Archive for Techno
August 21, 2006 at 12:31 am · Filed under 3BeatDigital.com, Beatport.com, druggy, hard & nasty, House, minimal, progressive, Techno
Alright, after a long hiatus, it’s time for some freaky house tracks.
Blue Insect by El Farouki is an excellent track; distinct, punctuating, popping percussive quirky beats over top a fuzzy, ultraviolet, buzzing bassline that has a slight, bendy drugginess to it.
Unlike the previous track’s subtle drugginess, this next monster whacks you upside the head with its freaky intensity. Undisputed Truth’s remix of Procut’s Feel So Right is awesome. I first heard it on protonradio.com in an outrageously fresh mix by David Alexander, Primal Innuendo 3 (to be posted here soon). A gargantuan bassline storms in, layers upon layers of intense druggy goodness fill in the track and desperate, creepy lyrics surface. I freakin’ love this track, which I’ve been listening to for years. Five stars; flawless execution. Well done, Undisputed Truth! This track’s a monster, and a must-have.
Moving into the absurdly druggy, another favorite track of mine is Matthew Dekay and Norman Soares’s More Money, More Power. A ridiculous, clip-cloppy bouncy beat gives the track a silly feel, then duggy waves of sound wash in, swirling and somewhat ear-piercing, and a surreal vocal sample pops in and… confounds me! Quality! Truly weird, but it works.
May 9, 2006 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Amazon.com, Beatport.com, House, minimal, Techno
Maurizio, aka Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, is what immediately springs to mind when I think of Berlin-style deep, minimal techno and house. While stripped back and minimal on the surface, there’s so much craft in what Maurizio does that I find his songs are repetitive but in a good way. While it is essentially the same loops of sound over and over, there’s ample analogue knob-tweaking and more snaps, crackles and pops than a Costco-sized box of Rice Krispies. Moreover, the short loops themselves are so hypnotic, funky, and just plain “right” that listening to them over and over as they progress is like scratching some deep itch in a satisfying way over and over.
Stripped back mad freshness; simple on the surface but with layers of depth and subtlety.
While intentionally adding analogue hiss and vinyl pops and surface noise to music often seems cliché, with Maurizio’s work it is his signature sound, and an homage to his favorite medium (vinyl, the traditional medium for electronic music and the medium on which his music was released in 1996). It also reflects his roots and passion for Dub, a music genre characterized by sample-based analogue remixes of Reggae music. The flaws and character of the medium are intentionally amplified and brought to the fore, and made an integral part of the music. A brand-spanking new Maurizio vinyl release sounds like an ancient, second-hand, scratchy dusty record.
I recommend the entire MCD release, available through either Amazon, or as MP3s from Beatport.
May 9, 2006 at 11:10 am · Filed under Beatport.com, cold & clean, minimal, Techno
You know those truly ground-breaking, incredible talents out there you go your whole life not knowing about? Then you discover them, freak at how they could have escaped your radar for so long? Then you binge on their works.
Berlin, Germany is a hothouse of vine-ripened talent, especially when it come to minimal techno. But don’t take my word for it: have a listen to Monolake, aka Robert Henke.
This guy is incredible. The first song of his I heard, White II, blew me away. It’s like… the auditory equivalent of floating, slowly, through a Tron-like city of light, skyscrapers of white light slowly moving past as you hover 800 feet above the ground, defying gravity.
Then I came across Ionized, which is like being in a huge, run down old warehouse, with rain pouring in through slats in the roof, splashing on the concrete ground. This track is a huge, dark mass, with rich, deep bass that resonates and reverbrates throughout the imaginary space. Towards the end, cold, dawn air and bleak dawn light enter. The more I listen to this track, the more it grows on me.
Finally, the track Cubicle. I still remembering freaking out the first time I heard this track. With headphones on, this song is a spasm-inducing combination of warm gusts of air flowing up your neck, while cold, wet ice cubes fall onto your brain, bouncing wetly off. Wow. This guy freakin’ rules. If you’ve never heard of Monolake, well, you can thank me later.
Almost his entire catalogue of music is available through Beatport. I’ve bought about a third of it. I’m still waiting for Robert Henke’s track Delta to show up on there; it should be up sometime this year.
April 26, 2006 at 4:22 am · Filed under Free, hard & nasty, Techno
When I think of “techno” I think of hard, pounding, nasty, synthetic, distorted, static noise, punctuated by beats and sweeping, spatial stereo effects.
For the longest while, I thought that such a thing did not exist, that my idea of techno only existed in my head. Then I discovered Speedy J.
I’d first heard of Speedy J, or Jochem Paap, many years ago. He had several releases on Plus 8 records, and to be frank, I didn’t like a single one of them, and still do not. Then, he produced some softer material in the mid 1990s, which I also didn’t care for.
But as of Loudboxer, and his freakin awesome live sets, I am a huge fan.
Jochem’s a true techno pioneer. He makes records that only have short endless sound loops on them, his personally crafted loops, which he feeds into Ableton Live, a cutting edge realtime music mixing software. He then tweaks some knobs and creates, live, an organic, flowing, cerebral mindfuck music that slowly mutates and morphs over time. Motifs emerge to the ‘surface’ of the sound and dive back into obscurity; patterns overlap each other, speeding up and slowing down, asynchronously intertwining. Like Plastikman’s seminal Consumed album (but much, much harder), this music is simultaneously purely synthetic and technological, while at the same time organic, fluid and ever-changing.
This is deep, nasty techno, and if you’ve never heard anything like it, you’re in for a treat!
Hear Jochem cook up a cerebral, spatial, morphing main course for the adoring crowd with these incredible live sets:
