1. Lights Down 2. Last Track 3. Zoo Trip 4. Brooklyn Weekdays 5. Perfect Zed Kevin McHugh, the producer & DJ commonly known as Ambivalent, follows up his 2010 EPs Rumors and Down with the release in April 2011 of Brooklyn Weekdays - five new tracks born out of a collaboration with Alexi Delano, the Swedish-born producer and resident of McHugh’s old New York stomping ground, who featured on Paco Osuna’s most recent Plus8 EP Amigos late last year and will be making his Minus debut with this release. The result of what started out as something resembling a game of musical Consequences beginning in summer 2009, Brooklyn Weekdays was conceived mostly in Delano’s New York studio as the two producers swapped loops and parts from works in progress that the duo had been working on individually. With McHugh making regular trips from his current Berlin base to his former hometown, it became a common for the pair to schedule a couple of days to work together in Delano’s Brooklyn studio in between weekend gigs - hence the EP title - bringing eachother pieces that could use a new perspective in order to develop into finished productions. With a shared enthusiasm for a broad range of electronic music, the process developed into a natural intuition for where to take the tracks: “The ideas I had that couldn’t get fixed would benefit from working on his system, and the things that Alexi’s system couldn’t fix I would take home and come back with some new ideas. Two months would go by before I came back to New York - we’d go back to the last track we’d made and soon be remixing our remixes of an old track that never went anywhere!” The resulting five tracks bear out the benefits of that collaborative process, with the EP traversing a range of styles from the warmer house sounds of Last Track and Perfect Zed to the more sinister techno grooves of Zoo Trip and Lights Down. Just as with a game of Consequences, the finished product takes unexpected creative turns that are likely to surprise as much as entertain...www.wordandsound.de
1. High For This
2. What You Need
3. House Of Balloons / Glass Table Girls
4. The Morning
5. Wicked Games
6. The Party & The After Party
7. Coming Down
8. Loft Music
9. The KnowingLess than two months ago, few of us had ever heard of the Weeknd. Then, as soon as the creepy R&B tracks from this free mixtape began to circulate, the hype engine revved up. There was the Drake cosign, the album art that looked like Spiritualized crossed with Tumblr art-porn, the missing vowel, the stylish samples, and the project's creators hiding in the shadows. You can't buy buzz like this, and the Weeknd's quick rise to Internet fame, both in indie circles and in parts of the mainstream, raised fascinating questions about the blurrier-than-ever lines between those two audiences and the underground's newfound embrace of R&B. (see also: Frank Ocean, Tri Angle Records, How to Dress Well.)
These are very interesting topics that have already spawned some good thinkpieces around the web, but set all that aside for a moment and you're still left with an album, same as always. And this album happens to be very good. The work of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo (Drake producer Noah "40" Shebib, is not, as has been reported, involved in the project), House of Balloons is a remarkably confident, often troubling debut that excels at both forward-thinking genre-smearing and good old-fashioned songcraft. Take for starters the track "What You Need": with Burial-style vocal samples, techno scrape, and a sticky pop chorus, it's far from your average R&B number.
Of course, the Weeknd are not without forebears-- producers from Rodney Jerkins to Static Major and recently The-Dream have been pushing the sonic boundaries of R&B for some time now. Where the Weeknd differ, though, is that their source material pulls from the leftfield (the title track re-purposes Siouxsie and the Banshee's "Happy House", two songs here ride mutated Beach House samples), and their approach is more about building vibe and atmosphere. They're great at rich, woozy compositions that send Tesfaye's aching falsetto through the mix. An example is "The Morning", which feels at first like a spacey synth instrumental before a stuttering digital drumbeat announces this massive, swaying chorus that enters your brain and refuses to leave.
The group's penchant for druggy atmospherics is mirrored in their lyrical content, which is overtly sexual, narcotics-focused, and occasionally downright frightening. Debauchery is obviously nothing new in R&B, but this takes it a step further-- the drugs are harder, the come-ons feel predatory and lecherous, and the general feeling is self-hating rather than celebratory. On opener "High for This", Tesfaye handholds a partner through some strange sex act, singing, "Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this." "Glass Table Girls" is pretty clearly about doing coke. Because we don't know these guys, it's hard to say whether these are real-life tales or imaginative storytelling-- you want to think the latter, but ultimately the anonymity makes it seem more disturbing.
What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music. It's hard to think of a record since probably the xx's debut (definitely a touchstone here) that so fully embodies such a specific nocturnal quality. And even though the image of nightlife painted by the Weeknd isn't a place you'd ever want to live, it's one that's frankly very hard to stop listening to...www.pitchfork.com
1] Get In With You
2] Bridges (4:24)
3] Get In With You (LV Remix)Kevin McPhee is the latest foot soldier to march out of the increasingly interesting and promising bass scene in Toronto. Unlike the rolling acrobatics of Egyptrixx or the increasingly psychedelic output of XI, Kevin McPhee's tracks are highly intricate and intimate: late-hours whispers of hushed vocal samples, strung-together breakbeats and colour-drained synths. It's a vampiric aesthetic that would turn to dust in direct sunlight, and thus McPhee's nocturnal rumblings find a natural home in the Irish label [nakedlunch], following similarly dark offerings from Scuba and Instra:mental.
"Get In With You"'s muffled, thudding beats trace out a ramshackle foundation for the song's dual chorus of sensual chipmunk murmurs and delicate, careful-footed piano. Technically in dubstep time, the track's slurred movement feels too slow to either be dubstep or Burialesque neo-garage (with which it seems doomed to endless and oversimplified comparison). London duo LV bring the track out into harsh hospital lights for a hypnotic, bass-heavy groove punctuated by horn stabs and a thick, squelchy bassline.
More recently McPhee has been moving in a more house direction, on a forthcoming release for Bristol's Idle Hands and a steady stream of new material making its way onto dubplate. It's a move nicely predicted by the b-side "Bridges." The mournful track glides on the ghost of a 4/4 thump, and the lagging beat, detuned synth and heavily distorted vocals depict a numb, depressive world lifted up only by the insistent clatter of the homemade percussion. His debut figures him as a strong newcomer with a distinct voice: Tracks as accessible, emotional and memorable as these don't come around too often...www.rfesidentadvisor.net
01. Down Home Kami-Sakunobe
02. Saki-chan (Pt.1)
03. Hobo Train
04. Fuck the Down-Low
05. B2B
06. Stand Up
07. Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair
08. Double Secret (Dub)
09. Saki-chan (Pt.2)
10. Crosstown
11. Head (In My Private Lounge, My Pad)
12. InfectedTerre Thaemlitz's Routes Not Roots was only released five years ago, and yet here we are with a reissue at the tail end of a comprehensive campaign by French label Skylax Records. Maybe the premature revisionism is appropriate in this case: the kind of sprawling, deconstructive house statement laid out on Routes Not Roots is decidedly pre-internet in the time it takes both to unfold its carefully layered tale and to properly invest in the mammoth album. Originally released on Thaemlitz's Comatonse platform, it was, until now, out of print, and admittedly Skylax have done a service in giving the album a second go after the wave of new interest in Thaemlitz following his 2008 album Midtown 120 Blues.
Stylistically, Routes Not Roots is the logical precursor to Midtown 120 Blues, spacious deep house built from the ghosts of New York house and garage and the disquieting technological anxiety of Tokyo. Though crafted with a more diverse set of samples and moods, Roots features embryonic iterations of the luscious deep blue depression that would come to define Midtown 120 Blues; Roots is rawer, redder and more volatile. The most obvious connection is "Hobo Train," where acoustic guitar, claustrophobic drum loops and dark, discordant piano form a whirring, propulsive rhythm that itself doesn't sound unlike a rocketing train. The track utilizes the same memorable speech sample as Midtown's "Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To," which on that album was a synth-heavy aural landscape subverting the manic-depressive hope of "Train" into near-hopelessness.
That comparison sets the crucial difference that colours this album: Routes is lively and unpredictable. Here, Thaemlitz sets his ever-active conceptual sights on sexuality and "complicating origins," exemplified in its use of samples taken from country songs (making "black" out of "white" according to Thaemlitz). "Crosstown" stretches out over thirteen minutes, a chorus of excitable drums, shakers and shimmering chords, but the somewhat festive mood is dampened by the disturbed identity politics that circle repeatedly in the form of an unforgettable vocal sample. "You my bitch!/Nuh-uh, we are bitches" sounds defeatist in the context of overwhelming cultural oppression and suppression, the kind of intra-musical critical thought Thaemlitz is known for.
Routes Not Roots largely lives up to its mission, playing with and obscuring the origins and constructions of deep house music. The all-important house piano is plastered over the album, but it's always dark, dissonant and dreadful, staining the stimulant-addled shake of "B2B" and stomping unceremoniously over the gorgeous melody of opener "Down Home Kami Sakunobe." With the stream of lengthy house workouts interrupted by tense spoken interludes and ambient meanderings, Roots is also a transparent self-portrait of Thaemlitz, exorcising and fearlessly exhibiting every aspect and facet of his personality as it pours out in awkwardly sized, uneven chunks.
But that's what Routes Not Roots is all about: Thaemlitz makes his audience feel things, channeling every bit of pain, deprivation and release that led to house music's birth into what sounds like a rebirth, an idea he would go on to focus and perfect with Midtown 120 Blues. Even if it's a little meandering at times, imperfections or not, Routes is about one of the most unique and affecting house albums you'll ever hear...www.residentadvisor.net
