Short but sweet. Really sweet. I just stumbled about this Slava fellow. Apparently he has an album coming out on the label run by the dude from Oneohtrix Point Never.
Little ambient. Little dark. Little footwork with those drums in the background. Some spaced out synths. I'm digging it because I like the combo of the psychedelic synth loops and weird footwork beats. Two things that I don't really listen to a ton of by themselves but which seem to work well together.
1. This photo was taken by the one and only Stanley Kubrick. True story, he use to be a newspaper photographer before he made films. He spent a summer in Chicago and documented the city. You can find more of that here.
2. Favorite video of the year by far. To be honest, I have pretty much stopped watching music videos. I find most of them to be obnoxious and gimmicky but I think this is fantastic. I love how all the photos are positioned in such a way that you can only see portions of them. You never know exactly what you are looking at and how the reflections just distort your senses even more.
3. I literally have been sleeping on this track. (Puns!) I normally get the new Kompakt Pop Ambient album every year and it immediately gets put into the sleeping music rotation. When I heard this track pop up on the Beat Oracle mix I was listening to today I recognized it from my dreams but couldn't figure out why. Seriously though, 100 times better in waking life. Yea, it is quintessential ambient pop music that I assume they play in Starbucks all over Germany but it is still awesome.
It wouldn't be winter without a bitching ambient track from Kompakt, would it?
Some beats. Finally, right? It's been a minute I feel like since we've had some beats around these parts. And, of all places to find them - John Talabot. I'm glad to see we haven't given up on are campaign to post every single John Talabot track every. We'll get there someday.
It's Monday, I've been dragging all day and I'm already dreading the rest of the week. I think that's why I listened to this tune about a dozen times today - I need to hear those drums to get me going. Percussion has always been front in center in Talabot's work. Lots of energetic beats, shimmering chords, and an effort to just lay it all out on the table. Holding back doesn't seem to be part of his MO which is why I love it.
After doing a little digging this is what I have learned - Tevo Howard, son of Rick 'Poppa' Howard is a House producer from Chicago. He produces the tracks and his dad contributes vocals. It's a family affair. And after reading Tevo's bio, I'm all in. I kind of wish I did the same thing. I suppose it isn't too late.
There is just something so refreshing about this track. I can listen to it over and over again and it never gets old. Similarly to the track of his that I posted the other day its the fact that so much comes from so little. The vocals are the most noticeable part, clearly, but do not sleep on the rest. It's like a good steak. Don't full around with any seasonings or anything. Don't get too fancy. Less is more.
Holy shit! Look at that chicken. Look at that kid smoking. Who takes a picture of that. It's brilliant.
I'm not even going to try and get into how I found this song. Just know that it was during a period of time where I really should have been doing some other work. But then I learned about 'voguing' and how that was a thing in the 80's in NYC. And then I learned that someone had put out a collection of tracks from that period. And the next thing I know I'm down a YouTube rabbits hole of disco that has no end in sight. It's a brutal existence.
Sometimes you only need a couple things to make a totally bitching track. It's all about the piano, vocals, and amorphous waves of noise that wash in and out of the track. It is not the biggest track I've ever heard but I can't stop listening to it. With a bass that sounds a little like it was taken from an Omar S track this thing just sort of jugs along without a care in the world. It's like those summer nights where you take the long way home just because you got all the windows down and got your jams kicking real loud. This clearly doesn't sound like that but it gives me the feeling of those times. It's the comfort of enjoying those moments - it's the comfort of not having any worries.
Ohhhh yea.....this is either Carl Craig by himself. Or it is a edit of a Carl Craig song by Thomas Bullock. Or it is a song that sprang from a collaboration between the two of them. I just don't know and after all of five minuets trying to figure it out I'm giving up. Listen, somethings are better off being mysteries.
In other news Thomas Bullock had a project once called Welcome Stranger. When you search for welcome stranger you get a return for a Wikipedia page with the same title. Welcome Stranger was the name given to largest gold nugget ever found. Well done.
Just, in general, not enough Ghostface around these parts. I spent the better part of Senior year in college bumping this album and trying to talk myself into thinking law school was a good idea.
Fuck yea brutalism! It's the architectural style with the best name ever. People in Canada liked it. CFCF is from Canada. This song as pianos and synths in it. Somehow all of this nonsense is related.
Hate is not strong enough of a word to describe my feelings toward cotton candy.
This place might be turning into a Tumblr page for a while. Minus the pictures of the scantily clad woman or photos of cats. Thing is I'm going to have to spend more time posting over at the other site I write for, Plunderbund.
This does not mean the jams are going to be ending any time soon. I probably just won't be including as much rambling text to go along with them. Depending on who you are this may be seen as an improvement.
Mayor McCheese was always my favorite. He reminded me of Bill Clinton for some reason.
This Legowelt character has been growing on me. I think it is the subtlety of his tracks that I like the best. They are like those albums you have that at first you didn't really like but for some reason you kept putting them on and now you love them. At first I wasn't too wild about this track but now I get it. It being that Detroit techno-y sound will those drum machines going a million miles an hour and those spaced out synths.
I heard a pretty interesting critique yesterday about how all this synth music being made by these sort of hippie/noise/drone people is filtering its way into the larger electronic music scene in general. The guy leveling the critique didn't seem all that excited about it but he is normally a giant sourpuss anyways so nothing new there. Is it possible for people to smoke too much weed, play some crappy rifts on a vintage synthesizer and pawn it off as something original? Yes, of course. But that doesn't mean you have to take it seriously.
Oh another note - I got to dance to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" last night at the local gay bar. It seemed appropriate.
It is mother-fucking winter people. Don't ever forget that. Mother nature isn't going to let you forget that so don't be caught acting a fool. I thought we had missed out on the worst of it until the other day I slipped on a patch of ice walking down my front steps. I haven't been able to move since without being in pain. My weather hubris got the best of me.
Look at that god damn llama again. What the hell is going on here? Who has a llama in a city and decided that the best way of getting it from point A to point B is in a car? It was a simpler time back then I suppose. You didn't worry about city health codes regarding what animals you could or could not put in a taxi. If you had a llama and you were late to a meeting you just hailed a cab, rolled down the window and got in the car with the llama. Men were men. Woman were woman. And traveling with a llama was significantly easier.
I first decided to post this track because I thought it was a good winter track but then I decided that I think this track is really pretty. Call this whatever you want but I think it is pretty interesting. It reminds me of The Knife if they turned down the crazy a tad.
The interwebs told me Wildbirds and Peacedrums are experimental duo from Scandonavia. Of course they are. Of course they are.
I remember being a freshman in college and having this album on a burnt CD. It had the title written in black marker on the front. I would play it in my tiny freshman dorm when my crazy roommate was away doing crazy person stuff. It was the sound of the future.
I don't think it is possible to overstate how important this track is and this entire album is. Released in 1992, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is a seminal album in the electronic music world. It was the genius of what ambient music is today and what a lot of electronic music is today. It was the avant garde. It is majestic, grandiose electronic music that is simultaneously trying to make the walls kick and make a statement. It was Richard D. James' blue period - he picked one type of sound and just killed everyone in site. He was murdering them with one hand tied behind his back.
Also, this thing sounds almost better now, 20 years later, than it did when it was first released. It's bass heavy, melodic, dark but still a little playful and god damn cool. I like to think of Richard D. James slaving away in his studio not happy until he's got the bass just right on this one so that it makes the headphones that he is wearing rattle just the proper way.
This one works best with the bass turned up all the way.
I wanna say a couple of things before we get started here. First, I apologize. From the bottom of my heart. I will never leave you alone for that long ever again. I'm a fool. An idiot. A heartless bastard. I'm sorry.
It's not that I don't love you it's that sometimes life says you don't have time to be surfing the internet to find that bitching track because you are in school full-time and working. Not an excuse, I know, but please consider it a possible explanation.
Second, I want to make sure I get this point across without over selling this - I have seriously listened to this track about twenty times today. I can't stop. I tried to stop. I went to school and after an hour of sitting alone and listening to nothing I pulled it back up and started listening to it again. First legitimate song of the year contender yet.
Oh John Talabot what are we going to do with you. First it was all those Catalonian summer jams that made you want to get drunk on the beach and now its this little tiddy. It's that mysterious women with miles of legs and dark eyes. It hits like a dump truck and feels like a kiss.
Gone are the child like abandon of his earlier work. In its place is this mammoth of a track that builds and builds over that pitched, whispery vocal part. Give and take, give and take of the tension. 7 minuets of mellow groove that seems to me just aching to explode at any minute. Instead its kept in this tight little box and flows effortlessly from there.
It's as if he was a professional or something.
The rest of the album? I'm sure it's good. You are going to have to find a legitimate review somewhere else though. No time for that when I can just listen to this over and over again.
