Baths – Lovely Bloodflow
Cerulean (anticon., 2010)
The latest release from anticon., debut album by Baths is in heavy rotation this week. It has some extremely lovely moments – worth checking – also worth spending money on, if you all are still into that.
New mix (Park Here) from our good friend Waer Rock/Culture System focusing on New York area producers making garage-y beats. This one is thick with unreleased jams from folks like Incyde, Peter Gunn, Mikey Dubs, and more – plus a track from our very own Matt Shadetek, “Beenie Eyes” from the album Flowers.
PS – I’m still here. Money calls, but indeed family is always first!
My new solo instrumental album Flowers is out! Â YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
It took me a while to get this out, longer than I’d like considering it’s on my own label but now it’s out and it feels GOOD! Â I love completing projects. Â But it’s not done! Â Now I have to actually sell some copies! Â If you or your grandma or your friends on the internet would like to support the Dutty Artz movement and contribute to the cause of me buying diapers, catfood and continuing my lavish lifestyle for me and my young family that would be great! Â There are many places to buy it. Â Here is a list:
BUY MATT SHADETEK – FLOWERS:
FREE DOWNLOADS:
AND if you missed them you can get some free downloads including two songs from the album and a podcast DJ mix I did for XLR8R:
Download ‘Funny Cats’ from The FADER
Download ‘iHop’ from XLR8R
Download the podcast mix from XLR8R
Stream ‘Funny Cats’ from Soundcloud:
BD1982 has been one of my favorite producers for a minute. I’ve been including his tracks on mixes and dropping them when I play for about two years now. His Spaceboots EP on Seclusiasis was one of the most banging EPs of the last 12 months- and he now has a full length out entitled “Lets Talk Math.” He laced DA with a lengthy interview, an exclusive mix for the podcast- as well as an Erykah Badu vocal version of “Subtract”.
BD1982 – Soldier (Subtract) 320[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Soldier_%28Subtract%29.mp3]
[display_podcast]
tracklist after the jump
T: So- we’ve been in touch for at least two years now- I first became familiar with your production through your monstrous “Water-Faucet” riddim, which shows up here as the instrumental for the gun man tune “Shotta Pon da Corner.” Lets maybe begin there. How did you come to work with Two Seven? Were you always planning on getting a vocal on that instrumental? What about “Fresh Air Ft. Syntonics” (one of my absolute favorites on the album) and “Chased by The Rain”- where the vocals take on a more instrument like role. How do you conceptualize the role of a vocalist in mainly instrumental genres? When your djing out are you playing primarily instrumental tracks as well?
B: I had been a fan of 77klash since hearing “Brooklyn Anthem” and sent a message through Myspace to see if he’d be interested in voicing a tune and luckily he was up for it! I hadn’t really planned on trying to get an original vocal for “Water Faucet” intially, maybe just because the “Blueberry Afghani” bootleg remix was making some rounds, but I’m still incredibly happy at how dope “Shotta Pon De Corner” ended up .
More Interview Under the Hood (more…)
Me, Berlin, March 2004.
Lately over at Dubspot I’ve taken on an expanded role beyond my normal teaching in the form of producing some materials for them in the form of articles and soon some tutorial videos. The first article is up on their blog and is about a concept I learned from Timeblind which he calls Speed Dating. It’s a method for improving your production workflow and I thought producers who read this blog might find it helpful.
[youtube width=”524″ height=”393″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVVLkWjTISE&feature=player_embedded#[/youtube]
props to Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork. Check iamamiwhoami YouTube channel for more videos.
If you happen to be in the greater Boston- or have a British style pension for traveling great distances to hear electronic music and turn your brain to mush- then next week should be fairly pleasant. Together Boston is a freewheeling many venue, many genre festival whose schedule looks kind of like a regular week in Berlin, but an absolutely exceptional one in any North American city. Check the website for a ton of great lectures, workshops and parties… After the cut is my ideal schedule for the week with venues and times.
For a quick summary- Rupture on Monday, Kingdom on Tuesday, Untold and myself (at different venues unfortunately) on Wednesday, Sinden on Friday, and an all ages showcase that Ill be playing a special noisy turnablist set at on Saturday. Come say hello!
Four Tet – Plastic People
There Is Love in You (Domino, 2010)
Kieran Hebden’s latest album was in heavy rotation this weekend. It has some extremely lovely moments.
Photo by Clair Lim, at my Logic class at Dubspot.
For those that follow this site you’re probably familiar with some of the things I do, like produce, dj, make records etc. Lately I’ve been doing some new things though, and I figure they’re worth mentioning here because some of you might be into them. The first I’ve mentioned before which is teaching at Dubspot. I love Dubspot, it’s a great place with a great group of people involved. I’ve been there for a bit over a year now and I really enjoy it. I’ve met a lot of great people there, students and instructors and it’s helped me to realize that I really like teaching music. I teach the production in Logic class there where I basically teach people how to operate Logic, the main program I use to make all my stuff, but I also teach the broad strokes of my own low-tek Hi-Fi production ideology. Basically the idea is that it’s not about expensive equipment or perfect anything but more about wading in, getting your hands dirty and having fun making something, which I preach and practice. I teach Logic in small groups of 4-8 people, usually once or twice a week at Dubspot. As a result of the class I’ve developed relationships with some of my students and continued teaching them in private lessons which are basically us working on their tracks together, solving problems, and talking things through.
One of the reasons I really like teaching and helping people produce is that I’ve spent about ten years now developing a pretty specific niche of skills, basically how to produce weird bassy dance-ish music, and it’s great to be able to share that knowledge, guide people away from the pitfalls and cliffs of the learning curve and point them in the right direction. Mainly because people just get so happy when they finally get how to do something that they really wanted to do.
More recently I’ve had a few people approach me to do this but without the teaching component, which has turned into people hiring me to go to their studios and help to finish their tracks, which I’m really enjoying as well, and have decided I’d like to do more of. So, if you’re someone in New York, who’s working on tracks and are looking for production help, be it mixing, arranging, polishing, achieving certain sounds or just help finishing stuff, get in touch. I do have limited time and limited mental stamina for working on stuff I don’t like so please point me at some kind of a musical sample or describe what you’re trying to do in your message and I’ll let you know if it’s something I think I can help with.
My next logic class is starting on Friday, January 29th and will be Wednesdays and Fridays from 10:15-1PM.
Contact me about production through Myspace, Facebook or Twitter.
One of our favorite mad scientists transmitting out of this here NYShitty High Priest of Anti-Pop Consortium, aka HPrizm aka Digital P has started a blog! It’s about music technology and it’s called Bangout Sessions. Priest is a great rapper, and has been for a long time but he’s perhaps less well known (if you haven’t seen him live) for his on-stage mad MPC bashing keyboard mutiliating beat performances. I’ve had the privilege of seeing him do this a few times and always enjoy it. Fearless and crazy. I look forward very much to hear how all this translates into blogging, and there’s a few posts up there already to get you started.
This is crazy. DJ Kiva is a friend who I met through teaching at Dubspot but who’s been active in NYC for a good while. He’s a wicked producer, musician and DJ. Among other things you may know him from his feature on ‘Underwater High Rise‘ from Solar Life Raft where he played guitar and percussion. He and I worked on this Beaterator project together for Dubspot and Rockstar Games where we went around to a bunch of schools in NYC and across the country and taught kids how to make music using Beaterator, which is a piece of music software that runs on the Sony PSP portable game system. It’s actually really cool and you can make surprisingly official beats on it, on the train, in the laundromat etc. On top of that it has a built in mic so you can sing on your track, play instruments into it, surreptitiously sample people on the train etc. Kiva, being the intensely creative dude that he is, has gone and made an albums worth of music on this thing in the couple of months he’s had it. And it sounds heavy. A particular favorite of mine is his cover of The Abyssinians ‘Satta Masa Gana’ with him singing and playing horns into the built in mic. MAD. Check it below, download it, show it to your friends.
BTR8ION…NYC artist/producer DJ Kiva presents the world’s first album written & produced entirely on the Sony PSP Beaterator. Created while traveling streets, subways, and skies from Brooklyn to LA and laid out mixtape style…Beateration for the Nation!
tracklisting:
01 Hollywood Starz
02 Situation feat. Channel Earth
03 Keep the Fire Burning
04 C’mon Y’all
05 Satta Massagana*
06 Bring Da Beat Back
07 Center of the Universe
08 Another Kind of Language
09 Mysyde
10 Era Unknown
11 Altitude
12 Back to My Galaxy
all music written, recorded, & produced by DJ Kiva © Adios Babylon 2010 on Sony PSP Beaterator.
* Satta Massagana written & originally recorded by the Abyssinians
Unrelated Submerged Second Life Picture- but watch for an amazing video coming soon from Sara Taigher
Solar Life Raft- the mix that keeps on giving- has finally made its way to your local record stores. /rupture and Shadetek working together is a serious Voltron force. It’s safe to say that I have listened to SLR over a hundred times since it was recorded- and I’m still finding reasons to go back. Opening with Time-Blind’s abstract tone poetry and closing with a gorgeous re-work from /rupture and Shadetek of Telepathe, it’s easy to miss all the ground the mix has covered.
Tracklists are the weird anathema of the DJ Mix- always reminding us as producers and consumers that for some reason the sounds cant just stand alone. A tracklist can mark a DJ’s access to dub-plates and exclusives or their prodigal digging- but always the tracklist serves as a sort of roadmap for listeners that want to go beyond the mix and gain some traction in it. Often I’ll look to a track list before deciding whether or not to listen to a given mix. Or I will return to the tracklist after hearing something amazing that I want to be up on.
SLR stands alone without the tracklist- and the hype that goes along with it- people read the tracklist and think, “Wow, this sure is eclectic”- but it’s not grab bag by any means- its laser precision etched in bass. It is hard to believe after listening to SLR that you’ve just digested sounds as seemingly diverse as Cardopusher, Paavoharju, and Luc Ferrari. One you get used to these sorts of mixes- where genre-orthodoxy and rigid notions of sonic-geographies are left behind- it gets pretty fucking hard to go back to an hour of any BPM mixed seamlessly at the start of 8, 16 and 32 bar phrases and movements.
/rupture and Shadetek can really cook in the lab. I’ve always rated Matt for his back-from-the-crossroads skills in Logic. I mean- from what I know- he was the first stateside producer to actually be doing production for grime dudes in London. /rupture on the other hand has always been off in a zone that seemed far more experimental- where quantization was frowned upon and standard timing or track development was laughed out the door. Through the last few years they seem to have tempered each others workflows and styles in all the right ways- and SLR should be an announcement that these two can make tracks with the very best of them. The album is almost a third original production and its the home grown tracks that really provided the convincing narrative that holds the mix together.
Effusive praise can ring hallow coming from ones own crew- but I’m not just trying to ramp up sales- Solar Life Raft is remarkable. Do whatever your ethical radar tells you in regard to consuming music and somehow, someway, find yourself a copy. If that happens to be amazon, boomkat, itunes, or beatport….just think of it as investing in more music.
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/leaky/MattShadetek-Strength_In_Numbers-SOLAR-LIFE-RAFT.mp3]
Matt Shadetek – Strength In Numbers
[audio:http://secretgooglecheatcodes.com/GGD-Bebey-DJ_Rupture+MattShadetek_RMX.mp3]
Gang Gang Dance – Bebey (DJ /rupture and Matt Shadetek Remix)
BD1982 is at the top of my criminally slept on list. Representing the Seclusiasis camp from Tokyo, where he moved from NYC a few years ago, dudes managed to get in with Goth-Trad and the infamous Back to Chill crew while simultaneously cooking up some of my absolute favorite tracks. He’s got a new 12″ that is dripping Xenon.
A. side is Dutty family 77Klash on the gunman tip over the crushing Water Faucet Riddim. The flip is the skittering Space Boots with remixes from some of the the biggest up and comers on the scene the U.K’s Slugabed and Montreal’s Hovatron. It’s hard to describe what happened in Vancouver last month when I dropped the Slugabed mix (Dev79 call it “hyper color style”) since the combination of howling low end fiends and gorgeous writhing Canadians basically led to sensory overload and total black out. If this is the sort of thing your interested in….cop the rest of the tracks @ Beatport Bleep Juno Download iTunes
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/BD1982_Space_Boots_(Slugabed_Remix).mp3]BD1982 “Space Boots (Slugabed Remix)
More soon from the infatiguable Seclusiasis!
A heavily syncopated journey deep into drum oriented dance floors.
Waer returns with a new mix! A really strong, undeniably dope selection of beat-driven instrumentals, a bit of West African mysticism/religion/belief, and if this is not his best mix yet, it is certainly his most effective. You can preview/download the mix here, but head over to Culture System for a link heavy tracklist and more info.
Having only been away from the states for nine months I’m amazed at the diversity of produce available at the grocery store. I’m equally excited about the excellent shows laced up and down the best coast these next few weeks.
First up is Tim Turbo from Seen (aka the non-hippie reggae and dance hall site) and Danny Scrilla doing dates down California and then over into Texas… “equipped with black duffle bags, brimful with Ghetto Lazerbass.”
Turbo and Scrilla Tour Mix Tracklist HERE
[audio:http://www.seen-site.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Tim-Turbo-Danny-Scrilla-Lazerdaze-Tourmix-2009-hosted-by-Prince-Zimboo.mp3]August 5th, San Francisco @ Vessel Nightclub
August 6th, Santa Barbara @ EOS Lounge
August 7th, L.A. @ Lot 613
August 8th, San Diego @ The W Hotel
August 12th, Dallas @ Zubar
August 13th, Austin @Â Barcelona
I really wish they could have joined me up in Cascadia- where I’ve got a few things going on in the next week.
I’ll be dropping down to Portland for a party this Saturday- August 8- with the Various crew at Branx… You can listen to the exclusive mix “DefinatelyMaybe” I did for them HERE.
Next week, the 13th, I’ll be up in Vancouver with the Thursday Ting! Crew at The Woods Studio @ 2nd and Ontario
Come through!