You’ll read a lot about how house music and in particular vocal tracks, lift you up, carry you along with a feeling, make you moist around the tear ducts. For me, most of that carries about as much weight as hearing kids in California harp on about P.L.U.R. back in the mid 90’s while they sucked on pacifiers and sported gargantuan, street sweeping baggy jeans. But I have to be honest that there are a select few vocal house tunes that can, to this day, send a shiver up my spine and have me dabbing at the corners of my eyes. Roland Clark’s South Street Player alias only graced two releases, but throughout his entire career that has spanned over twenty years this Strictly Rhythm release under that name is undoubtedly the highlight.
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Aufgang, Barock Remixes
March 9, 2010 – 11:01 AM
What kind of music would people like Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, or Johann Sebastian Bach be making if they were alive today? Would they have stuck to their roots and continued to play the music they were famous for and helped make famous? Or would they have updated their existing systems and ideas, used the latest technology and reflected their newer influences? It’s highly likely they would choose the latter (if you can look past the sheer logistical impossibilities of Bach especially surviving for so long). A group like Aufgang may well present us with the closest approximation of what someone like Bach may have sounded like some three hundred years after his time. The combination of Francesco Tristano, Rami Khalifé — both classically trained pianists from the prestigious Julliard school — and Aymeric Westrich, a formidable percussionist in his own right, lends itself to an interesting new take on both classical and electronic music. Taken from their self-titled debut album, “Barock” is reinterpreted by Wareika, Mondkopf and Robert Hood who all personalize the track and take it in whole new directions.
LWE Podcast 45: Stacey Pullen
March 8, 2010 – 12:01 AM
As an ambassador for Detroit, Stacey Pullen has been flying the flag for over fifteen years; DJing vigilantly around the world with a gruelling schedule that has brought him a dedicated fan base and releasing sought after, kinetic explosions of Detroit techno and house. His productions filtered out of the various labels through the early to late nineties came under a number of guises but all were imbued with an unmistakable soul and current of exploration. His talents were such that Virgin records gave him a major record deal in 1998, which lead to the recording of his first album under his own name, Today Is The Tomorrow You Were Promised Yesterday. In anticipation of his March 12th gig at Chicago’s Smart Bar (part of the D25 concert series) LWE spoke to Stacey Pullen about that album which lead to a bleak period of disillusionment, the early years at Transmat and feeling reinvigorated again with a basket-full of new music to unleash on the world. He was also kind enough to put together an exclusive mix for LWE of tracks he has been feeling lately.
Martin Landsky, Werkschau EP
March 3, 2010 – 11:01 PM
“Life moves pretty fast,” were the worldly words of wisdom from Ferris Bueller. In terms of electronic music, trends move pretty fast and depending on the style they are crafted in it’s easy for tracks to sound dated after a period of time. Martin Landsky is putting his tracks to this test with a forthcoming LP aptly titled Werkschau (retrospective). As a teaser we have the Werkschau EP featuring two early tracks from the Naked EP from 2000, and a reworking of one of his most popular tracks “1000 Miles” from more recent years, updated here under the name “2000 Miles.” Choosing to remake a track he only released three and half years ago is an odd choice.
Joy Orbison, The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow
February 24, 2010 – 11:01 AM
Being the recipient of the unholy amounts of hype the English press loves to dish out must be oddly flattering and scary as hell at the same time. Joy Orbison may well have felt both of those things when his debut release midway through 2009 was hailed as nothing short of sheer musical brilliance. It would be enough praise to potentially leave some producers forever trying to scale the heights of a bar set way too high for them from the outset. Joy Orbison, however, has shown that not only was he worthy of the attention he received (maybe save for quite so many superlatives) but he has more than enough chops to back up a blinding start with a well of equally impressive releases to follow. His remixes of Jose James’ “Blackmagic” and Four Tet’s “Love Cry” both showed that the producer could mine a wealth of melodies and crucial dance floor pressure, whilst his “J.Doe/BRKLN CLLN” twelve proved beyond doubt the original success of “Hyph Mngo/Wet Look” was more of a comma rather than an exclamation point in his career. “The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow” then follows the familiar pathway of warm melodies and R’n'B vocal swatches that have thus far defined Joy Orbison tracks, though both of these elements are underpinned by an almost faultless production style propelling these fairly standard tropes towards the upper echelons of the genre.
Ation, Lovers Dub
February 17, 2010 – 11:01 PM
The power of the sample simply cannot be ignored within the realms of electronic music. It is essentially how house music as we know it came to be; playing around by re-editing other records, reshaping older ideas, reinterpreting axioms of the strains that came before. Opinion can be ruthlessly divided amongst critics, fans and producers alike over just how much should be sampled, whether it should be done at all or how much credit should be given to the original. There now exist within electronic music countless versions based around the same samples to the point where they are seen as standards. First Choice’s cover of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” has long been a house music standard, and the allure of those sultry, smoky tones still inspire today. Ation’s “Lovers Dub” on Scuba’s Abucs off-shoot enterprise pays its own homage to the track with a brilliantly deep, stripped back, steppers riddim that uses large portions of the vocal.
Putsch ‘79, Samasavel
February 15, 2010 – 11:01 PM
It can’t be much fun being cloaked in solid darkness 24 hours a day for months on end, but then the prospect of experiencing equally tedious endless daylight can’t exactly be appealing either. But so it is for Sami Liuski and Pauli Jylhankangas who, based in the northern climes of Finland, put up with the dual aspects of luminosity and murk for long stretches of time. Perhaps to counter the the interminable winters or rather to celebrate the wonder of boundless sunshine they create warm, ebullient electro/disco sounding like it’s been beamed in directly from the early ’80’s.
Kuedo, Starfox EP
February 9, 2010 – 11:01 PM
With production partner Roly Porter, Jamie Vex’d released a respectable number of sides for the likes of Planet Mu and Subtext, though for the past year or so he has been going solo. Under his own steam he has also been moving away from the DMZ-styled low end rumblers and in to more experimental territory, highlighted by last year’s In System Travel EP and this new work under the name Kuedo.
Hell ft. Bryan Ferry, U Can Dance
January 28, 2010 – 11:16 AM
Taken from Hell’s ambitious double album Teufelswerk, “U Can Dance” unapologetically looks back at electroclash with rose tinted glasses, Bryan Ferry lacing the track with his languid, lounge lizard tones. Hell’s original (with help from Peter Kruder and Christian Prommer from Trüby Trio on programming) starts off strong, merging icy cool, arpeggiated synths with Ferry’s equally frosty serenade to a club nymph. Though clocking in at nearly ten minutes, it is in danger of overstaying its welcome after two thirds of the way through. The keyboards start getting a little cheesy and Ferry has long since left the vocal booth, presumably in search for a cigarette or a martini; in any case the magic is over by the six minute mark or so.
BBH: V/A, Detroit: Beyond the Third Wave
January 27, 2010 – 11:01 AM
There have been plenty of Detroit techno compilations over the years; True People would probably rate as my favorite for its sheer comprehensiveness and myriad pieces of vinyl, though its spot at number one has often been contested in my mind by this compilation on Astralwerks which came out the same year in 1996. Packed with ten tracks of exclusive material from the creme of Detroit’s third wave of techno producers, it showcases their many different sides, from deep and hypnotic through to raw, jacking soul and clinical, electro funk. Though many of the producers on the album were familiar to me already, there were others like Ectomorph, Will Web, and Mode Selector I was discovering for the first time. Throughout it all can be heard strains from their mentors mixed in with the new directions in which these younger guns were taking the music.