[Hotflush Recordings]

Over the past year the music released by Hotflush has become ever more imposing. Grandiose techno such as Paul Woolford & Psycatron’s “Stolen,” Scuba’s own driving and melodic “Adrenaline,” the recent Locked Groove 12″ — all have seen the imprint grow ever more suited to the biggest rooms while, thankfully, never straying too close to lurid territory. But while the imprint’s output has remained high quality, there has also been an encroaching gloss — and conservatism — that has tempered the earlier, more visceral excitement of rawer releases by artists such as Untold or Pangaea. Sigha’s Abstractions I-IV is a case in point: a hulking and nuanced set that offers a restrained and authentic forward drive, if lacking somewhat in originality.

Opening with a beatless salvo — “Something In Between Us” — the combination of ambient outdoors vista and lush pad work is beautiful, but by no means an indication of what lies in wait. Indeed, although beatless tracks have been a part of the landscape since time immemorial, in techno circles they often hold more than a passing element of menace. This one simply shines. Any feeling of elation is short lived, however. “Where I Come To Forget” leads with a sparse arrangement, cavernous kicks broken by a cracking snare on the offbeat. Some tracks simply demand to be thoroughly worked, this being one of them. Each element of the tune is brought in slowly (the whole thing lasts eight minutes), and clicks along with Teutonic precision; it takes a very real engineering skill to create such a beguiling — and damned near perfect — DJ tool.

Not everything here is quite as captivating, however. There is perhaps a small element of techno karaoke to certain Sigha tracks, with audible influence drawn down from firmly within the genre. Third track, “How To Disappear,” is a decent case in point: the oscillating synth work, ticking percussion and ominous atmospherics straying far too close to Sandwell territory for comfort. Final track, “Drown,” draws this set to a roundly satisfying close. The dank atmospherics and dusky pads are underpinned by some serious sub weight, and a satisfyingly heavy atmosphere of industrial rot prevails. While Sigha may be some way off from finding a truly original voice within techno, his work is serious and accomplished nonetheless, offering an ever-increasing bounty of slick productions. Abstractions I-IV is a skilled EP, shot through with moments of quiet beauty.

[Hotflush Recordings]

Released earlier this year, Scuba’s sophomore album Triangulation was an atmospheric meditation on deep dubstep and Berlin techno. Spacious and varied, it succeeded in progressing from the IDM-inflected A Mutual Antipathy and built upon the fantastic series of EPs Scuba released towards the end of 2009. To further explore the wide-ranging bass music scene, the Hotflush boss has enlisted a cadre of remixers for Triangulation (Interpretations). For the most part these remixes eschew atmosphere for energy, and in that way this collection hearkens back to the origin of remixes — the extended club mix version of popular tunes. Whether it’s increasing the BPMs or shifting the style of a tune, each remix transforms the original into a worthy variation.

“Before” gains two different remixes here, the first of which, “Before (After),” is by Scuba himself. Whereas the original was an almost glacial hip-hop burner, the new version revises the the drums, moving them up in tempo and coating the track in a windy ambient haze. Now its repeated vocal phrase floats in a bed of harmonics instead of buried under bass and melody. The second version of “Before” is by Deadboy, who keeps the melody almost in intact ableit at a slower pace and flips the percussion into a minimal garage workout. On Triangulation, “Latch” was one of the most submerged tracks, with a thick cloud of grit over the quiet melody and techno percussion. On Will Saul and Mike Monday’s version, the remixers turn the tables on this dynamic and put a newly invigorated house beat front and center, looping the atmospheres so they echo throughout the track.

Surprisingly, FaltyDL takes “On Deck” and pushes the heavy techno number into a more subtle funky track. The almost acid-sounding synth of the original is gone, replaced by a leaner melody of piano and reverbs. The drums swing a little further with syncopation, giving the impression of a drastically different song. Scuba next reexamines his own “You Got Me,” which appeared first as an ever-changing chameleon of a track, the melody moving through several phases of variation. His “You Got Me (I Got You)” version is much more playful, with a livelier synth that is pushed up a few octaves and brings back the old rave feeling of euphoria. The tribal “Tracers” gets a remix from Deadbeat who expands the track to almost twice it’s length for a minimal techno epic. It’s only towards the end that the original melody creeps in, sitting under several layers of effects. It’s a bold departure from the original, where the obvious thing would have been to make it more mental in a remix. By taking a step back, the track becomes more nuanced and surprising.

My personal favorite track of Triangulation has always been “So You Think You’re Special,” so I was especially keen to hear what Joe would do with the track. A producer with an immense amount of exposure this year and who great things are expected of, he changes Scuba’s original torch song into a somewhat melancholy funky track, with an unexpected looping piano chord and some synthetic bass slaps. Nowhere to be found is the diva vocal or echoing percussion of the original, making this song a wholly new invention. Triangulation (Interpretations) continues Hotflush’s solid year of releases by hewing close to Scuba’s vision for the label as a place for music that doesn’t fit into any one genre, but rather encompasses them all.

With the markers of just what exactly constitutes dubstep in perpetual motion, Mount Kimbie have been doing their part to blur the lines even further. Since early 2009, their stuttering, crackling productions infused with everything from folky guitar lines, UK garage, R’n'B and ambient have pegged them as ones to keep a close eye on. After two highly collectible EP’s on Hotflush Recordings, they released their debut album, Crooks and Lovers, to critical acclaim in July. LWE sat down with Dominic Maker and Kai Campos to talk about influences, recording the album and the future of Mount Kimbie.

Where did you meet each other?

Kai: At university in South London, in Elephant & Castle. We both had moved up to London for uni. We didn’t really know anyone else at that time so we would go to school together and talk about music.

Where are you originally from?

Dom: I was born in Chichester in West Sussex and currently live in Brighton.

K: And I was born in Cornwall and lived there until I moved to London.

Where does the name Mount Kimbie come from?

D: It’s a combination of Nick Drake’s song “Kimbie” and the album Mount Eerie by the Microphones.

What were you listening to before you met each other and whilst growing up?

D: I listened to a lot of commercial indie stuff. I remember hearing Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm album and thinking that was wicked. Also Arcade Fire and TV On The Radio. I guess that was the stuff that was making me want to make music initially. But I guess I never listened to music that much. There were about six or seven albums that I listened to repeatedly and then maybe I’d hear a song here or there that I liked.

K: I played in bands and was more seduced by hip-hop and electronic music in my formative years. I was really in to Madlib and especially his Quasimoto stuff. Then I got more into ambient stuff like Phillip Jack and contemporary classical stuff like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass and John Adams.

What sort of music was bringing you together?

K: There wasn’t necessarily that much common ground. We were just talking about music in general. Dom made this incredible short film which had Pharoah Monch on it.

D: I was actually studying film and video at university and the project was to make a little five or ten minute video to introduce yourself to the group. At the time I was really into hip hop so I put on that track “Simon Says” with me just sitting there drinking milk.

K: But we talked a bit about TV On The Radio, which we were both into. But pretty soon after that we were both going on Boomkat and hearing people like Bassclef and Loefah and stuff and it was 2006 and we were like what the hell is this?

So was that kind of a result of going to university in South London?

D: Yeah I guess so. I remember hearing dubstep at Bestival and it must have been a good six months before I was in London, but I never followed it up. Where I was from there wasn’t a big resource for getting your hands on new music, but of course there’s so much going on in London and it’s really easy to hear new sounds and go to clubs. So finding out that there was the chance to listen to this sort of stuff regularly was really exciting and that’s how we came together really, just going out and trying to find new music. I remember one of the first things we saw was Bassclef at this old theatre and we thought it would just be this guy DJing, but he had this trombone and it was really inspiring.

Musically had you been doing anything before that?

K: Yeah we’d both been making stuff. I was making electronic music for a long time, so in my room at uni I had my little bedroom set up, so I had a half decent studio and I would show Dom how to use certain things on the computer. From there we just naturally started making stuff together.

Is that original set up basically what you use now?

K: It’s not too far off. I had a PC then, and was running Fruity Loops and had a little mixer, a guitar and some decent monitors. And I think if you have decent monitors then you’re set. I have a few new bits now but it’s essentially the same.

So you play the guitar on the tracks?

K: Yeah, although I’m not sure there is any on the first record, but yeah, pretty much any time there’s guitar I’m playing it.

Were the first two EP’s written around the same time?

K: No, they were written very much around the times they were released, even in the order the tracks run. The first four tracks we finished became the first EP and the next four were the second EP. It kind of seemed very easy at that point.

D: I think the EPs were a year apart.

K: Yeah, it seemed like a much longer time between the records, but it wasn’t, it was quite a productive stage at that point.

But there must have been quite a few things that you’d almost finished or had been working on before Maybes came out.

D: There were some things, but they didn’t feel very serious to us. I remember the first mix we ever did was a for a radio show in Lancaster and we just put in anything that we’d made. It was a terrible mix.

Everything you’ve released has been on Hotflush. Were they the first people you contacted?

K: They were the only ones we heard back from. We sent them some tracks, they liked it and asked us if we wanted to do a record. So everything we said they were happy with and we decided on the track order, the artwork and everything.

D: It was much easier in those days. [laughs]

K: Yeah, I was thinking they’d come back at some point and ask us to change something, but they never did, it was so simple with them.

Is that why you chose to release your album on Hotflush too?

K: Yeah I mean they’ve been really helpful and really open minded and just left us to get on with it I suppose, and hopefully it’s worked for everybody.

Has the album attracted attention from bigger labels?

D: We don’t really know. Our managers soak up all of that stuff so we have no idea. I think when the album came out it was like a big shock wave for us so we’re still recovering from that. We just want to play live and that’s really all we’ve been able to think about since the album came out really.

K: We are looking forward to doing another record but we’ve got a lot of shows to play and a lot of stuff to take and then we can sit down, hopefully the start of next year and think about how we want to do it.

When you first started making music together did you talk about what exactly you wanted your sound to be?

D: We never really had a chat like that, we just naturally progressed into what we’re making now from the original stuff. I think the only conversation we had about our music was that we wanted to make dubstep and we decided we weren’t good at that so we set out to do something a bit more creative.

K: It’s hard to put it into words really and if you could there probably wouldn’t be a point in making the music. So the reason I think it works between us is that we’re both aiming towards the same thing that we can’t quite put into words and there were a couple of moments where things just clicked. On “Taps” from the first record, for example, which is not necessarily the best thing we’ve done, but there was just something about the production that Dom was doing on that, that we both knew that was the sound we were looking for. But we’re always looking to change things too.

Picture by Phil Sharp

I was wondering that, that after two incredibly successful EP’s and now the album, do you feel a pressure that the next thing that you do needs to show a marked difference?

K: Well I think we want to anyway. I mean, we don’t really feel the pressure from other people to reinvent it all over again, but the best kind of feeling that you can get is when you surprise yourself with what you’re doing. When you listen back to something and wonder how the hell you came up with it, that’s the feeling you look for and it does happen every now and then. That’s when you get excited and when you want to do more. I’m sure whatever we do will sound very different, we just don’t know how yet.

How much planning went in to the album?

D: Well, it’s about a year’s work of not much work really. The intense part came about three weeks before we had to hand it in and a good percentage of the album was finished then. We didn’t over-think it though. Well, initially we did but nothing good came of that so we just relaxed and stepped back a bit and relieved ourselves of the pressure you naturally put on yourself in a situation like that; and we started to write things we wanted to go on there and at the start it was just ideas and loops, then a few months later we’d come back and add to them and just keep building up. One of the hardest parts was working out the order of the tracks, because there are so many different sides to the album. If we had thought too much about the concept of the album then the running order would have come easily, but it was good in the way that it made us really have to think about that side of things.

K: You can think about the order of things too much while you’re making the album and maybe think after finishing three songs, well, we need something to take it in a different direction so I’ll write a song like this. That becomes quite troublesome, so I think it’s best to just get in and write the songs and try and figure out the narrative of it afterwards. It was definitely a much harder process than the EPs, though, and I didn’t think it would be, but I just felt very differently about it. But I think it’s very hard within electronic music to make something that is cohesive and feels like it fits together. It’s much easier to just make a bunch of singles. So it was very important to us that it worked as a whole.

Do you agree that bass music in the UK seems to be in a very exciting place right now?

K: Yeah it does and I think that it has quite a bit to do with the Internet and those people who are now making music. Compared to say, the drum & bass scene in the mid-90′s which was a very exciting place to be, but perhaps the people who started making it were all coming from a very similar background. Now the people who are making music that is getting put under the same umbrella are coming from lots of different places and you don’t need to be in a certain place to hear a certain type of music any more. And certainly the breadth of influences that you hear I think is quite exciting too.

Who are some of the producers that you guys get inspired by?

D: We’ve always worked very closely with James Blake and listened to a lot of his stuff. Especially lately, we’re listening to a lot of his unreleased stuff, which has very tough keys and basic percussion, just real songs you know.

K: He’s really seen as one of the most exciting electronic producers around; he’s basically an incarnation of Joni Mitchell deep down. There aren’t too many electronic producers out there who sound like Joni Mitchell and write songs like he does. We listen to a lot of Actress as well. We were talking before about making a cohesive record, well this guy has made two records that just feel like works of art. If I was feeling kind of stuck for ideas I’d just listen to Hazyville from start to end and it would give me plenty to think about.

James Blake often gets talked about like he’s involved with Mount Kimbie. How does he fit in?

K: It’s basically because he has played with us live. We were already friends and when we started doing live shows we asked him to come help out. We thought three people would be good, it would be more fun, plus he’s really good at playing keyboards and he has a MacBook as well. [laughs]

D: To be honest, at the time it was because he had the MacBook and then as soon as he played with us it was because he played amazingly and his voice was incredible. We knew it was going to be good.

K: This was before he’d released any records and our schedule started getting very busy and his was too with school. We started playing Europe a few times a week and he had essays to hand in so we had to go ahead with just the two of us and wanted to figure out some way we could make it work. Now his career has taken off as well, so we’re going to do gigs together in the future because it’s a lot of fun. But when we took it back to the two of us playing we had to approach it in a different way and it was really interesting. We have never recorded anything with him, though there was one track that we have played live that we all did together. So I guess that’s why we always get lumped in together with him.

So we can set the record straight with that then.

K: Yeah, that fucker didn’t write anything. [laughs]

D: I wish they said that about his tunes, that we had a hand in them.

Speaking of singers, I was listening to your remix of Andreya Triana. It seems that a lot of your remix work centres around working with bands and that your style goes very well with vocalists. Has there ever been any thought of using vocalists for your own productions?

K: Yeah we’ve definitely had to think about it. It’s a completely different element that you can bring to music, but with the album it was too soon because it would have been too rushed and we didn’t really want to have an album that had about four or five guest vocalists. Not that we have anything against people who do that. We just wanted it to be a singular vision and if we were going to have a vocalist on it they’d have to be a big part of it rather than just coming to the studio and laying down a couple of tracks.

D: It would to really mean something and feel right.

K: Yeah, we’d want the music to be as much there’s as ours. It’s just about finding the right person really. So it definitely is something to think about for the future.

In terms of remixing your contemporaries, there’s only been the LV/Untold remix. Have you been approached by anyone else?

D: No, just a lot of indie bands.

K: I remember hearing Untold’s track and really loved it. Then I saw him at Fabric about seven months later and he asked if we wanted to remix it. So he said he’d send over the stems and ended up sending about 4GB of stuff through, all these weird animal noises and effects and all sorts. So there’s probably a bit of Untold on the album, too. [laughs]

Any samples you’ve used that you can let us know the secret to?

D: We’ve definitely used a bit of James. Lot’s of him talking.

K: We didn’t use so many for the album, but definitely on the singles. The samples for “Maybes” are a well guarded secret but they are from a copyright free source. “William” is obvious if you’re in to minimalist neo-classical composers and know about a guy in New York called William [Basinski]. For the album there was a night where I was bored with what I was listening to and so I had an evening with techno, like Basic Channel style stuff. Every day I would log on to Last.fm and start with Basic Channel and skip forward ten or fifteen tracks and press record at certain points, and at the end I just had this ridiculous amount of files of about fifteen seconds of stuff. I organized them all by date and called them all things like “1″, “2″, “3″ and things like that so I don’t know where half of it came from. But low quality Last.fm streaming, that’s helped make the album.

Many of your peers are also playing around with techno and 4/4 club tracks. Is there another side to you that you want to explore too?

D: We have done some pretty apocalyptic remixes with some sick acapellas.

K: For me, as a teenager, 4/4 was something I really struggled with and got quite angry about but I guess it’s like a lot of things in life, you come back to it later and think, ‘Why was I such an angry little bitch about it?’ There is a certain beauty in the simplicity of it and in the undeniable animalistic side of a 4/4 beat. I’m not sure we’ve done anything in that format that is good enough, but we are definitely influenced by it. A bunch of guys like Ramadanman and Joy Orbison seem to be looking for more subtle and different ways to make their point and I think house and techno is something that rewards you if you give it enough time.

Finally, what can we expect from Mount Kimbie in the next year?

D: A total overkill of live shows and probably not hearing much from us, maybe a few remixes. But then hopefully by next year, something totally fresh and new and something that we’ve enjoyed doing.

K: The plan is to run ourselves into the ground until February, then take six months off to look at the awful people that we’ve become and make a record and edge ever closer to the mainstream to find that elusive fame that we’ve been searching for.

It’s one thing to be excited about music from your hometown. It’s quite another to find out that some of the most exciting dance music on the shelves right now, in your humble opinion, was made quite literally down the street from you. When I met Praveen Sharma this past summer, we initially bonded over living on the same street just a few blocks from each other. When a mutual friend pulled me aside and said, “You’re talking to one of the Sepalcure dudes,” I was shocked I hadn’t heard any woozy, loved-up bass coming in through my back window. (Finding out that the other Sepalcure dude, Travis Stewart, had spent a chunk of his musical formative years in my hometown in Florida blew my mind a bit as well.) A collaboration between old friends and New York dance music veterans, Sepalcure very quickly moved from casual side-project to Hotflush-approved, extremely-hotly-tipped “lovestep” juggernaut. After a recent taping of Bless Up! at Brooklyn’s famed Halcyon record shop, I sat down with Sepalcure to find out how it all came together. The boys were also kind enough to provide us with an aural accompaniment to the interview — an exclusive, edit-heavy mix of the sort of tender house, fiesty bass, and Sepalcure sounds that’s perhaps best enjoyed with a smooth Malbec and that special someone.

LWE Podcast 61: Sepalcure (42:06)

Tracklist:

01. Kenny Larkin, “Breathe” [Peacefrog Records]
02. Twerk, “Kiu Kiu” [Mille Plateaux]
03. Shed, “Warped Mind” [Ostgut Ton]
04. Michaux, “12£ Ute-No” [Audio.nl]
05. Scuba, “On Deck” (FaltyDL Remix) [Hotflush Recordings]
06. Velour, “Kick it Til it Breaks” [Night Slugs]
07. The Hundred in the Hands, “Pigeons” (Blawan’s Bare Bones Remix)
[Warp Records]
08. Distal & HxdB, “Typewriter Tune” (VIP Mix) [white*]
09. Spatial, “100505″ [Infrasonics]
10. Sistol, “On the Bright Side” (Scuba’s Brighter Side Remix)
[Halo Cyan Records]
11. Millie & Andrea, “Gunshot” (Stripped) [Daphne]
12. Neat, “Lime & Sugar” [Airflex Labs]
13. Icicle, “Anything” [Tempa]
14. Commix, “Be True” (Burial Remix) [Metalheadz]
* denotes tracks which, as of the time of publishing, are unreleased

How did you meet? How did this Sepalcure collaboration come about?

Praveen Sharma: I was just getting really inspired by all this UK-whatever, this past year especially. I’d been doing the Praveen & Benoit for awhile, and I was just kind of bored, and Travis was just kind of bored, and I’d started making beats again for the first time in awhile. I invited Travis over and was just playing some shit, and we just started doing it for fun.

But your history goes back a ways before Sepalcure, right? How far back do you go?

Travis Stewart: Years. Maybe like eight years. Praveen was helping out with a show and was also performing, at Knitting Factory, wasn’t it?

PS: Yeah, downstairs at [the old Manhattan location of] the Knitting Factory.

TS: We had been talking off-and-on before then, and he’d been playing some of my Machinedrum records on his radio show upstate, like he’s been doing the Percussion Lab Radio thing for years. We’d just been talking then, and I met him through a couple shows. When I was living in Florida, I would come up to play in New York. Then I moved to New York, and we pretty much started hanging out all the time. We lived together at one point, like I was subletting at his place. It’s kind of funny that we’ve known each other for so long and only within the past year have really started collaborating musically. But it’s been beautiful the whole way.

Was there something that you guys bonded over musically, like a particular style or particular records, something that made the relationship click?

TS: Not necessarily. We have a lot of similar tastes across the board as far as genres go. We’re always playing each other different records and sending each other tunes and stuff. But Praveen definitely got me into a lot more of the UK sounds. I’d always been aware of the UK sound and dubstep and stuff like that, but I wasn’t that into it. Praveen was really digging into a lot of stuff and was playing me really interesting stuff that was coming out of the whole dubstep scene and UK funky scene and just bass music in general. Just from giving me a bunch of tracks, he started getting me on the same kind of path. He was a big influence on me to start doing more of that dubstep sound for sure.

Praveen, did this sharing go in the other direction as well? Were you getting lots of music from Travis?

PS: I’ve always gotten a lot of music from Travis. I still get shit-tons, especially now that we’re doing these back-to-back Serato sets. I’m thrilled because I end up every time with like a boulder full of gems. He was a big influence earlier on, especially when I was doing my Neo Ouija album. I just loved what he was doing with the whole glitch-hop thing and all that. The whole time [we've known each other], we’ve always been sending each other tunes. I think it just sort of flipped this time. It’s been more of me being like, “You’ve got to hear this shit! This shit is not the shitty dubstep that we don’t like! It’s better!”

Praveen, you mentioned that album you put out awhile back on Neo Ouija. I wanted to talk about each of your music careers before Sepalcure. What were you both up to?

PS: Originally I was doing a lot of IDM. I was sort of in the same circle as Travis, and I used to send him stuff. I thought he was the shit, because he came out with this sound before Prefuse 73 did. But I was always doing a way more toned-down, minimal, ambient electronic thing. That was for my Neo Ouija release and my Ai release, my Expanding Records release. All that stuff was very minimal, electronic, ambient. Then eventually I went through a period where I was pretty bored by a lot of electronic music. I went on this trip to India and sort of found half of my roots — half of my family is Puerto Rican, and is Indian — and I came back with a harmonium and some tablas, and I started working on this project with my friend Tom [Meluch], who goes by the name Benoit Pioulard, on Kranky, and that was way more of a folky sort of vibe. That was the last, like, three years maybe, with no beats. I would maybe throw in some beats, but not like we’re doing now. I was very far removed from what we’re doing now. The lead-up was fun. It was this big switch-up that’s been pretty inspiring.

And Travis, a big part of your back-story has been Machinedrum, right?

TS: As far as the Machinedrum sound goes, it’s always kind of been up to whatever I’m into at the moment, you know? I’ve never really adhered to any rules, like that my sound has to be part of some specific formula or anything. It’s definitely — like since I’ve moved to New York, it’s become more dance-centered and more clubby. I definitely feel like the Sepalcure project has been a natural progression from what I’ve been doing with the Machinedrum stuff to this new sound we’ve been getting into.

It sounds like the beginnings of Sepalcure were pretty casual. When did you know you were onto something? When did you start thinking in terms of releases?

TS: We didn’t plan on it originally. Originally, just like Praveen said, we were both bored. We just wanted to make some tunes influenced by the stuff we were both listening to at the time. We were passing it out to friends, and you know, when you’re friends with people who work with labels or know people who work with labels, it’s sometimes natural that those songs end up in other people’s hands. It just happened to be that we passed a couple of the unreleased Sepalcure tracks to Alex Incyde from Dub War, and we had no idea that he was actually doing PR for Hotflush at the time. He passed along the tracks to Scuba and got back to us before we were even considering demo-ing out tracks. It was really cool that it happened that naturally.

PS: Yeah, the shit we sent him wasn’t even finished! I think the first time for me that we were really onto something was our booking at Bass Mutations [at Unsound Festival New York this past February]. It’s like, how the fuck did that happen? We had no releases, we really hadn’t even performed; that was our first performance together. And it went off really well. I think that was the first time we were like, ‘Holy shit, this is gonna be dope!’

You didn’t send out any demos to get that gig? They just got in touch with you?

PS: Well I mean, we had sent Alex and also Dave [Q, founder of Dub War] — it’s kind of a funny story, because we’d sent both of them some tunes. Alex hit us up and was like — we still had no idea he was working at Hotflush — he was like, ‘I think Paul [Rose, aka Scuba] would really like these.’ And we were like, ‘No, no no no no! They’re not done!’ But Dave didn’t ask! He just sent them. Dave was actually the one who sent them to Scuba. We had no idea, and then the next thing we knew Scuba was hitting us up for two tracks — “Feeling That I Know So Well” and “Deep City.”

This is kind of a nice segue. I was doing some research on you guys getting set for this interview–

PS: Creepy!

Yeah, this is gonna sound a little creepy. You know, if you google “lovestep,” you guys are the first thing that comes up.

TS: Naturally.

As someone who listens to a lot of this stuff, I think it’s kind of a fantastic tag. Like it’s kind of silly.

TS: It’s kind of funny. We were both noticing this whole shift in the dubstep scene, taking the whole “brostep” sound and just, like, melt-your-face bass lines and intense testosterone-driven music to a more relaxed, more soulful, more melodic kind of form, with the influence of diva vocals and everything like that, bringing the sound full-circle with this kind of New York and Chicago house sound that was so big in the ‘90s and that kind of disappeared for awhile. I think it’s sort of reinvigorated a lot of producers that are out right now.

So you guys were obviously aware of what was going on. I didn’t really know that the timetable was like when you guys were making the Love Pressure EP. I was wondering if your sound was a reaction to people like Joy Orbison, or Pangaea with his “Memories” release…

PS: Of course. My lovestep mixes were definitely a reaction to that. It was just me loving that shit. The term was actually coined by our friend Nick, who lives in London and used to be the chef for Warp or something crazy like that. He came by, I think in September or late August [2009], when we’d first started. He heard us throwing in all these diva vocals and this soulful New York garage or New York house sort of sound, and he was like, “That’s some lovestep.” I thought it was hilarious. But to be honest, that was when we were just doing it for fun. It’s a funny term, but we wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed right now, because a lot of the tracks that we have cooking right now are a lot darker. There’s still some of the loved-up ones, but we have a lot of diverse tracks that are ready.

If you’ll permit me to do a little reading of what you guys are doing… you know, I definitely hear the similarities with UK people like Joy Orbison or even Floating Points. But it totally makes sense that you guys are doing this in Brooklyn. From a geographical standpoint, you have the people to your east, in London and elsewhere in the UK, who have taken influences from New York and almost pushed them into the pop realm. But then I also hear in your sound a lot of what’s going on to your west in LA, where the beats aren’t totally quantized and there’s this hazy, stoner quality to the mids. Do you feel yourselves sitting between these two scenes, pulled in both directions by them?

PS: We’re influenced by everything we hear, for sure. But we have a lot of [those qualities] that we’d been doing in our own side projects. We are definitely very influenced by what’s happened in the past in New York, and it’s a huge inspiration for us to see people like FaltyDL, people like Kingdom, all these producers who are coming up now who are sort of bringing this New York garage thing back in a different way. That’s really inspiring for us.

TS: And I also feel that there’s been this big shift in locality of music. Like, there was a New York sound, and there was a predominant UK sound and West Coast sound and what have you. And now I really feel like, especially with today’s technology, it’s all becoming more world music, in a way. People are influencing each other and creating music that — like, you have a producer from Detroit or wherever making something that could very well come straight out of London, and this is happening everywhere right now. It’s becoming harder and harder to pin down a localized scene. I’m kind of embracing that right now. It’s kind of exciting to think about music being more worldly rather than localized.

It’s interesting, because you’re influenced by music that’s from New York, that’s part of your local cultural history, and also by music that’s influenced by New York music. Like, could Sepalcure have even happened 15 or 20 years ago, before the Internet allowed music to travel around like it has?

TS: If we had, for whatever reason, 15 years ago had the sickest connections to DJs and record circles and stuff, maybe we would be doing the same stuff. It’s really hard to tell. Obviously we’re both very passionate about music and seeking out music, so who knows? Maybe 15 years ago we would have sought out music in the same way, you know, just used whatever resources we had at the time rather than the Internet.

Let’s get into Love Pressure now. From the artwork to the flow of the tracks, it doesn’t just feel like a 12″. Like, it’s four tracks, but it feels like you’ve approached it as a cohesive unit. Once you guys got serious about releasing something, were you trying to create a whole rather than parts?

TS: I think what happened, and the reason it kind of sounds so cohesive, is because we were literally writing a lot of those tracks in the same two- to three-week period, or at least starting a lot of them. So they naturally all ended up sounding similar, because we were just on a certain tip at that time and weren’t even necessarily concerned if the songs sounded too much like each other or if we were using the same samples in some of the songs. We just wanted to do it. Yeah, I think it just has to do with the timing.

PS: On the artwork tip, we’ve tried to maintain a kind of cohesive style artistically. It’s actually Sougwen Chung who’s been doing a lot of the artwork. When we were just doing it for fun, she was living out in Europe and would send us these live drawings to tracks we were working on, like “Every Day Of My Life” and “Feeling That I Know So Well.”

Yeah, you can find videos of those on the internet, right?

PS: Yes. They weren’t ever supposed to be on the Internet. They were, you know, just supposed to be for us. Then all of a sudden they started getting a lot of views.

TS: It kind of happened in the same manner that the tracks did. We made the tracks for us to jam to, you know? There was no intention of tons of other people hearing them. It was kind of cool that both the visual side and the music side kind of came together in that way. It was like accidental exposure in a way.

Love Pressure is for sure cohesive, but for me, there’s one real standout. Can you talk specifically about how “The Warning” came together?

TS: We were trying to make an interlude track.

PS: Yeah, that’s exactly how it started.

An interlude track?

PS: We were like, okay, we have all these tracks, we should make an interlude track or something. So I just jumped on the Rhodes and started playing some keys, and we threw in some ambient soundscapes we were working on. Travis was at the controls while I was playing the stuff on the Rhodes. Next thing I know, I hear beats, and I’m like — I turn around, and I’m like, ‘This is supposed to be an interlude track!’ And he’s like, ‘No, motherfucker. This is too dope to be just an interlude track.’ And then we just went with it. I think that’s why it might sound a little bit separate, is because it started from a different place.

TS: Yeah, the initial approach was very different.

Speaking of approach… as a duo, is there a distinct division of labor when you guys are in the studio?

TS: Recently we’ve been experimenting with the long-distance thing. I spent a month in Europe, and we got to experiment with a different way of making tracks. It’s been very successful, but it’s definitely very different. When we’re in the studio together, it’s basically like, whenever one person becomes fed up or just kind of overwhelmed with all the work, we just kind of switch it up and then the next person takes the lead. He may continue with what the other person was doing or may do something completely different. There’s no real rules.

PS: There’s no real rules. But I think the one important rule that’s actually made this such a fucking awesome process to work together is that we really just let either of us try whatever we want to try. Then if we don’t like it, or if the other person doesn’t like it, you know, then we flip it up. There’s a lot of elements in these tracks that started as something totally different. Say I start some bullshit. Travis comes to it, and he’s like, ‘I like some of this,’ and then, like, flips it. We just keep switching.

TS: There’s a lot of trust.

PS: Yeah, a lot of trust.

So what’s next? Let’s first talk about what’s coming up release-wise. You guys have your first EP out right now. What can we look forward to?

PS: We’re working on an EP right now, another EP for Hotflush. We’re hoping for the fall, so it’s a tentative fall release. We’ve got the tracks done. Basically, we’ve just got to get in the studio again and finish a lot of them. And then we’ll see what happens after that. I mean, there’s a lot floating around right now, but that’s really our next big goal. We have a handful of gigs at Decibel Festival [in Seattle] — a Hotflush showcase with Sepalcure, Scuba, and Untold. Machinedrum has a show, and then I’m doing a Praveen performance. It might turn out to be Praveen and Benoit, I’m not sure yet. This winter, we’re hopefully heading overseas to do some Sepalcure shows.

TS: Something we’ve been trying to maintain, and it’s difficult — you know, when you start a project and you start putting out releases, you have a certain amount of pressure, if you will, to create and put out new stuff. And I think what was so beautiful about everything we’ve made together is that there was a complete lack of that pressure. So we’re trying to maintain that as much as we can. There’s obviously people asking us to do mixes or, you know, when’s the next album coming out, when’s the next EP or whatnot. But we’re just trying to take it one day at a time just like we naturally would. When the time comes that we have enough material to put out a release, it’ll happen. I’m very confident of it.

How about performing? Praveen, you briefly mentioned some overseas shows a second ago.

PS: This winter, there are some tentative dates overseas, in London and we’ll see what happens with those. We can’t really talk too much about them, they’re up in the air, but they will hopefully be pretty big.

Considering how fast things are happening for these guys, I thought it might be good idea to touch base once more with Praveen and Travis before our original interview went to press. Not surprisingly, they had quite a lot to fill me in on. They answered a few more questions via email.

Decibel Festival was on the horizon when we last talked. How’d that go?

Sepalcure: Decibel was fantastic. We both played solo sets at different venues and then converged to play the Hotflush showcase, which confusingly had the worst sound system but the best crowd. We had a blast and hope to get to play on a proper system next time. Was great to see Seattle’s crowd absolutely hungry for the Hotflush sound.

I understand that you intended your next EP for Hotflush, which you’ve just finished, as a bit of a departure. What’s different about it? Was there anything different about your process this time around?

This time around, there was far more back and forth between us. With Love Pressure, we’d worked on all the tracks only while together in the studio. I think “Fleur” is the only track we both started and finished together on this one. Otherwise, we feel like it’s just a natural progression from that sound we started exploring with Love Pressure.

When’s it due out?

Just in time for the tour this December. [Hotflush informs us the EP is actually scheduled for January -Ed.] Actually just sent the final pre-masters out to Scuba today. We’ve got our visual artist, Sougwen, hard at work on the next batch of Sepalcure art. Anyone who knows her work already should get excited — she’s been working with new mediums just for this EP.

Mary Anne Hobbs has been a massive supporter of you guys. On her final Radio 1 show, she mentioned that she’d been working with Darren Aronofsky on the soundtrack to his forthcoming film Black Swan, and that it would feature some music from you guys. Talk to me about how this came together. Will the movie feature new and exclusive Sepalcure jams, or is it stuff we’ll already be familiar with?

Mary Anne Hobbs is actually the reason we landed this amazing opportunity. We’re extremely flattered that she recommended us to Aronofsky. Travis was in Europe at the time so we collaborated remotely for the majority of the summer on a few different options. The movie will feature a small bit of an exclusive track that we wrote specifically for the film, using parts from Swan Lake and vocal track by Body Language’s Angelica Bess.

When we spoke over the summer, you were reluctant to let too much slip about your upcoming European tour. Can you share any more specifics?

We’re heading over to Europe from December 9th to 19th! We’ll be over there on a short Hotflush tour alongside Scuba and other Hotflush family. Can’t really say much more than that at the moment but we’ve got some really great shows lining up.

LWE Podcast 61: Sepalcure (42:06)

[Hotflush Recordings]

Journeying through Brooklyn from southern Bed-Stuy to the oil-spill end of Greenpoint, the B48 bus shuttles me often from my apartment in Clinton Hill to my best dude-friends’ flat off Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. The richness of the scenery makes up for whatever obvious beauty this route lacks. Ancient brownstones give way to mid-century housing projects. It skims the jammed BQE briefly before penetrating South Williamsburg, where hipsters and Hasidim squabble over the former’s existential right to bike lanes, and Satmar kids chase each other up fortress-like blocks and whisper on stoops. I pass car repair shops with signs mostly in Spanish, un-wrenched fire hydrants serving alternately as ad-hoc car washes and water parks, failed luxury condo schemes dressed in plywood and street art and mere vandalism. By the time I pull the cord to request my stop, I’ve cut about as jarring and complicated and weirdly beautiful a slice of urban life as one’s likely to find anywhere.

I mention the B48 because without it, I’m not sure I would have fully understood Mount Kimbie. I’d found the duo’s two Hotflush EPs oddly underwhelming for the praise practically everyone else heaped upon them, and of the five remixes that appeared this spring, only Instra:mental’s take on “At Least” had really held my attention. Even on the ass-graced cover for Crooks & Lovers, their debut full-length, it didn’t look like Kai Campos and Dominic Maker were putting their best foot forward, exactly. I do a lot of my music-listening on earbuds while in transit — hardly ideal, but New York commutes are long, days here marvels of time management — and I’ve gotten pretty used to having my head on the dance floor while my body waits in a crumbling G-train station. But as Crooks & Lovers began soundtracking my trips up to Williamsburg, first as a professional obligation but soon as a pleasure, everything about these guys started falling into place.

Crooks & Lovers isn’t pitched at 4 a.m. bassbins; it’s the sound of watching a complicated world pass by your bus window on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon, mediated by a couple of creative minds not too self-serious to giggle about big butts. Like the labyrinthine neighborhoods the B48 diligently circumnavigates thrice hourly, it follows its own messy logic. The tracks are generally short, existing for maybe a block or two before dead-ending or merging into another. The same could be said for the album itself, which clocks in at a scant 35 minutes. But after a listen or two, they cease to feel unfinished, instead joining the broader fabric of the neighborhood. Tracks like “Before I Move Off” and “Field” cram as many ideas and colors into three or four minutes as Hotflush honcho Scuba might into six or seven, yet you hardly feel them rushing from point A to point B. Mount Kimbie don’t concern themselves much with genres or tempos: they sound as content to trudge along well below house tempos (“Adriatic,” “Ode to Bear”) as they do in dubstep territory (“Would Know”). This casualness also extends to their sound design, probably a big part of my early hesitancy about these guys. In the context of an album with little interest in dance floor movement, Mount Kimbie’s preference for tiny sounds — spindly drum programming, steely guitars straight off a Books album, cheap digital reverb (a major feature of “Before I Move Off”) — makes them feel that much more tangible. If you’re going to make music in your dingy apartment, Crooks & Lovers seems to be saying, why not make music for other kids living in dingy little apartments?

This isn’t to say that this music isn’t deliberately and elegantly composed, or that it couldn’t make one hell of a smash. In the wake of this album, the buzz surrounding Mount Kimbie has become something of a din, even in circles Hotflush’s mystique might usually be lost on. It just doesn’t sound like it’s bending over backwards to impress us. Crooks & Lovers is a quirky little electronic album from a group whose beauty sneaks up on you, and whose poetry maybe isn’t readily apparent on your first bus ride. Like the bowels of Brooklyn, it might never make perfect sense, but that never stops you from looking on intently and curiously from your window seat.

It was inevitable that Joy Orbison’s enormous success would spawn a flurry of sound-alikes, and George FitzGerald’s Hotflush debut complements projects like Pariah and Sepalcure in recalling the English producer’s melodramatic, vocal-infused tracks. While it may well be an opportunistic move on the label’s part, The Let Down/Weakness gets by on its own merits; Fitzgerald clearly has an ear for structure and spacing, as both tracks cleanly unfold with much in the way of filters, builds and breakdowns — suitable material for the pulling of heartstrings.

Rhythmically, both tracks are of the standard peaktime two-step variation: swung but still fairly propulsive, with neither undergoing many changes aside from the occasional breakdown. “The Let Down” is the poppier of the two, matching a droning undercurrent with steely synths and an echoing vocal refrain. The formula breaks down to isolate a solemn, quivering melody, which is perfectly coupled with another rueful vocal sample (“I’m sooo ashamed”) to devastating effect. Meanwhile, “Weakness” is a dubby tease-and-release workout, and what it lacks in obvious hooks it more than makes up for in a dense groove, augmented by obscured vocals. Neither track is very groundbreaking — “Weakness,” in particular, is indistinguishable from a lot of other productions in the dubstep-techno vein. Moreover, the emotional highs are a bit sugary, and the heartstring-tugging may only work once or twice. Still, this is a strong debut, and the the quality of construction, coupled with an instinct for big emotions — the formative idea that a dance track can actually say something — hints at a promising future for FitzGerald.

Six full months into 2010, the record labels that have impressed me the most have one thing in common: from record to record, their releases are as varied as they are superb. With so much music to contend with at any given time, labels that diversify without sacrificing quality stand out from purveyors whose releases are all the same flavor. And while it’s easier than ever to start a label in some form, the tasks of assembling a talented roster, putting together a multifarious yet cohesive release schedule, and turning out handsome finished products requires uncommon artistic vision and business savvy.

Luckily for dance music fans and collectors, there have been a bevy of imprints helmed by managers and A&R teams who have kept us guessing and reaching for our wallets throughout the year. For some labels that’s meant limiting the number of releases and making each one count; others cast their net wider and delved into reissues; others still have challenged listeners to buy music in unexpected mediums. It was ultimately quite difficult to narrow the list down to five, and doing so leaves out so many worthy labels. With apologies to Aus Music, Laid, Ostgut Ton, Workshop, Modern Love, Underground Quality, Planet Mu, Royal Oak, Time To Express, Uzuri, and probably others, here are five record labels, in no particular order, that stood tallest in my memory and heaviest in my collection.

Hessle Audio
No longer the new kids on the block, the London-based Hessle Audio has managed to capture an increasingly mature sound without losing the vitality that made them a label to monitor closely. This was no small feat after Ramadanman, Ben UFO and Pangaea’s imprint released Untold’s barnstorming “I Can’t Stop This Feeling” and Pearson Sound’s cutting PLSN/Wad to a great deal of acclaim in 2009. Their strategy for 2010 was more ambitious, banking on doublepacks from two of the label’s founders while continuing to reach out to innovative outside artists for standout EPs. It was a risk that paid off big time as Pangaea and Ramadanman’s self-titled 2×12″s found each at their sharpest, containing provocative cuts like the former’s “Why” and the latter’s “Don’t Change For Me.” James Blake’s mind-melting Hessle debut, The Bells Sketch, was arguably even more successful, further establishing the young turk as a producer too talented and innovative to ignore. Hessle Audio capped off the first half of the year with a percussive blitz from Joe whose “Claptrap” is strongly vying for the year’s best cut built upon hand claps. Although clearly respectful towards dance music’s past, Hessle Audio has spent most of its time looking forward — writing history rather than obsessing over it — and it’s kept the imprint full strides ahead of its peers.

Honest Jon’s Records
Had you told me a couple years ago I’d pick what Entertainment Weekly called “the hippest world-music label going” as a top label I’d have laughed my head off. Yet these days there’s no doubt in my mind that Honest Jon’s, Damon Albarn and Mark Ainley’s London record shop-cum-label, is deserving of the title. Although the imprint’s steady stream of hyper specific world music comps and eclectic reissues has been somewhat compatible with dance music fans (who else reissues Moondog records and releases Carl Craig edits of The Congos?), the label’s forays into the dance music world are what won me over. Building on the success of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio album, Honest Jon’s carefully selected some of today’s most beguiling talents — Actress and T++ — and coaxed them into releasing some of their strongest material yet. Actress’ second album, Splazsh, tore up the freshly printed rulebook of UK bass music while interpreting life through the chilly pixels of video games. T++’s Wireless sent nanobots to infiltrate the work of ndingidi player Ssekinomu, blurring the lines between technology and organics, flesh and circuitry. All this while continuing to dig up treasures few knew existed, like hyper South African new wave and sublime Turkish music from the turn of last century. With a live album from Moritz Von Oswald Trio still to come, my money, quite literally, is on Honest Jon’s Records for the foreseeable future.

Further Records
When RA/LWE’s Will Lynch asked Mark Cul of Further Records about choosing of cassette tapes as the main medium for their releases, Cul mentioned how useful tapes can be for pot smokers who get their fix in the car while out clubbing. While he later added, “They’re portable, and they sound great,” what Further has done as a largely tape-based label goes much further than utilitarian reasoning. In a similar vein as vinyl-only labels, the Seattle-based Further convinces music buyers to own a piece of hand crafted art that takes up space and cannot be easily replicated (although sharing the listening experience can be a delight). They share a DIY ethic with punk/noise/black metal groups but cater to electronic audiences, having convinced producers including Aybee, Lerosa, Donato Dozzy and Anders Ilar to commit whole albums to tape. This probably wasn’t easy as each album has been fantastic — hardly the kind of throwaway material one might expect producers to fob off on cassettes. Aybee’s even made our top 5 of the first half of 2010. Further aren’t format hardliners either, with mp3 releases (including by label founder Chloe Harris) and even vinyl versions of Dozzy’s album. Bringing together top notch music with conspicuous release formats that feel as special as mixtape from your sweetheart, Further Records is an unexpected force to be reckoned with.

Hotflush Recordings
It’s not altogether surprising that Hotflush followed up a strong 2009 (and a spot on our top labels list) with a prodigious first half of 2010. Building on the stringent quality control that has always defined the label, Paul Rose (aka Scuba) and Alex Bishop have continued to push Hotflush to the front of the dubstep pack with singles from rising talents Sigha, George Fitzgerald and Sepalcure, not to mention a slew of excellent remixes of Mount Kimbie. But it’s Rose whose shadow looms largest over the label’s discography with his accomplished sophomore album, Triangulation, which offered one of the best arguments for dubstep and its bassy kin crossing over in the electronic mainstream. He’s also delivered the goods on a single for sub-label Abucs and courted tasty remixes for the Offshore Recordings joint label, Hotshore. With a highly anticipated album from crossover wunderkinds Mount Kimbie and a slew of other bits still to come, it’s enough to make you wonder if anything can impede Hotflush Recordings’ dominance over its corner of the dance music arena.

Rush Hour Recordings
Many veteran house heads love to extol the virtues of older, rarer records knowing full well how difficult and pricey it can be to get a copy (you can almost hear them intoning, “It builds character!”). Luckily for newer generations, Dutch label/store/distro Rush Hour Recordings is anything but convinced and seems on a mission to keep some house music’s building blocks accessible for most record shoppers. As in 2009 when RH reintroduced the world to Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Rick Wilhite, and the early works of Daniel Wang’s Balihu Records, 2010 has seen a flood of essential re-releases. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment was reissuing the highly sought after Virgo album, followed closely behind by records from Ron Hardy, Boo Williams, Robert Hood as Floorplan, Jamie Principle, and Mandre. In case that wasn’t enough, Rush Hour has also been doing an exemplary job releasing new records as well. Sure, they got a bit carried away with Tom Trago records (live takes and outtakes?), but they’ve more than made up for it by pushing beyond the old school house sound they’re known for by recruiting Falty DL and Cosmin TRG, not to mention new singles from Kirk Degiorgio and a series of new records curated by Rick Wilhite. They’ve also shined the spotlight on contemporary Chicago talents, releasing the fantastic Tevo Howard Crystal Republic doublepack and new EPs by Gene Hunt and Ricardo Miranda on their Hour House Is Your Rush sub-label. No label has done more in 2010 to bring house music back to its roots while keeping one foot firmly in the present. And for that, they deserve our kudos.

When I saw Mala and Skream tag team at Dub War’s fifth birthday party in New York recently, I was struck by how absurd it is that a style that half a decade ago sounded like the height of dance music futurism now plays like a throwback. (Don’t even get me started on how Skream, a guy about six months younger than I, is already a golden oldie. I have a general policy of no existential crises before breakfast.) I think it’s fair to say that since 2005, dubstep has had more ideas than practically any other subgenre. And the debut 12″ from Brooklyn duo Sepalcure, the latest signing to the always-forward Hotflush Recordings, feels like it’s bursting with all of them. The fact that Sepalcure, with their lithe yet woozy beats and watercolor renderings of classic house, played a live set at Dub War just one month before Skream’s and Mala’s subs-rattling dread is another bit of evidence of dubstep’s constant flux. That Sepalcure could turn out such relevant and future-forward music on their first time out bodes very well.

A collaboration between Percussion Lab founder Praveen Sharma and glitch producer Machinedrum (given name Travis Stewart), Sepalcure simultaneously evokes Joy Orbison on codeine and FaldyDL on adderall: despite recasting floor-ready steppers as a series of late-era Van Goghs, the four tracks on “Love Pressure” sound deeply considered and exceptionally focused. On the title cut and its somewhat wilder A-side partner “Down,” Sepalcure achieve this through energetic yet precise and forceful bass lines that keep a wealth of colorfully textured synthesizers from either evaporating or bounding away. Of the two tracks, the title cut — with its cleverly deep vocal bits and subtle organic percussion — wins the day; while still pretty fantastic, “Down” doesn’t so much bring new ideas to dubstep’s table as re-jigger all of the ones we’ve been hearing for the last year.

On the B, the vibe takes a distinct (and appropriate, for two Brooklyn dudes) turn towards house. “Every Day of My Life” follows the same template as both A-sides but nudges the tempo down considerably. The Logic-sampling “The Warning,” though, feels like an entirely different animal. Trading last year’s purple synths for sweeping, scratchy, shoegazey strings, Sepalcure make both the sample and dubstep entirely their own. It’s a gorgeous finish to a very strong 12″ and another buzz-worthy win for Hotflush, a label that’s been surprisingly quiet this year when label head Scuba isn’t on production duties. With a bounty of new material rumored to be on the way in the coming months, Sepalcure are poised to throw a lot of new ideas at dubstep. We should listen very closely.

[Hotflush Recordings]

It’s almost silly that Paul Rose would go make a house/techno alias (somewhat) different from his well-established one. Lately Scuba’s productions would be more readily categorized as techno than dubstep anyway, even though his wide range of tempos and blend of styles comes out genre-less anyway. After the sublimely subterranean debut of the SCB moniker remixing his own “Hard Boiled,” the SCB project developed further with one of the mixes of 2009: the 37th mix in the mnml ssgs mix series. Kicking off a new series of catalog numbers on Hotflush, Scuba now looks to firmly plant the SCB flag with the succinctly titled SCB001.

Awash with the delayed sounds of pencils falling and paper rustling, “20_4″ sounds like an inevitable storm in the distance, the black skies closing in on the clear parts above. With a straight 4/4 kick in place solemn chords radiate throughout, providing tiny hints of color amidst the gloomy grays. On the other side is “3_5,” a much brighter contrast to the cloudy “20_4.” Scuba’s first priority is still the bass and the low frequencies still bite, but up top is a swirl of luminous synths and filtered white noise. It may seem a bit singleminded next to Scuba’s highly-varied, forthcoming Triangulation album, but the first SCB record is aimed squarely at DJs’ record bags, where it will no doubt see plenty of action. It would never be mistaken as anything other than the work of Rose, but those in the techno community who have yet to embrace his work will surely find plenty to love in SCB001.

To start off our year end coverage, LWE correspondent Chris Burkhalter breaks down the top five labels of 2009

Dance music enthusiasts are almost certainly the most label-conscious people in the record-buying world. How else can you explain the bickering over new Perlon signings, the ubiquity of the compound adjective “buy-on-sight,” or the hastily depleted stocks of anonymously-produced 12″s? We follow our favorite DJs and producers, naturally, but a record publishing operation with vision and taste is very often the best guide to the sounds we thirst for. 2009′s cream of the crop — labels like Running Back, Uzuri, Prologue, Dial, Sound Signature, Blueprint, Apple Pips, and Time To Express — did more than narrow the field of available records, but sharpened our expectations of what new music should achieve. And the mushrooming of secretive private presses (many of them fostered by Hard Wax’s distribution) yielded results that were just as rewarding. But from where I’m standing, these five labels loomed largest.

In some circles, Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo” might be reason enough to include Scuba’s imprint among the ranks of the year’s most important, influential, and exciting labels, but there was a lot more going on at Hotflush than just one huge track. Between the mid-tempo melancholy of Mount Kimbie’s “Maybes” EP and Untold’s trio of bubbling rhythm tracks, Hotflush pursued curious new paths for bass music’s future. Meanwhile, records from Sigha and Pangaea showed that, with a little personality, the label’s more tried-and-true sonic templates still bang plenty hard. And Scuba himself turned out three discs worth of material, continuing his steady creep toward techno, and delivering one of his finest tracks to date in “Symbiosis.” Hotflush’s quality control team is certainly due for a raise, as their 2009 strike rate was virtually unrivaled.

Was any label as enigmatic as Macro this year? Unpredictable and often challenging, the label’s 2009 run sometimes seemed to provoke its audience, but it was all essential listening – whether the goal was meeting the latest challenge or verifying fierce objections. The elusive Stravinsky edit left even ardent supporters scratching their heads, but it was Goldmann’s grandiose/kitschy remix of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade” that was most contentious. Macro still trades in proper dance music, of course, but on its own terms. Raudive wove stately jazz abstraction into his twisting techno single for the label, while the promotional blurb for Peter Kruder’s tense 12″ name-checked Tchaikovsky. And the original version of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade”? Electrifying techno quicksilver, and a proper classic. The label’s most notable releases, though, involved a trove of previously unheard punk/new wave/proto-techno that Patrick Cowley recorded with singer Jorge Socarras in the Seventies. An expansive archival project that seized the label’s full resources for the second half of the year, it felt more like a gift to dance music than a market product.

Four months after announcing the end of publishing activities, Clone found a whole mess of music they wanted us to hear — and too much for just one label. So Clone switched the lights back on and splintered into half a dozen niche sublabels. Combined, they turned Clone’s “going out of business” year into one of its most prodigious. In general, the new imprints are founded on retro tastes, with Clone Jack For Daze and Clone Loft Supreme styled after vintage Chicago and New York house sounds, respectively, Clone Basement Series taking on classically-minded techno, and so on. The artists showcased came from all over, and had their own creative itineraries, but the records generally presented minor updates on beloved house and techno sounds. The least of these were skillfully-executed, stylish homages, and the best were astounding. For myself, the highlights were A Made Up Sound’s fresh reconfigurations of house, Reggie Dokes’ “Chicago Pimp,” and the Mike Dehnert records (including the deliciously garish Levon Vincent remix). Your own year-end list might not include those tracks, but it’d be hard to believe that it escaped Clone’s tentacles entirely.

2009 began gloriously for Hyperdub with Joker’s “Digidesign” and Kode9′s own “Black Sun,” and the label hasn’t let up since. The beefy 5 Years compilation officially celebrated the label’s five-year anniversary, but its eclectic disc of new material doubled as the announcement of Hyperdub’s transition from a hungry young label to a confident musical institution whose reach now extends well beyond the garage continuum. Artists well-known to Hyperdub fans — Zomby, Darkstar, Samiyam, Ikonika, and yes, Burial — turned in potent new material, but it was the first-timers to the label that really got people talking. The aforementioned Joker track stands proud beside the label’s finest releases to date, and was backed by that slinky, R&B-steeped track from 2000F & J Kamata. Mark Pritchard’s drunk 8-bit “Wind It Up” was utterly unavoidable. And then there’s Hyperdub’s newest star, Cooly G. Add to this a full album from King Midas Sound, and visits from Martyn, Mala, and Flying Lotus, and we wouldn’t blame you if you were still playing catch-up in January.

This Hamburg label’s handful of records (totaling just fourteen tracks) traded in light melodies, gradual builds, and mild flavors, capitalizing on the allure of warm glow over searing heat. There was always a thumping functionality for the dance floor, but a subtle one easily concealed by the elegance of the often melancholy compositions. The And Suddenly It’s Morning compilation appropriately arrived in autumn, and went a long way toward characterizing the label’s sweater-and-scarf aesthetic, but the highlights of the year were the two EPs that preceded it. STL brokered with Smallville for one of the finest entries in his exhaustive catalog, a record of bright, layered melodies and brooding dub atmospherics. And the label’s only remix for the year, Jus-Ed’s scrub of Steinhoff & Hammouda’s “You Are,” positively smoldered. As we got to know these records, Smallville emerged from under the long shadow of the kindrid spirits at the neighboring Dial, and grew to be a cherished favorite of DJs, critics, and fans alike. And, just like Dial, Smallville’s wares worked at least as well on headphones as in the club, so that if Smallville wasn’t responsible for an indelible moment toward the close of your best night out this year, there’s a good chance they soundtracked a memorable walk home.