Manhattan Melody

I've been listening to a lot of old school drum and bass lately. The main reason why is because of the topic of today's blog Lemon D's Manhattan Melody. I had not listened to this track in a good few years. I rediscovered it on the Hyperdub show case on Benji B's show on BBC Radio 1 Xtra which was played by Kode 9 as a major influence in his work. To quote both Benji B and Kode 9 when talking about this record "it was a magical time in music that has never really been recreated" and "it didn't matter how low budget or sophisticated someones setup was they could still make a record that sounded like this". Aswell as the excellent atmospheric build up for me its the drums in this track that just pack such a wallop. Once they kick its just full on dnb gold that makes me wanna dance like a loon. Check it out below and play this shit loud!

LEMON D - Manhattan Melody

Wellies

Theres so many sources for music on the internet these days which can be good and bad in equal measure. Its just as easy to download tripe as it is to find gold. A few years back I used to aspire to be on pirate radio and I have many happy memories of doing the Electrophonic Radio show live from Bob's toolshed in Whitechurch with JJ. Apart from that there wasnt many other ways of broadcasting your sound out to an audience that didnt know you. With the advent of the internet and the ease of podcasting, and the more recent yardcasts, quality music is just a few clicks away. One click that you should make is over to the Reprise Agency website.

They represent some of the biggest and most exciting names in the game at the moment, from Loxy to Samuel L Session and their Podcast is the perfect shop window for their artists to show off their wears. The Pangaea and Dave Angel mixes have been on heavy rotation on my I Pod lately and I would highly recommend checking the rest of their audio library out.

Poiple

Good friend and all round top bloke Cryo from Syntonics just sent over his new mix. Its a mega mix showcasing a lot of his own productions and its seriously good. You can get it here and if you like the tracks you can find them here. Also Syntonics have just released their new single, Back 2D Jungle/Flip It Out which comes backed with a bumper pack of remixes from the likes of Kanji Kinetic, Edu K and Merk Meny. You can cop that here and its highly recommended. Stay tuned for more info on Intellegenix releases here soon.

9 Samurai

Now coming up to it's fifth birthday Hyperdub has grown to be one of the best labels of the decade and far more than just a dubstep label. With an impressive roster which includes Burial,Joker,Zomby, LV, Cooly G to name a few (I will blog about all of them at some stage) it is the labels founder and boss Kode 9 released his debut album "Memories of a Future" in 2006 which is the topic of the blog today. The second album which was released on Hyperdub is a collaboration with vocalist the Space Ape weaves it's way through 14 tracks with haunting and heavy and dark vocal by the Space Ape over the top. It's an album that has got heavy rotation on my i-pod over the past few years and explores Kode 9s love of 2-step garage and drum and bass to create a minimal masterpiece. Check out one of my favorite cuts from this album on the link below. And if you see anything on the Hyperdub label just buy it!!!

Kode 9 and Space Ape - Nine Samurai

She

Seems that people want to bring the fun and smiles back to the dancefloor. More and more producers are looking to the Disco sound of old and cross pollinating it with new production techniques to give it a modern twist. Of course this isnt a new development, Moloko had a number 1 hit with Sing it back in 1999, Hercules & Love Affair were one of the biggest acts of last year but its always good when you find someone who is making tracks that fit perfectly into your sets without you having to drop the bpms to a crawl.

Jean Moustache is someone who has been doing this for some time. His Groove City album is littered with feel good tracks and below is my pick of the bunch. 

Jean Moustache - Choucroute

Vista

Its been a while since I got a cd compilation and felt that I had to hunt down every single track on it. I used to love getting the vinyl companion to cd comps a few years back. To me they represented the only way of getting the tracks featured when you lived in Dublin. This was before Juno or download sites, the only way you could get something that was outside of the mainstream was to pay triple the price ordering it into HMV or take a punt on Billy in Abbey Discs, next tuesday mate. On a few occasions I even went over to London just to buy vinyl. The track below was featured on Radioactive man's brilliant Fabric cd from a few years back, I remember going to visit my Sister in Seattle and listening to the mix constantly on repeat for the whole trip.I havent really heard or seen a good compilation in any shop in a good while, prob due to the fact that you can go onto a blog and download an up to the minute mix from just about anyone in a matter of minutes, its also a sign of the times when I Pod accesories inhabit the floor space once reserved for vinyl in HMV aswel. I suppose lately, buying second hand vinyl is what excites me. Finding the gem that you cannot believe someone thought they could do without. Im sure everyone has that list committed to memory and when you find one thats on it, theres no better feeling.

Takeover Sound - Together in the dark

Smog

I suppose thinking about writing this post I had, before they were famous or before they were past it in my mind. I guess its just really about the music that they were making or playing before they gained the status that they have today. I think everyone would agree that they are now household names and some would argue that their best years are long behind them. First up is Daft Punk. The recording below was taken from an event that they played in Wisconsin in 1996. A quick Google search and youl be able to see Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo without the masks, robot costumes or giant pyramids. absolutely tearing it up live. I think they have always put on a good show, I went to see them a few years ago in Marley Park and their Red Box gig from the 90's is the stuff of legend. Alive is still an album that sounds good today but this set is just as raw as it gets. Really makes you wonder, what will all the advances in technology and the growth in popularity of programs like Ableton, how no one has really managed to come even close to replicating or bettering what these guys were doing 13 years ago. I think they'v lost their relevance in recent years. You couldnt say that the material that they have put out is bad, just not up to the very high standards that they set themselves and what we came to expect of them. There is no question though about the quality of this.

Daft Punk Live at Even Further

Next is the Prodigy or more so, Liam Howlett. This recording was taken from an American radio station he did a guest mix on in the early ninties when the Prodigy were touring with Moby and others just as the rave scene was really kicking off. The mixing is sloppy in parts to say the least, but, for me its more about the tracks he's playing. I think every Dj I know has a copy of Experience on vinyl, its one of those seminal albums and this mix was recorded a year before its release so you really get a sense of the sounds that were going through his head at the time. Cant say Im a fan of the new stuff though.

Liam Howlett Guest Mix on Edge Club

Derek Went Mad

Back in the early nineties my brother gave my first taste of acid house / rave. Sharing a bedroom with my older sibling I got to hear a lot tunes from the glory years of rave. Acts like The KLF, The Prodigy, Altern 8, N- Joy, Kicks like a Mule and whatever tracks that got played on pirate station Sunset or new tunes my bro heard in Sides, The Asylum, The Olympic Ballroom and The Mansion House got heavy rotation in my house. I could probably write numerous blogs about any of the tunes I heard. But I've decided today to write about "Derek went mad" by Shut up and Dance from the album "Dance before the Police come". This track had a darker edge to it than most of the more upbeat rave tunes at the time (Charlie by The Prodigy for example). with an ere intro and a dark, heavy breakbeat right through and the sample "and Il return the stronger man". It made my head nod and give me chills at the same time. Were where you in 92?

Shut up and Dance - Derek went Mad

B55

I always rip the piss out of one of my mates  for playing Minimal so he never lets me forget about it when I ask him for a track iv heard him play out, and, to be fair iv gotten a few off him. Its never a genre that appealed to me in the slightest, lots of build ups that go nowhere and it generally just leaves me frustrated hearing it for long periods of time in a club but every now and again you get a few gems. Its weird because I like stuff thats stripped back and raw, no bells and whistles so by rights I should get it,maybe its just the way its packaged or the fact that when someone is playing it they never exceed about 10 tracks in an hour. Could be good to see someone taking the music and trying something new with it or just play it out differently. Lose the 2 minute mixouts and just hammer it out.

Gideon - Freak Your Body

Shooting Star

First proper gig I went to was on my 18th birthday, Judge Jules in the Temple Theatre for Paddys weekend, it was a place id come to frequent quite a lot in the following months and years, going to see the likes of Mauro Picotto, Seb Fontaine, The Tidy Boys, Timo Maas, all the mid ninties "Superstar Dj's". My real education in dance music however would begin one winter night in the Red Box when a moody Englishman by the name of Dave Clarke was at the helm. To say my mind was blown is an understatement. Id never seen anyone djing the way he did, id been used to going to see dj's that would play the whole track mixing out in the last 8-16 bars. Here was a guy going hell for leather choping,cutting and scratching in and out of banging track after banging track. One of my fondest memories of a Clarkey gig was going to see him at a Bugged Out night in Mono, there was only about 50 people there but the atmosphere was unbelievable, he actually came down to the front of stage and had a chat with one of my mates before he went on, promising to play a request. Its a far cry from the shirt brigade queuing around the corner to get into Tripod to see the same guy a few years later.

The set below isnt the best representation of his skills as a dj but I think its a lot more balanced and listenable than others and you still get the seamless mixing combined with the relentless tempo of the type of techno that we just dont get to hear out on a regular basis on these shores anymore. Some would argue that hes been on the decline for a few years now after the release of his long player Devils Advocate but his original productions like Before I Was So Rudely Interupted and Southside are still tracks that I play out regularly combined with some of his remixes like Depeche Mode's Dream On and Underworld's King Of Snake. All in all this is a guy that introduced me to so much through going to see him play and for that Im truly grateful.

Dave Clarke Breezblock Set 2001

Extra

I first came across this track in 1996 (Man that was 13 years ago!) on MTV's Partyzone and it completely blew my head. Extra by Japanese techno producer Ken Ishii is a wicked track from his excellent Jelly Tones album. Released on the R&S label which released some of the best electronic tracks of the early to mid nineties. The Anime video directed by Anime legend Koji Morimoto is my personal favorite video of all time. All of this 3.48 minute clip still looks amazing today. Check it out below.

Ken Ishii Extra

Donuts

I don't know were to start when I talk about this record. The Detroit born J Dilla or Jay Dee released this amazing piece of work on his 32nd birthday Feb 7th 2006 , 3 days before he tragically passed away in his mothers arms of an incurable blood disease.Dilla is one of the greatest producers ever having worked with Del la Soul, Common, Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip to name a few. Donuts to me is quite possibly one of the best hip hop albums ever made. A complete instrumental album it samples and loops through an hour of absolute gold . Click on the below link to sample some quality donuts.

J Dilla R.I.P

Donuts

Noir

Bridging the Divide:

It took a while to materialize, but finally, it seems, to these ears, that the often plundered musical treasure chest of 80's, 90's & 00's Electronic Music originating from Detroit and Berlin has finally been properly channeled and fused to a tempo more familiar to me, for quite some time I have admired the mechanical anonaminity of the motor citys endless trail of Electro, maybe subliminally, my first musical love. In my 'developmental' years, despite only every playing one form of music in a dj sense, I frequented far more electro & techno events than DnB ones, this is probably reflected in the majority of my sets, usually shunning the traditional, and tired, sampled breakbeat template favored pretty much since DnB's inception, opting instead for a far more synthetic sound, trying to find paralllel's between old Detroit and DnB in its current manifestation, this was once not an easy feat. That has slowly changed over the last two years, buts the impression I get is that is was a sound waiting in a dark lane, primed for an opportunistic mugging, to say its effect has changed the face of DnB is no exaggeration, maybe a little late on the uptake, the classic sound of Detroit and the staunch protocal of Berlin minimalism has taken a firm grip on a certain spectrum of my scene, reducing once militant drum workouts to floaty high tempo electronica soul, inevitably herd mentality has now engulfed this once refreshing ideal. A duo who essentially only released 8-10 tracks have totally overhauled the way DnB is created, structured and accepted, which to me emphasizes exactly how much this reinvention was needed, weather it is a case of envious eyes replicating what they view as a musical trend or a telepathic message broadcast throughout the scenes more astute producers, calling for a need for change, something very significant is currently under way, hopefully this doesnt burn itself out in a similar manner to its distant soul mate over in Berlin, or fall foul to pseudo philosophical mantras and excessive posturing in order to justify their motives like its other relative in Detroit, 

D-Bridge & Instra:mental have set the standard for this movement, you can taste the fruits of their labour here.

www.club-autonomic.com

VIDEO LINK

 

Hope In A Wall

I don't know what to make of acts that just pop up,put out some quality stuff then disappear just as quick. Whether you think that a small back catalogue adds to the mystique or just when they stopped before they over-stayed their welcome. France Copland are an act I really wished would have put out more of the same before deciding to hang up the boots. 2002's Pute & Mac white label was followed with the 2006 release of The Great French Institute Swindle on Omerta. Since then,not a peep. The track below is a rework of NWA's Dopeman, really love this track. You'l excuse the quality of the vinyl rip, just played it out that much its down to the bones.

France Copland - NWA's Dopeman

Chartreuse

Chrissy Murderbot has just released an ep on the ever brilliant Wide Records. Stand out track for me is below but I would highly recommend buying the whole ep to anyone with more than a passing interest in well produced club tracks. Also looking forward to hearing the Dj Guy remix of thighs which is forthcoming on Wide.

Also, lots of great mixes by Kwissy available for download on his website and various Bass goodness from Wide

Chrissy Murderbot - Work Your Body

Hugs

Iv been revisiting a lot of my old records and cd's lately. Old Aux 88 and Dave Clarke mixes,Anthony Rother remixes, the good stuff. Electro, not the type played by 20 somethings with trendy barnetts, is prob my favourite genre and its a shame that there isnt a great deal of interest in it here in Dublin. Sure, theres people playing it, making it and promoting it but not to the level where you could go to a regular electro night week in week out. Might have to look into changing that. Rediscovered this track there yesterday, most people would remember I-F from their huge track, space invaders are smoking grass. This is a track of their album Fucking Consumer and listening back to the whole thing nearly every track on it is good, its hard to believe that its over 10 years old now, but like I said in my previous post, quality always stands the test of time.

I-F - Cry

Trip To My Soul

Music is cyclic. Trends come just as fast as others go but at the end of the day quality always stands the test of time. There will always be innovators and inevitably there will be those who try to copy them. When I first started getting into breaks it was through compilation cd's available at the height of its popularity, but, it was only through delving a little deeper that I found what I really liked. My early vinyl collection was made up mostly of Tipper and Si Begg records, Rotters Golf Club and Fuel releases sprinkled with obscure white labels. Those days are long gone but I cant help but feel that the impression left by this music is still around today. Listening back to some of this stuff recently, its head and shoulders above any of the current crop of blog superstars productions around at the moment,and, unlike them, has its own quite unique identity.

Children Of The Cone - Bass Toy