Teleosteopathy

This mix is a lot heavier than the last and a bit more cohesive I think as a whole. “Loose Changes” is a pretty eerie start, and I couldn’t resist the Czubala/Martinez you link (or the fact that both tracks are really, really scary). They lead into a slamming track off Gabriel Ferreira’s Blissful EP, for which I have to give a shout out to 3+3=7. That goes into a significantly wonkier track from Minimono. Tuning Spork again! Although I’m not yet convinced by the new Anthony Collins.

I had to wedge in a Kornel Lemon track from the album, From Top To Bottom, which is still a big winner for me this year, before the A side from the new, amazing Exercise One on Mobilee. “Intensity” sounds like a washing machine that’s got away from itself and joined some kind of parallel laundry-rave universe. It’s a very good sound. Then “Feel It” off Marco Carola’s Apnea EP, for which the word ’seminal’ would be extremely appropriate if only other people had the sense or skill to imitate it. Again it’s only about 45 minutes, 192kbps.

IAMYOURFACE Mix ‘08

01. Mike Wall - “Loose Changes” [Metroline]
02. Marcin Czubala - “Copafamiglia” [Mobilee]
03. Marcin Czubala - “I Am You” [Mobilee]
04. Martinez - “You…” [Cray1 Labworks]
05. Gabriel Ferreira - “Caciq [Fase Miusic Sender Remix]” [Miniatura]
06. Minimono - “On A Bike” [Tuning Spork]
07. Alex Tsiridis - “Suasion” [Trapez]
08. Kornel Lemon - “Capsule” [Kaufe Digital]
09. Gel Abril - “Your Face Is A Mess [Mark Broom Remix]” [Be As One]
10. Exercise One - “Intensity” [Mobilee]
11. Marco Carola - “Feel It” [Plus 8]

Thank fuck February’s nearly over…things can only get better.

Last night’s Border Community night at The End was as mad as predicted. Max Tundra’s DJing/singing was off the scale of craziness, Ripperton was sounding good then bad then good again, Kieran Hebden was pushing all the right buttons (his sets are great, i’m less keen on his Four Tet stuff…), Apparat was a bit scary, and James Holden was totally off his face. He started off ALL OVER THE PLACE but gradually found his feet (well, I imagine he slowly managed to work out where the hell he was and what he was supposed to be doing…I doubt he could even feel his feet) and we danced til close-on 6. Highlight of the night was probably Kieran Hebden playing the DFA remix of Delia Gonzales & Gavin Russom’s “Rise” (cue crazy dance posing on each ‘PSSSHH’ noise) follow soon after by both sides of “Enfants”. Beautiful!

Recently I’ve been listening to:

- The banging Exit Fest mix up on Man Make Music
- James T. Cotton’s Like No One on Spectral Sound
- Audion’s new remix for Sasha
- Goldfrapp’s gorgeous Seventh Tree
- Plastikman’s Musik on recommendation from a work colleague (nice to know there are people in my office on the same wavelength eh)
- Swirlies’ stunning “Two Girls Kissing” (you can get their discography for free on their website)

And also Thomas Brinkmann’s masterpiece of an album, When Horses Die, which sounds set to be 2008’s Asa Breed. It reminds me most of Einstürzende Neubauten. “Words” is a chilling opener (a cover of “In A Manner Of Speaking”), the drum break in “Meadow” hits HARD, and closer “40″ is as going to be the track I turn to for winding down in the evenings.

Meanwhile, Martinez has released a storming EP on Cray1 Labworks, one of the labels I’m hooked on at the moment. The title track is a 10 minute journey in the style of Portable’s recent output. Somehow really evocative of both calm dusty plains and, at loud volumes, nightmarish basement parties. Nice.

Martinez - “Burning The Midnight Oil” [Cray1 Labworks]

I heard Kornel Lemon first on the Contra EP on Cray1 Labworks, also home to great releases from Tadeo and Soulrack. The EP has two originals and two remixes, and all of them are worth a listen. Matt Star takes Kornel’s jumpy “V1″ and sends it deep down a hole in the ground. Retronouveau’s “V2″ meanwhile gets a pretty hardhitting remix from Bryan Zentz - it verges on electro but not in a ridiculous way.

Anyway, now Kornel Lemon has an album on the way, called From Top To Bottom. You can hear a bit of the title track on his myspace page - it’ll give you an idea of the kind of depths that the kick drums plunge to on most of the tracks. There’s a kind of black-hole of sound that you don’t really hear on a lot of records, sucking in all the sounds around it so that only a bit of metallic percussion can escape. It hits HARD.

The track below is called “Glutamin” which according to my biology textbook (that is, wikipedia) ‘aids gastrointestinal function’. Well, the beat gets my guts for sure, but i’m pretty sure it does more damage than repair. Amid all the melodies and lightness-of-touch that’s accompanied the recent shift towards housey techno, you know I’m actually really pleased to hear this kind of primordial, no-nonsense techno. There’s variation though too - on “Mascapone” there’s even what could be described as a Dial-like flirtation with melody (I’m thinking Pigon’s “Promises” in particular), although it’s a lot less flighty given the relentless pounding going on underneath.

I hope the album gets a lot of attention in spite of Kornel Lemon being (at least to me) a relatively unknown name. You can download the album here if you want to. I would love to hear ANY of these tracks played out, if not more than one. Was it Villalobos who was playing most of Michal Ho’s album in his sets? - let’s hope someone does the same with this one.

Kornel Lemon - “Glutamin” [Kaufe Musik Germany]

I first heard “Mumbling Yeah” at Electric Picnic festival, played I think by Marco Carola in one of my favourite sets of last year. It grabbed me pretty hard and stuck in my head, even though I had no idea what it was, who it was by, or even if it had been released or anything. When I finally found out what it was (probably, I think, through Ronan Fitzgerald’s continued championing of the track on his HIAF blog) I was very excited, but hearing it at home has never matched that first exposure in the middle of a muddy Irish field.

So it comes to the second release on Arearemote, and this time I’m hearing it first in the context of my own, slightly moth-eaten living room. There aren’t hundreds of ravers surrounding me, there isn’t a Funktion One soundsystem 2m to my left, and there isn’t a super-star DJ that I already adore behind the decks. But Pitto’s “Sexvibe” has transported me back to all the clubs I went to in 2007, to that precise moment that I find happens on great nights out - that moment when it all becomes almost too much and I have to just stand there for a moment taking stock of everything, gazing wide-eyed at the movement around me and wondering if my body can take any more punishment at 4am.

It’s normally aroundabout the breakdown of a properly epic track, when the DJ begins toying with the crowd (this is why I love Derrick May so fucking much - he takes an almost clinical approach to what’s essentially quite a humorous exercise: cutting the bass, dropping it again briefly, pulling it back…he did this with “Mouth To Mouth” the night after Carola in Ireland and I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing) - when the DJ begins toying with the crowd, pushing them around with dropped beats and moments of almost-silence. Everyone knows something big is coming, everyone knows they won’t be able to resist it, but it’s those moments of hyper-aware playfulness beforehand that really pull everyone together before the big plunge.

For me, they’re the moments I treasure when I look back afterwards. “Sexvibe” encapsulates one of those moments in 10 minutes of build and decay: the drums are clangy in the visceral way of Mr G.’s “U Askin?”; the vocals are kinda cheesy like mid-90s bigbeat; the breakdowns are ostentatious, ridiculous, almost hilarious in their simplicity.

I’m completely sold. And then it all swoops upwards at the end, as if it’s being mixed into another track, as if it’s not just a single-side of vinyl being played in my living room. If home-listening can in anyway send you to the middle of a packed dancefloor then it’s worth it, and this is definitely worth it.

Go here to hear a sample. I’d just buy it though, if you can. (by the way, the title of this post is the sound that came out of my mouth, half-whispered, on first hearing this through…)

February’s here so to cheer myself up during this least enjoyable of months I made a new mix. I think I’m getting a bit better at the whole thing, not necessarily in a technical sense but in a selection sense. The way this one seems to be a proper journey makes me very happy. I’ve put in some recent listening: the dub of Solomun’s latest sweeping statement “Beauty & The Beast”; the A side of Mihalis Safras’ killer 12″ “Colpo Grosso”; a cut from the new Marc Antona EP on Sender. There are a few tracks from last year which I overlooked in my year-end chart: Tuning Spork with ANOTHER winner in Blackwell’s “Mirror Images”; the trio from Cadenza’s clanging “Nora P”; and Josh Wink’s absolutely terrifying remix of Someone Else’s quirky found-sound “Lowdown Brittle”.

I’ve also stuck in some older cuts just because I fancied changing it up a bit: that Soylent Green track I was talking about a while back; Pantytec’s endearing “Pink”; and one from Crowdpleaser & St Plomb’s underrated 2006 album. And it begins and ends with some beautiful pianowork from Jan Jelinek and Bruno Pronsato, two absolute maestros of electronic music. It’s about 45 minutes long, so it’ll be great for my walk to work tomorrow morning and hopefully yours too.

LeaP! Interrobeat Feb ‘08
01. Jan Jelinek Avec The Exposures - “Music To Interrogate By” [~scape, 2003]
02. Crowdpleaser & St. Plomb - “1Er Mai” [Mental Groove LTD, 2006]
03. Solomun - “Beauty & The Beast [Dub]” [Four:Twenty, 2008]
04. Blackwell - “Mirror Images” [Tuning Spork, 2007]
05. Soylent Green - “Jet Set” [Playhouse, 2006]
06. Schneider, Galluzzi, Schirmacher - “Nora P” [Cadenza, 2007]
07. Mihalis Safras - “Colpo Grosso” [Trapez LTD, 2008]
08. Marc Antona - “Brain Raid” [Sender, 2008]
09. Someone Else - “Lowdown Brittle [Wink's Profound Sound Interpretation]” [Foundsound, 2007]
10. Pantytec - “Pink” [Perlon, 2002]
11. Bruno Pronsato - “What We Wish” [Hello? Repeat, 2008]

I’m really proud of the transition between tracks 6 and 7. Small pleasures, eh.

Prosumer & Murat Tepeli were the subject of a fantastic article on RA last week, written by Jorge Hernandez. It’s the kind of interview where you know both parties are completely at their ease - and it’s that setting that produces the most interesting insights into how and why people make the kind of music they do. They mention names, but not in a lazy name-dropping way. I felt like I’d actually learnt something from their answers, and definitely had some researching to do about their inspirations. So thank you to Jorge for producing such a great piece!

The duo’s album, Serenity, is released on Ostgut, a label that for me has yet to release anything short of 5*s. It comes on vinyl or on CD, and for once there is a real reason to buy both, not just a single bonus track or whatever. The vinyl has cuts made specifically for DJs (”the more club-oriented cuts”) while the CD could very well work for a great houseparty, but equally has acted as a perfect soundtrack for my long bus rides home during a seriously cold patch of the London winter. Thing is, almost every cut is as groovy as you like - even from my first listen to any of their material (”What Makes You Go For It”) I got caught by the real physicality of this sound. It’s not as hard-hitting as some of Ostgut’s output, but it’s got a definite low-down swing to it. Difficult to describe, I suppose.

Another thing I love is the totally soulful vocals. They could be all kinds of twee. Instead they make me wish I was the one with the microphone singing my heart out, even if it was only to my empty living room… If Bruno Pronsato has given our minds a stunning workout in early 2008, then Prosumer & Murat Tepeli can be the ones to give our chilly feet a reason to have a little warm up on dancefloors private and public. If I hear “The Craze” played out anywhere over here, then I’ll have had the tiniest slice of the Panorama Bar experience and I’ll probably be even more desperate to make the pilgrimage to Berlin. You can buy Serenity on both vinyl or CD directly from the label, or you should be able to pick them up from somewhere like Phonica.

Prosumer & Murat Tepeli - “The Craze [Live At Panorama Bar]” [Ostgut]