Dormida escuchando tu voz, mirarte hasta el amanecer. - Sleeping whilst listening to your voice, looking at the dawn.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Ayobaness: The Sounds of Township Funk
So in typical fashion everything I said I'd review first takes a back seat to a compilation of South African house I recently acquired. If you've got any interest in house music globally, you've probably heard South African DJ Mujava's Kwaito track 'Township Funk', which was released on Warp back in 2008, and got a bit of exposure from Gilles Peterson, amongst others. It got the remix treatment from Skream & Sinden, among others.
original mix
Skream remix
(probably needs a little more bass tbh)
Aesthetically it's not mindblowing. Like Major Lazer's 'Pon de Floor', it's got a basic drum intro, akin to marching-band rolls, but very rhythmic. The marriage of those hypnotic synths over the top is what makes it what it is, ie. a great track to dance to, and ultimately a great step forward for the genre, and its exposure to a broader audience.
A relatively new genre, Kwaito is essentially South Africa's take on house music, with minor influences from disco, hip-hop, and local tribal dance. Slightly slower and often resembling hip-hop, it takes the American house sound of the early to mid 90s and fuses it with African rhythms, chants, and basslines/synth stabs reminiscent of 80s electro. The word comes from the Afrikaans slang kwai, meaning 'hot', or 'kickin'; as in, 'this new shit is fresh' type thang. The emergence of Kwaito is hardly surprising, given the South Africans liberated way of life following apartheid. It represents those freedoms as much as it does the ghetto townships; an increasingly competitive and developing blend of distinctly African dance grooves. Out Here Records, a label focusing on compilations of popular music styles in Africa, brought out this great collection in May of last year: Ayobaness! - The Sound of South African House. It features one track from DJ Mujava, among a dozen other nuggets of S.A. bliss. I've posted a few of my favourites below.
If you're still into paying money for music and listening to it on a proper sound system, you can pick up these jams right here.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Emilio Jose
Its taken me quite a while but I can finally say that I enjoy/somewhat understand Emilio Jose as a legitimate artist after not only listening to Chorando Aprendese on repeat but also exploring the mind space and lets be honest, getting a bit crazy on the weekends.
At face value, many of Emilio's songs seem to be quickly thrown together to look complicated/sophisticated affairs, however look a bit deeper and realise things on a grander scale and his music evokes vivid memories and feelings of time and space. Much like the avant-garde Soviet film makers who create meaning and story through montage, juxtaposition and a dialectic mindset are Emilio's tools of choice in the creation of Chorando Aprendese. This is most apparent in tracks like Ti Deixachesme. I could also go on about Emilio's master of language not in the sense of lyrical genius in one particular language, but jumping between his native Portugese to Spanish, English and even Catalan, however if you can't understand most to any of it, it doesn't really matter.
Get yourself a copy of this latin american masterpiece, not folk or alternative as you'd expect in the current musical climate, but music for the mind.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Newest Releases in 2011
Privyet
A lot of new techno and house releases out in the last few months, each of which I'll be reviewing over the next fortnight. James Blake has of course released his debut LP, following many months of anticipation, and it is an interesting blend of art pop, soul, and dubstep.
There are also new releases from Nicolas Jaar, Steffi, Maceo Plex, Chaim, Deniz Kurtel, Hercules and Love Affair, Robag Wruhme, Isolée, a new Fabric mix courtesy of Derrick Carter, and compilation overviews from German techno labels Ostgut Ton & Bpitch Control.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Rolling in the Deep (Jamie XX Reshuffle/Remix)
The xx made many if not most people's best of 2009 charts, and much of the credit thrown towards the young Brits is thanks to the production talent of Jamie who does remixes under the Jamie xx moniker. Applying the xx's trademark sound to tracks, stripping them down to their bare bones and showcasing their true essence as music with production ironically thrown out the window. If people didn't take notice with Jamie's remixes of Glasser, Jack Penate and Eliza Doolittle, they certainly rose up and embraced his reworking of Florence and the Machine who reworked You've Got The Love; and to be honest if you were a producer who had a track reworked, and distributed with the Jamie xx sticker on it you'd be understandably pretty pissed off because in my humble opinion he's showing everybody how its done. He takes these tracks and not only makes them his own but makes them as some might suggest should have been made in the first place.
Come 2011 and he's dropped another bombshell with a reworking of Adele's Rolling in the Deep. Speaking in architectural terms Jamie creates a modernist masterpiece where the song is honest in its materials/samples, practically minimalist, always focused and never detracting from the landscape/environment that is Adele's amazing voice that can at one moment can seem synonymous with sunlight gently piercing a tree's soft, fresh leaves and at the next sends the ground shaking and making you feel horrible for yet again getting on her bad side.
Make sure to not only check out Rolling in the Deep (Jamie XX Remix) but also his reinterpretation of Gil Scott Heron's album 'I'm New Here' funnily enough entitled 'We're New Here'.
Rolling in the Deep (Jamie xx) ft. Childish Gambino by Childish Gambino
the sound of silence
m n m l s m
...Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features''
The appeal of minimalistic works, and thus minimalism itself, would and does appear at first almost absurd. I would be lying if I said that I have never stood before a piece of artwork and thought of it at this; absurd, dull and in a single word - shit. Whilst now I rarely find myself in this position, it is surely and necessarily impossible to say that all minimalism, whether it be in the form of art, music or architecture, is brilliant. Stripping anything down to its barest minimum is dangerous - a house with only one wall and no roof is not a house, it is a wall. Similarly, one might argue that a single note compromising music is not music, it is a note. I do not deny that these positions are absolutely correct, I merely consider it important to retain a level or a limit to minimalism in order to avoid locking horns with obscurity; in order to avoid minimalism becoming equal to nothingness.
...Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features''
The appeal of minimalistic works, and thus minimalism itself, would and does appear at first almost absurd. I would be lying if I said that I have never stood before a piece of artwork and thought of it at this; absurd, dull and in a single word - shit. Whilst now I rarely find myself in this position, it is surely and necessarily impossible to say that all minimalism, whether it be in the form of art, music or architecture, is brilliant. Stripping anything down to its barest minimum is dangerous - a house with only one wall and no roof is not a house, it is a wall. Similarly, one might argue that a single note compromising music is not music, it is a note. I do not deny that these positions are absolutely correct, I merely consider it important to retain a level or a limit to minimalism in order to avoid locking horns with obscurity; in order to avoid minimalism becoming equal to nothingness.
minimalism = something
So minimalism is far from nothing, but it is without a doubt hard to put a finger on, precisely because of the nature of it. A kind of interactive self-inversion is at play - a simple, repeated melodic motif in a piece of music demands attention because of its inconspicuous nature. It grows like a seedling, it develops and matures and that idea is transformed into something greater. It takes on new forms, colours, ideas, and it slowly begins to redefine itself. It evolves beyond itself and it transgresses the boundaries it initially set for itself, and this is where the beauty of minimalism and minimalistic ideas lies. So what then allows for this intangible evolution?
Perhaps we might consider this by example of a simple painting. If we are to imagine a blank canvas, and a black square in the middle of the canvas, a multitude of ideas may spill forth, but initially these are inevitably masked by what appears to be something of extreme, perhaps demeaning, simplicity. But the longer we stare at that square and the longer we consider the relation between the two aspects of the painting, the greater the complexity becomes. As an observer we can begin to consider and examine the relationship between the two colours - white and black - and between the two geometrical shapes. We can invert the relationship , alter and distort its form and if you like, re-create the initial form. In doing this we understanding the initial form to be quite literally a form - it is not a concrete shape but rather an abstract representation of something else, of something, of anything! It represents something - geometries, colour relationships, symmetries, physical spaces, etc. - and thus allows the brain to completely expand of this form and to create its own multitude of relationships with the form, thus defining the form as something which cannot be labeled.
Perhaps we might consider this by example of a simple painting. If we are to imagine a blank canvas, and a black square in the middle of the canvas, a multitude of ideas may spill forth, but initially these are inevitably masked by what appears to be something of extreme, perhaps demeaning, simplicity. But the longer we stare at that square and the longer we consider the relation between the two aspects of the painting, the greater the complexity becomes. As an observer we can begin to consider and examine the relationship between the two colours - white and black - and between the two geometrical shapes. We can invert the relationship , alter and distort its form and if you like, re-create the initial form. In doing this we understanding the initial form to be quite literally a form - it is not a concrete shape but rather an abstract representation of something else, of something, of anything! It represents something - geometries, colour relationships, symmetries, physical spaces, etc. - and thus allows the brain to completely expand of this form and to create its own multitude of relationships with the form, thus defining the form as something which cannot be labeled.
minimalism ≠ something
Having considered it in this light, the relationship between a piece of art, a structure, a melodic idea and the observer/viewer, far from being passive, is reciprocal, abstract and beautiful. The viewer becomes a creator, becomes the artist, and in this way meaning is passed on through representation and reconfiguration. Meaning is passed on, and meaning is created, and it is exactly through this process that we might truly understand minimalism as an art form.
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