DJ Tropical Breeze - Opus 1

Inaugural official release by DJ Tropical Breeze: Insurrecto. Two tracks recorded sometime in the last couple of years. Title track is a sparse, slow house number. 'Island of Samar' is a dub tempo experiment in layered synths, delays and echo. I hope to put some more of this stuff out but I'm pretty inefficient.

Get it here.

Julian Love

Vacant late night Youtube staring and red wine guzzling and stumbled across this: disco-house gold by recent RBMA alumni Julian Love:





Beautiful! On a similar vibe as Soundstream's latest:



Then the quality control trailed off and I faded out to this nonsense:

We Call It Acieed!

I'm back on 3 Triple R 102.7 FM's Max Headroom this Thursday 21 November with "We Call It Acieed", an hour of music featuring the Roland TB 303.
Expect a pretty condensed summary.

Stream it here.

This comes after an excellent live acid set by Hieroglyphic Being at the Residence for Melbourne Music Week. Jamal Moss played a kind of free-improv house, starting with heavily tweaked 303 riffs before adding drums and going predictably berserk. It was noisy, oddly funky, and riveting, and he had a pretty big crowd dancing. Here's an excerpt from a comparable set in September:



More acid that's got me hooked of late is "The Future" by Innershades, with the 303 banging out a basic bleepy bass riff, but jeez its good:



And acid maestro Tin Man's latest for Acid Test "Mystified Acid" is good too:


But perhaps not as good as "Devine Acid" from last year:


And this old clip of Mike Ink live is super:

House, Hipster House & Underground House

blissblog speaks more on hipster house versus 'House' proper, and the problems with nostalgia for- and exclusion from- a music culture very much alive and well. This is a good point, and worth elaborating: hasn't there always been a kind of hipster house, an 'underground' house standing apart from the mainstream? Or has this current branded hipster house sprung up from an absence of underground house, as a reaction to the subsuming of underground house by the mainstream? I'm thinking of the likes of Kassem Mosse in RA charts, of the Amsterdam House of Clone and Rush Hour becoming a universally known and respected style, of FXHE and Underground Quality high-ranked staples of Juno and Beatport, Jamal Moss' big feature in The Wire...

But it's also that the leveling has occurred from both sides. What exactly is mainstream house music these days? Is it RA's most charted track for October, Miguel Campbell's 'Something Special'? And how different essentially is this from the Dial, Workshop, 100% Silk etc. catalogs? Maybe its all in the intent, but any notion of distinction seems pretty flimsy.







... Also, given the major focus hipster house has received from blogs, websites, etc who don't usually engage with dance music, has hipster house eclipsed both underground and mainstream house to become bigger, more mainstream than them all? Isn't the notion of indie kids dabbling in beats, divorced from mainstream dance culture, all too close to the new rave of Klaxons? With its lazy appropriation of vintage Chicago tropes cloaked in ironic low-fi credibility, it's acceptable for indie kids to listen to hipster house as it's not officially dance music (Note that that description also pretty much applies to the Mathematics catalog which is 100% dance music).

This doesn't work as such the other way around. Blissblog mentions the suspicion that 'hipster house = people whose productions wouldn't cut it on a contemporary dancefloor', but there's plenty of interest in hipster house from mainstream quarters - LWE's 100% Silk Talking Shopcast; Sex Worker in Scuba's DJ Kicks mix; Blondes praised by Detroit-Chicago authenticity purists Blowing Up Your Spot...



But doesn't everyone listen to everything and anything these days?

Year of House 2000

Re: Simon Reynolds' recent posit of 2011 being a big house year:

is 2011 house's biggest year internationally since 1989-90 or whenever it was crystal waters was in the US top 10?

This is in reference to the myriad house genres and subgenres presently blossoming, from the various 'hipster house' sprouts of the 100% Silk-ilk and post-dubstep angles, to the house-y standard of established-underground generic minimal tech-house, to the dominance of house within contemporary chart pop. A quick scan of the FM dial confirms the latter, at least here in Australia, and given our complete reliance on following the trends of others and with it a complete inability to start trends of our own, I'll take this as evidence of conditions in the UK and US.
(*I'm always surprised at how much chart pop-house I enjoy - it's as though they understand certain underground traits better than the underground do, and with their mainstream musical proficiency and knack for using highfalutin' equipment, blow them up to absurd but nonetheless functional proportions)

This reminded me of chart music in 2000-2001, the year I first came to London, where everywhere I went I heard commercial house that I openly enjoyed. I'm not sure how then compares with now, but there seemed to be a lot of house in the air, and most of it fucking great. The following were inescapable:

Spiller feat. Sophie-Ellis Bextor 'Groovejet' - a friend of mine used to date her, apparently


French Touch maintained a gentle caress on the charts - Modjo's 'Lady'


... and Daft Punk 'One More Time' - their biggest hit


Black Legend 'You See The trouble With Me' - re-do of Barry White and Ray 'Ghostbusters' Parker Junior

Kylie Minogue 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' of 2001, which put her in Madame Tussauds as the attraction's most fondled exhibit requiring an 'anal makeover'


Chicane 'Don't Give Up', featuring a vocodered Bryan Adams


Sonique 'It Feels So Good'


Fragma 'Toca's Miracle' - mash-up featuring vocal from Coco Star's 'I Need a Miracle'


Madison Avenue 'Don't Call me Baby' - Australian surprisingly, actually from late 1999 but it lingered


But it all ended with this. The inevitable conclusion of house, popular music and seasonal festivities?


2000 was also a turning point in music, with Napster contributing to a decline in sales, leading to singles spending less time at the summit. 2000 still holds the record for the year with most #1 singles in a calendar year (43) and also contains the longest run of consecutive one-week #1 singles. We know how it ended - the strange swill of flotsam and jetsam that defines contemporary music and listening habits.

100% Silk

The charming Amanda Brown at 100% Silk has kindly linked to my $2,000 Leaking Oil Mix, which I thought she might enjoy after listening to a slew of Silk records I bought. They're doozies (the Silk records), a breath of fresh air in the often mirthless world of contemporary house music. Someone likened Silk productions to Omar-S meeting Mathematics, but they're warmer and more approachable than even that enticing description suggests.

I've already spoken highly of Octa Octa's 'I'm Trying', but the title track 'Let Me See You'

OCTO OCTA - HIGH REFLECTION teaser from 100% Silk on Vimeo.

... and 'High Reflection' are also tops


Maria Minerva showcases the mustier Not Not Fun side:


And Ital seems to be making the greatest strides into the wider dance music world, with Wire and LWE reviews, which when you hear these is no surprise





And with videos like this he'll keep the hypnagogs happy


Italo's clearly an influence, and not just on Ital, and this clip he highlighted is utterly supoib. It also shows just how little we've progressed, but then why should we need to?



At 2008's Dissonanze festival I shared a cab with Alexander Robotnik and Daniele Baldelli (!) after they finished killing it on the rooftop stage overlooking Rome. I took the front seat and listened to them talk about how they play Italo to get the ladies, and how minimal doesn't so they don't like it. Fair enough - here's a nod to these masters

House House House

Forgetting novelty for a moment here's some great newish House:

Kassem Mosse's return to Nonplus features the scorching A-side 'Enoha' alongside three of his more experimental rhythmic cuts. Structure and tones are reminiscent of the Omar-S-impressing '578' but 'Enoha' is more reduced and downbeat


Mark Ernestus refines and polishes Basic Channels linear drive on his Shangaan remix for Honest Jon's


Slow squelchy throb from Gunnar Jonsson of Kontra Musik Records


UK Funky diehards Funkystepz keep the flag flying with 'Face Off', four kooky but eminently workable tracks


'Get Down' is your standard high-quality looped disco flange mantra from Kyle Hall, of which the non-youtubed B-Side 'Xero' is more interesting, a gorgeously sloppy instrumental chugger which keeps dying, then reviving, dying, reviving...


I've spoken of my fondness for Jared Wilson's 'Girl I'm Waiting' before but the A-Side is also a winner, more primitive and Chicago obsessed but also more gnarled and nasty


Mind Bomb beat me to the punch with praise for 100% Silk (and Johnny Turncoat dubstep traitors) but more praise is deserving. I'd previously felt ambivalent about the label's more Not Not Fun leaning releases, those cloaked in delay and fuzz, but the latest by Octa Octa is crisp and incredible, all four tracks utter killers. 'I'm Trying' is the winner


... which samples Amerie's mindblowing '1 Thing', a hit at a cheesy New Years Eve party I once held


Earlier came Ital's incredible 'Queens'


... and Magic Touch with the lovely rough-hewn Chicago of 'Clubhouse'


I could go on...

Prosumer: Panorama Bar 03

Heard a promo of Prosumer's Panoramabar 3 mix this morning, and it's a doozy. He's always been fond of bleeps but this is properly bursting with neon analogue globules, particularly through the latter half. Mix-wise it's full of quick transitions, more a live party style mix than your standard carefully crafted dinner party set, but with such a well chosen selection of tracks it works very well. I'd opt for this approach any day, and hopefully it might inspire a few others to loosen up a bit and listen closer to the music.

What to look out for will be the accompanying 12" of exclusives. These include Steffi's stunning opener 'Sadness' and a slew of killers by mystery artists Soundso, Sound Store, and T.S.O.S., surely involving Prosumer himself in there somewhere? It's as fine a celebration of his style of house - sharp, sexy and FUN - as one could imagine, surpassing the high quality casts and live sets out there, and one of the most entertaining mixes I've heard in a long while.

Read a mini interview with Prosumer for RA here.

Check Prosumer's excellent mix for mnmlssgs here.

Buy it here in May.