disaster? The exact opposite was true – the combination rocked it.
YT seemed to be driving the show in places, and he was tearing it up. Mala was reduced at points to sticking on backing tracks for tunes off “Straight outta Britain”, but he seemed characteristically relaxed about it all. YT hits like “England Story”, “Innit”, and “A Wicked Act” got rinsed out. The latter even included some new verses – updating the 7/7 theme with references to the recent alleged plane bombings.
A new track was introduced as “England Story pt 2″ which turned out to be an awesome re-rub of Admiral Bailey’s “No Wey Better Than Yard” – we got taken all round the country with the occasional “when you check it out lawd, England it ah mi yard!”. Blinding. Want it.
At one point I was faced with the absurd situation of having a certain inebriated blogger on my right hand side telling me that he wasn’t sure if white people could ever MC reggae properly, while on my left hand side a group of black blokes were waving their lighters in the air and bawling for a rewind.
Mala pulled out some dubstep tunes towards the end of his set, which YT took in his stride. I wasn’t really feeling the music, but that’s me. Having said that, there was one great bit where Mala managed to make the top of my head wobble. Just the top two inches of my head, while the rest of me stayed still. That was wicked.
Now – how’s this for the beginning of a set? -
- Conroy Smith – Dangerous
- Papa Levi – Mi God Mi King
- Shinhead – Rough & Rugged
- Turbulence – Notorious
Pretty damn excellent, I reckon. Now – how about if it’s all relentlessly tweaked with by The Bug? Hmmm? And how about if top-of-the-range grime MC Flowdan flings down lyrics over the top of it all? Yeah I reckon that might veer towards being one of the best things of my summer, actually!
I know even less about grime than I do about dubstep, but I do know that grime has more in common with the whole uk fast chat vibe than dubstep does, and I can spot a pure pro in his game. Flowdan is one of those people who is larger than life: as soon as he stepped up to the mic he was officially In Charge of the room. Busting lyrics like nobody’s business. “Jah War” mashed me up. Huge. Want it.
Flowdan didn’t seem remotely phased by the stranger riddims selected by The Bug, or the sound problems which reduced the set to and old skool one-deck session. You don’t need more than one deck if you have a wicked MC – that’s the whole reason they came about, to vibe up the crowd over and in between records.
Flow introduced his cousin and I started worrying. This guy looked a lot younger, so was this some kind of “two for the price on one” obligation thing? Nepotism in the dance? I needn’t have worried (I need to trust people more!). The young Killah is the latest recruit to the Roll Deep crew and it’s not like they are desperate for new blood, is it?
Killah was obviously loving the vibe, praising the 90s riddims cos he grew up on ‘em. Him and Flow alternated tunes and… wow!
To YT’s credit he’d stuck around to check the scene out, and to Flow’s credit he alloed him back on the mic. Devastation ensued.
After a while I retreated and checked my watch. Damn.
“Shit, I wasn’t going to stay this long!”
“Neither were we! – You working tomorrow?”
“At my desk by 9:00am mate…”
At 2:00am I clambered up the stairs. Incoherent. Unable to tell Loefah how much I’d enjoyed myself, but he looked blasted and it must have been written all over my face. Loef was bidding the faithful goodbye. Mary Ann Hobbs was flyering for her own party – how cool is that?
On the bus on the way home I was thinking. Well, trying to. I was musing that in your teens and twenties you go out and see loads of stuff that blows you away. There are lots of “first times”. Maybe when you hit your mid-30s this has diminished because things repeat and you get more discerning. Seen it all… ?
Well, BASH gives me that rush every single month. Every time, without fail, there’s something which smacks me in the head with its brilliance. That’s why I’m so evangelical about it – sometimes I feel it’s all I’m blogging about – squeezing a few minutes of my medically-allotted keyboard time.
So – if August was mayhem, then September will be armageddon. Come down, or don’t, but (in the words of Anthony Red Rose) “you can’t say me never did a warn you”.
we don’t want no war tonight
It’s very gratifying so see it all kicking off in the comments boxes below.
To give him fair credit, Red Eye has clearly paid his dues with this stuff. He’s thought about it a lot. If he is who I think he is, he’s been to endless sessions, bought tunes and given enough love to things he appreciates. There’s enough material in his postings to disagree with (not least the stuff about the last 10 years of reggae, which warrants another post) but he has touched a nerve for sure.
Dubstep isn’t criticised enough. I’m not saying that because I get some kind of sadistic buzz out of people slagging it off. I’m saying it because dubstep should be BETTER. The fact that it seems to be one of the most interesting musical developments at the moment isn’t good enough, because there is little else happening which is even vaguely interesting (to me, right now).
ancient memories
Red Eye has every right to compare dubstep to other scenes and other eras. In fact that depth of perspective is exactly what is missing from places like the dubstep forum, where dubstep records are compared to other dubstep records and people relentlessly big each other up. Of course having a mutually supportive scene encouraging newbies (and pros) is one essential element to keep the ball rolling. But in isolation it doesn’t make for very interesting reading and I can only think that it encourages more of the same rather than moving tings FWD.
word bombs
As well as being my best mate, Paul Meme has done some of the best writing about dubstep. Paul is relentlessly positive about everything, but can at least string a few words together instead of “your chest” or “big tune”. Ditto Boomnoise and Paul Autonomic. Ditto K-Punk and Blackdown‘s coverage of the Burial album, which I haven’t heard, but at least now want to. (Although Burial seems like a special case – and it is probably of crucial importance that the LP marks the exact point of re-entry of The Wire magazine into the debate, for good and for ill.)
my dubstep box is fully unloaded
I don’t own any dubstep records. The only dubstep records I own are:
- Tempa02 12″ and some weird remix of WeareIE that Kode9 did (I have to confess that I picked these both up 2nd hand, dirt cheap)
- A Hyperdub promo CD for “Spit” which Kode kindly sent me and I cursorily reviewed here. I liked it, but I have to confess it never really grabbed me despite Paul evangelising about it.
I was never really into garage, so I just missed out on all this stuff in the early days, despite Paul’s best intentions and his great tapes of pirates.
Virtually everything recent I have heard has been from online mixes, or stuff Paul has played me, or down at BASH. As Woebot has said, a lot of the tunes sound unfinished – like someone has forgotten to put the hook in. Kode9 has made a virtue out of this by saying that, post-jungle, we can use our imaginations to fill in the gaps ourselves. He was talking about beats tho, not the whole arrangement! Plus, he’s also said that there may be a need for more vocal tunes in the future, which shows as clear as a bell why he’s regarded as being facing the future – he’s prepared to tamper with the blueprint, the DNA. Ditto Loefah and the Digital Mystikz. I’m sure there are others. As I said in the comments box below, there will always be some people pushing, some not. Dubstep is not a monolith, but it could quite easily become one…
electricity runs through a cable, that’s how we get the power for the turntable
People say you can only understand dubstep when you hear it through a big system, which strikes me as being very limiting – or an excuse. Jungle still hit you when you heard it through little speaker via a pirate station. Reggae made sense when you heard it on John Peel or wherever. But yes, when you experienced either for the first time through a soundsystem, you got the full impact and it added another dimension (pay close attention…). If people are content to make music which only works properly in one particular environment then I respect their focus and integrity, but wonder about how long it will last. Plus, there seems little point in buying the tunes to play at home.
BASH revelations
That said, when Mala and Loefah dropped some of their productions during their sets at BASH, I loved it and did begin to understand what all the fuss was about. When Mary Ann Hobbs dropped Benga’s “Zombie Jig” I was off – glued to the floor, but floating somewhere else. I had to grab hold of Boomnoise and ask him (3 or 4 times!) what it was.
When Kevin Martin played the Mystikz’ “Anti-War Dub” last month I had the jump on him ‘cos I’d already checked it on Paul’s mix. But but but… when Space Ape came on the mic all the pieces in the jigsaw fitted together. “There’s a Bug in the system, there’s a Bug in the system…” Fellow novice Danny was next to me on the dancefloor and turned round to say “If that’s dubstep – I’ll have some of that!” we were both blown away…
ready for the dancehall tonight
People criticise the music because of their frustrations with it, not because they want to ruin the younger generation’s fun. There is no need to shoot the messenger because ultimately we should all be aiming for the same thing here. Surely the scene isn’t so fragile that it can’t withstand a few jibes from Red Eye and me? I’m more positive about it than him, true. But I still feel that there is something missing, and not in a good way.