Hypnotic Underground Beat Mix - 2.9.10

So, I have this bi-weekly college radio program on which I play whatever happens to be in my ears at the moment. Sometimes I do genre themed playlists, and the other night I put together a beat mix I'm particularly pleased with. Thought I would share it with the world...here's the tracklist:

Gemmy - "Rainbow Rd"
Jackhigh - "Aviation"
1000names - "Ice is the Silent Language"
Nosaj Thing - "3rd Complex"
Flying Lotus - "Tea Leaf Dancers"
Nujabes - "Sea of Cloud"
Ras G - "Yea..."
Pete Rock - "Play Dis Only At Night"
Depakote - "Quarter Milk"
Samiyam - "It's Important"
Onra - "War"
Dr. Who Dat? - "Stop Calling Me"
Teebs - "Untitled" (9th track from Teebs 09)
AFTA-1 - "The Facts"
MF Doom - "Secret Herbs and Spices Beat 5"
Mike Slott featuring Muhsinah - "Deux Three"
Tranquil - "Payroll (Paul White's Clean Dub)"
Gold Panda - "Fifth Ave"
J Dilla - "Oh Oh"
The Gaslamp Killer - "Track 1" from Akuma no Chi Ga Odoru
~ 60 minutes

Fades and arrangements were done in Live 8. No DJ speak on this, just the music. A couple of the tracks are really brief, too brief for how dope they are, so I extended them a bit for the mix. Hope you enjoy! (I just love hearing about it when you do).

Download

Oh and happy Valentine's Day readers! As AFTA-1 sez, Love is real...

Oorutaichi - Drifting My Folklore

Here's an album I've been meaning to blog about for some time, Oorutaichi's Drifting My Folklore from 2007. I don't know much about Oorutaichi, other than that he's a Japanese solo artist/DJ who cooks up some seriously zany acid cartoon music. If you thought that was Cornelius's shtick, prepare to experience new levels of zany acidity - Drifting My Folklore comes bursting at the seams with mutated disco, freak funk, twisted pop hooks, synths and turntables galore, hypnotic grooves, and utterly bizarre vocal melodies that shouldn't work but somehow do. Rarely are albums simultaneously as strange and catchy as this one. Given the overwhelming number of different musical ideas that transpire throughout it, one must really admire Oorutaichi's flawless sense of craft in arranging so many instruments and studio effects into something cohesive, without a moment sounding out of place. (Then again, what could sound out of place on an album like this?) The studio tricks in particular are frequently mindbending and worthy of Nobukazu Takemura at his best. In the end there's probably no describing this album, so let's just say I can comfortably imagine alien robots doing their morning workout routine to it, and leave it at that.

Aside, Oorutaichi contributed one of the best tracks on Shugo Tokumaru's 2009 release Rum Hee, a remix of Shugo's song of the same name.

Download
Purchase

Orbital - Orbital II (The Brown Album)

"There is the theory of the Moebius . . . a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop. Where time becomes a loop. Where time becomes a loop. Wh-Where t-time b-becomes a l-loop. Where-eretimetibecomecomalooaloop. Where . . ."

...so begins the UK-based Orbital's second album, a classic of early 90s experimental ambient techno. The first track, "Time Becomes", consists of the above Star Trek sample looping over and over against itself in a tempo-phasing experiment that borrows directly from Steve Reich. Though this kicks the album off with a fairly lofty and intellectual feel, the song is actually a joke - Orbital's debut, the Green Album, opens with the very same sample, the reappearance of which at the beginning of the Brown Album was meant to momentarily fool listeners into thinking they bought a bad pressing.

The hour of music that follows "Time Becomes" is one of the most consistently well reviewed in all of 90s electronica, or indeed any electronica. It's hypnotic, trippy, joyous, haunting, and deeply groovy. All of the tracks are lengthy and insistently rhythmic, making them fine for dancing or zoning out to, but they are also all dynamic enough to reward close attention. Two of them, "Lush" (please play this one loud and with as much bass as possible - the layers, the layers!) and "Halcyon + on + on", were big singles, and are probably a couple of the best tunes of their genre/decade. "Planet of the Shapes" is another quality head-bumper, with effective use of the sample "Even a stopped clocked gives the right time twice a day", taken from the film Withnail & I.

A second phasing experiment closes the album; this time the phrases "Input translation" and "Output rotation" loop against each other. Like "Time Becomes", this is the type of track that one either instantly hates, or grows to love for the delicate, ephemeral melodies and rhythms that can be discerned emerging from the chaos. (Guess which one it is in my case).

This album appears on a lot of Best 100 lists and for good reason. I slept on it for a long time, and would caution any fan of electronic music not to make the same mistake.

Download
Purchase

Metro Area - Metro Area

On the heels of the recent Kelley Polar post, here is the full length debut of Brooklyn based Metro Area, for which Polar lent his viola talents. Morgan Geist, DJ and half of Metro Area with Darshan Jesrani, met Kelley Polar in 1998; their collaborations led to the singles "Dance Reaction", "Miura", and "Caught Up", all of which appear on the 2002 full length. But this is not a Kelley Polar album, and its sound is immediately recognizable as closer to the New York house scene than outer space. The songs are mainly instrumental, and despite some very slick production and elaborate arrangements they maintain a raw, stripped down funk feel. In other words, the album successfully revels in the old school and points toward the future. What better time than the new year for us all to do the same?

Download
Buy

Kelley Polar

Here are two albums by Kelley Polar - 2005's "Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens" and this year's "I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling". Polar is a Jiuliard-trained classical violist who somehow turned to making bizarro-future-disco. Excellent!

"I Need You to Hold on While the Sky is Falling" [2008]
Download


"Love Songs of the Hanging Garden" [2005]
Download


Visit Kelley Polar's website

Paco de Lucia - Cositas Buenas

I am ashamed to say that for most of my life I'd written off Paco De Lucia as a latin-jazz-fusion cheeseball. I'm not sure why exactly I made that judgment, considering I'd hardly heard any of his music, aside from one album by The Guitar Trio with Al Dimeola and John McLaughlin, which honestly, I don't rememeber. I think it may have been an opinion transferred to me by my older brother, who was a big influence on my music tastes for a long time. Anyways - when that brother handed me this album "Cositas Buenas" I was stunned. I had for some reason come to associate De Lucia with empty technical wankery and fusion corniness, but I was hearing something completely fresh to me - modernist flamenco! Off-kilter rhythms, unworldy vocals, beautiful melodic narratives carefully dancing around eachother - complex, but not in a way that places too much emphasis on Paco's virtuosity (of which there is plenty, wow) - but complex in all the right ways, to deepen and enrich the music. Perhaps nicest of all is that it's rare to find music this rich in intellectual musical fervor that is so plainly danceable - each song on this album is based on the rhythms of a traditional Flamenco dance form, but Paco explores every option that rhythm seems to allow - skirting around and in-between that rhythm to the point where it's barely recognizable. Perhaps I'm unusual in this regard, but my absolute favorite thing for music to be is surprising - this album consistently surprises. Beautiful, fun, and definitely surprising.

Here's a more sensible, to the point review:
For four decades, Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia's jazzy, Mephisto-like technique redefined flamenco. This CD, which means "Good Small Things," is de Lucia’s first release in five years, and it's been worth the wait. Most of the eight tracks feature just de Lucia, a chorus of vocalists, percussion, and the zesty handclaps called palmas. Lucia and company take you through the Moorish, Jewish, and Gypsy inventions and dimensions of flamenco, from the buleria "Patio Custodio" and the torrid tientos "El Tesorillo" to the moody, mid-tempo buleria por soleatres, foreshadows the future of this ancient and inventive art form. --Eugene Holley, Jr.

Try
Buy