Postponing today

“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the pressent, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to forsee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beatportness

Thursday is the day for new Beatport releases, except when its Wednesday. Some of those “new” releases were in last week’s newsletter? What’s that about? Anyway, Stu Hirst, Dirty Rotten DJs, Shawn Astrom & Mike Monday on Level Recordings, Blueprint Sounds joins Beatport and we get loaded up with their first two from Habersham & Numinous and Chris Micali and new stuff from Derek Howell on Proton.

• Dirty Rotten DJ’s – Start Getting Naked [Level]
• Davidson & Hirst – Looking For Something [Level]
• Mike Monday – Housequake 05 [Level]
• David Amo & Julio Navas present Paco Maroto – Electronic Electro [Fresco Records]
• Habersham and Numinous – Rhetorical Question [Blueprint]
• Chris Micali – Dubway / Chant [Blueprint]
• Lonestar, Pinkbox Special – “The Pinkstar EP feat. Derek Howell & Joshua Michael” [Proton Music]

Ewan Pearson June 2005 Chart

Two months old, but reposted here with audio links to get a feel for Ewan Pearson’s funky electro-house blend.

1. Solid Groove – This Is Sick [Frontroom]
2. Kikiorix – 3AM Pop [Kingsize]
3. DJ Remo featuring Chelonis R. Jones “Black Sabrina” (DJ Naughty remix) [Giant Wheel)
4. Mike Monday - What Day Is It? [Playtime]
5. Missy Elliot – Lose Control [MCA]
6. Goldfrapp – Ooh La La (Tiefschwarz remix) [Mute]
7. Gui.tar – Can’t Stop [Careless]
8. Daft Punk – Technologic (Basement Jaxx remix) [Virgin]
9. Colors – Am I Gonna Be The One?
10. J.Rod & Pat Nice feat. Joe Good – Peter Pan (Mugwump in Neverland mix) [Brique Rouge]
11. Future Now – Future Now (Tim Paris remix) [2020 Vision]
12. Royksøpp – Only This Moment (Braxe and Falke remix) [Wall of Sound]

International Ewan Pearson Appreciation Day

Ewan Pearson. Remixer of Royksopp, Goldfrapp, Chemical Brothers, producer on Gwen Stefani’s solo album. OK. But published author? Visiting Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London? Yes, apparently Ewan Pearson is the co-author of Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound, a densely-written essay on the history and varieties of British dance music culture. Let’s dive into chapter one:

The ambiguity found in here in the double negative – ‘It didn’t mean nothing’ – encapsulates the kernel of doubt at the centre of many responses to instrumental dance and music cultures; where a culturally-inherited insistence that value inheres in attributable meaning collides desperately with a sense that dance and dance music have traditionally resisted or negated familiar modes of communicating either value or meaning.

Provocative stuff. Our culture insists that music is valuable if you can attribute meaning to it, yet dance music avoids being pinned down, creating the appearance that dance culture is meaningless.

Dance seems to resist discourse, and some discourses have resisted writing about dance – failing to deal with the dance at the heart of dance culture whatsoever…At the heart of the refusal to write about dance… is a deprecation of the ‘non-rational’ that renders the activity of dance itself invisible, incommensurable with the ‘”verbal forms” “prioritised” in “logocentric western societies”‘. Dance seems to occupy a critical space ‘beyond the grasp of reason’.

Sonic Society

Shiny new Sonic Society Records offers past, present and future Pig & Dan releases, all available at the slightly pricey €2.50 (~US$3.00) per track, but at least they use PayPal. Having several dozen digital retailers of dance music is tedious, not just because you have to trawl through every site searching for what you are looking for, but also because you have to sign up for an account with every retailer, and provide them with a credit card. What happens to that once they go under? What we need is a centralized location that keeps track of new releases, and a centralized payment gateway like PayPal.

The Pushers Mixes & Charts

Los Angeles producer Colin Cameron (The Pushers) offers up a debut (?) remix on Red & Blue’s Adjust Recordings, whose technological distinctiveness has been recently added to the Beatport collective. Why not give it a listen?

• Federico Giust – Drums are kickin’ inside my head (The Pushers headless remix) [Adjust]

Adjust have mapped out their releases until the end of the year and provided audio samples, charts, and in exchange for signing up for their mailing list, access to Red & Blue’s MercurySessions show archives. Such generosity can’t go unrewarded, not on my watch!

As is my custom, I am reproducing here The Pushers’ August 2005 Chart with BeatPort and Juno links where appropriate.

1. Rhythm Code – Addictive [Open Up]
2. Trancesetters – Roaches (Erphun & Colin C. Mix) [CDr]
3. Dean Coleman – Back 2 Deep [Heavy Rotation]
4. D-Formation – No Surrender No Retreat (Roman Lieske Mix) [Intenso]
5. Forme – Ignition [M Theory]
6. Martin H – Reference [Invent]
7. Bipath – Paranoize (The Pusher’s Heavy Groove) [CDr]
8. Andy Page – Serpent [CDr]
9. Free*land – Physical World (Rouzbeh Delavari’s Faulty Physics Mix) [CDr]
10. Red & Blue – Siren [Adjust CDr]

Nathan Vain: Soundscape

Opulent Temple throws awesome events. Sometimes, Nathan Vain spins at them. Other times, he’s absent and the children cry. Don’t cry children! For Nathan Vain has left you with a mix, a mix called Soundscape for you to enjoy. (Kind of a shame its RealAudio though.) Or, if your mothers and father have taught you to read, view the tracklist and see that Mr. Vain tempts you with tracks from Chris Micali, Roel H, Benz & MD and a healthy dose of Luke Chable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that fully three-quarters of those tracks are on labels associated with progressive powerhouse and dance music emporium, 3Beat Records, who seem to have added even more labels to their roster. I’d probably really really love 3Beat if they a) released digitally in a timely manner and b) sold through BeatPort.

One thing I will say about DanceRecords.com (who are hosting the Nathan Vain mix), they’ve really hit the mark with their genre tags. If BeatPort was smart, they’d implement that in a second. Unfortunately, they are dumb, and here’s why: BeatPort have purposely prevented fans from linking to anything but their main page. Do they hate free advertising? Do they not want to take advantage of the single most powerful marketing tool in existence, word of mouth? Sometimes I’m surprised at how electronic music labels are so stingy and controlling with their content, especially since the vast majority of it is stuck in its own ghetto. Wouldn’t you, as a record label owner, seek grass roots means of marketing instead of trying to replicate the dubious successes of an industry that has largely rejected you? I say dubious because despite the many multiplatinum records, overall the industry has had a largely corrosive effect on the culture by insisting that it maintain control.

There is one bright spot. Some electronic producers are putting out remix packages, sometimes cleverly disguised as “contests.” We don’t need to be bribed to download and remix our favorite artists’ work, is what I’m saying. There’s no better way for an artist to really engage their audience than becoming active on the internet, especially with electronic music, which has at least one completely unique characteristic: the electronic audience is made up of DJs and producers, people who are collaborators. Labels and artists ignore their core audience because they look at the major labels with stars in their eyes, and try to emulate them. Of course that fails, because the mainstream audience is passive, disengaged and world’s apart from the underground audience. Applying mainstream marketing techniques to underground music fails because it alienates the core culture. When you lose the core culture, your product looks like an hollow shell that has no meaning or cultural relevance that only survives as long as pump it up by pouring money on it. Its like trying to cook on a barbeque with only lighter fluid.

P.S. I’m available as a marketing consultant. (Also a J2EE/WebLogic position in SF.)

Podcast: First Mix

First mix ever! Second one really, if you count the botched on recorded using a noisy laptop mic input. I had the gain too high on one channel, so with that and the dodgy mixing, it was barely listenable. My next plan is to mitigate my performance anxiety by drinking heavily beforehand.

Get it now!

Tracklist

1. John Tejada – Sweat (On the walls) [Poker Flat]
2. Funk D’Void, Phil Kieran – Black Worm [Soma]
3. Leri & Barone – Love Machine [Ocean Dark]
4. Christian Cambas – Paramount [Audio Therapy]
5. Martin H, Sina M. Solouk – Sounds Reviving (Oliver Klein and Peter Jurgen’s Remix) [Invent]
6. Phatjak – Supermarket [Audio Therapy]
7. Hystereo – Validity Reason [Soma]
8. Coburn – We Interrupt This Program (Einmusik Remix) [Great Stuff]
9. Alter Ego – Beat The Bush (Tiefschwarz Remix) [Klang Elektronik]
10. Rosko – Love is a Drug (XL Vocal Mix) [NY Love]
11. Quivver – Spittin’ Funk (House Dub) [Boz Boz]
12. Kaan Duzarat – Organic Intellectual (Baunder Remix) [Only]
13. S Junkes – If You Stay (Jose Zamora Mix) [Only]
14. Way Out West – Don’t Forget Me (W.O.W. Dust Biter Remix) [Distinct'ive]

Crazy Local DJs

After broadly insulting the local population of DJs in this town, I’m pleased to announce my Local DJ Awards:

• Most Improved DJ: Altovideo. Yes, I get an award. Despite possibly 9 years of listening to electronic music, and 6 of those years really listening to electronic music, I started DJing. My roommate had one 1210 mk3, one 1210 mk5, a Pioneer DJm-300 and a pair of Sony MDR-700s. Other than the mismatched between the decks, it was the Canonical DJ Setup, other than maybe the learner’s permit mixer. You’d want to step up to the DJM-600 for a serious workhorse mixer. There’s a very good chance that any random bar or club you enter will have this setup, which is why it comes recommended, so it was nice to spend my first year behind it and get a mindset for how its done mechanically. (DJing is really a two-tier process; on one hand, you have to deal with the physically moving pieces: tone arms, pitch shifters, needles, headphones, handling records and sleeves. Then there’s the mental process of feeling out in the the fabric of the music what should come next, as if you are trying to find a puzzle piece’s neighbor by examining its shape.) I don’t mind tradition, so long as it works, and the Technics are rock solid for what they do, but I need a crazy mixer to work with my crazy mind. A dozen inputs, all assignable to the cross fader, or in any proportion to the headphone mix. EQ with sweepable mids, hi-pass and low-pass filters on every stereo input with adjustable resonance. Hell, why not throw on a gentle limiter on the main outs, really smooth out the levels. That’s what I would buy if I thought it would be smart to throw $3,000 at a mixer. What I want now is something that can produce sound for recording that’s passably listenable. I’m going to give that another shot this weekend, my goal is to produce a usable mix. Actually making a permanent record of how I did and how successful the mix is will hopefully bring quality into sharper focus and continue to refine my technique. So I think I deserve the award. I’ve only being DJing for two years, and my skills are sufficient to entertain in clubs and bars without being thrown out or having tomatoes thrown at me. It seems like a milestone, at least, to continue in this direction.
• Best DJ: DJ 6Q – I’ve heard of this guy on and off in Sacramento since he won some kind of remix competition for Fat Boy Slim, The Rockafeller Skank, which he clearly deserved. I listened to the runners’ up, which were all basically dudes with Fruity Loops or moms with whatever sound package they found bundled with the Dell in the den. His clearly blew them away. He had apparently walked around asking random people to sing the chorus (”Right about now, the funk soul brother, check it out now…”) and then pasted it around in Acid with bits of the original and other random samples he had found. And it was original. Rough, but it showed a lot of effort. I saw him spin at a house party downtown a few years ago, and then tonight, a friend played a couple of his mixes for me. The first one was a reasonable 2 Many DJs type mash-up situation, the kind of “remixing” that William Gibson writing about in Wired now that its been around for 10 years or so.
  (Thanks for giving the heads up, guys.) The real genius was in his electro-house set, which I thought was impossible to hear in this town. This is what sucks about this town. Despite the near take over of electro into progressive, trance and house, no DJ here will touch it with a ten-foot pole. I, with 2 years of experience and barely capable of beat-matching, seem to be the only one who has heard of it, much less used it in a set. I was glad to see its infiltrated the minds of at least some people, because it certainly deserves it. People are seriously missing out. So my frivolous award goes to DJ 6Q.
• There are only two awards. That tells you how meaningless this award is.

Progressive Update from Beatport

• Andro – Monkey Lover [Method] Acidy.
• The Dolphins – Warriors [Ocean Dark] More acid from Ocean Dark, another label to watch.
• AudioTherapy’s Across Borders: Greece hits BeatPort. Liking the Christian Cambas & Phatjak tracks, maybe ToneDepth too for those slow moments.
• Deep Dish – Say Hello [Ministry of Sound] Better late than never. Chus & Ceballos remix is excellent.
• Quivver – Brothers & Sisters/Spittin’ Funk [Boz Boz] Quivver is the guy. Spittin’ Funk: The vocal sample makes it for me, organ solos for that authentic feel. I’m making an exception to my strict No Solos policy. You can thank me later, Quivver.
• Stef Vrolik & 16 Bit Lolitas – Between U [Plastic Fantastic] The airy vocal twin to the dub mix.
• Kagan Duzarat – Organic Intellectual [Only] Sparse and dubby main track on this Romanian (?) label. Breaks and main room remixes on this release, and an essential Baunder remix on another release.