Like a Scientist

Late last year, Mid­west pro­ducer Fancy Mike released the great Madi­son Square Gard­ner EP on King Deluxe, full of thick pro­gram­ming and effer­ves­cent synths. One of the most notable aspects to his music, though, was an affin­ity with orches­tral sounds and com­po­si­tion. While the music had its heart in hip-hop, the under­ly­ing struc­ture was in the sym­phony. It lends his music a weight some­times not found in the bright, spas­tic beat con­struc­tions that cir­cle the globe today. Not one to rest on his lau­rels, the new Sigma Chi Pri­mav­era EP is a var­ied and com­plex col­lec­tion of remixes, col­lab­o­ra­tions, and new tracks. More

May has been a busy month of reviews for me. I’ve had reviews pub­lished in three dif­fer­ent places: Lit­tle White Ear­buds, FACT Mag­a­zine, and Sonic Router, who I just started writ­ing for. In case any­thing was missed I wanted to run them down here. More

All too often a promis­ing young artist releases a bril­liant album and then dis­ap­pears for­ever, almost like the process of that first album was too much like cap­tur­ing light­ning in a bot­tle, to use a cliche. For the past cou­ple years, I had wor­ried that was going to hap­pen with Sanso-Xtro (Melissa Agate), whose Sen­ti­men­tal­ist for Type Records in 2005 is eas­ily one of their best releases and def­i­nitely one of my per­sonal favorites. Slightly influ­enced from the IDM and electro-acoustical com­mu­ni­ties that birthed Type, Sen­ti­men­tal­ist set itself apart from other releases by hav­ing an organic and tex­tural qual­ity brought on by a pick of loose per­cus­sion and dreamy synths that didn’t quite match up in the same way that most music did at the time. There was cer­tainly an ele­ment of jazz here, mixed with post-rock, mixed with folk, mixed with… every­thing. And for the past six years, that’s all there was, one per­fect album, in dan­ger of never being expanded upon. For­tu­nately, Agate has resur­faced this year with the won­der­ful Foun­tain Foun­tain Joy­ous Moun­tain album, pick­ing right up where she left off, but more mature and more beau­ti­ful. More

My first con­tact with Matthew Mer­cer came about almost ten years ago through mutual friends. We imme­di­ately bonded over criss-crossing musi­cal tastes and a con­stant hunger for new stuff to lis­ten to. He was also an extremely tal­ented com­poser with for­mal train­ing and a real ear for ten­sion. Early music was under the Systm name and fit in with the IDM sound of Autechre, Phonem, Arovane, etc. His pro­gres­sion into dance music was soon piqued by the glitch techno work of Akufen and the way that IDM sounds were given a new lease through 4/4. Soon enough he was releas­ing sin­gles on Forte and Neu­ton­mu­sic which bridged the gaps between techno, IDM, glitch, and elec­tro. More

Doesn’t seem like that long ago that I posted about a bunch of great down­load­able releases for free. Some of the below are free, or name your price, with one or two that are ben­e­fit com­pi­la­tions. It’s all pretty great stuff in the beats and synths range of hip-hop and elec­tronic arena. Big fan of all of these. More

One of the tracks on Moa Pillar’s new EP, The Moon and Thun­der Dance, first appeared on the excel­lent free com­pi­la­tion from Error Broad­cast called Fly Rus­sia, which I pre­vi­ously reviewed. About that par­tic­u­lar track I said: “I can’t really think of any­thing in imme­di­ate mem­ory that bangs quite so hard as Moa Pillar’s “Water Lily” (with the excep­tion of Slu­gabed, maybe), a track that goes along way to mak­ing chirp­ing bleeps the most men­ac­ing sound in exis­tence. Per­haps it’s the tum­bling drums behind it? Or the blunt instru­ment bass rolling along under­neath it all? This is def­i­nitely how you start a com­pi­la­tion.” More

100% of the pro­ceeds from this new dig­i­tal com­pi­la­tion will go to the Japan Red Cross to help with the relief effort there. 49 tracks, many of them exclu­sive, avail­able for about $15.00. As of this morn­ing, they have raised about $9,000.00 and are hop­ing to get to $10,000.00 in the next 24 hours. Amaz­ing artists that have been cov­ered here such as Rudi Zygadlo, Slu­gabed, Kode9, Illum Sphere, kid­kanevil, Doshy, Pete Sasqwax, Kper, Vir­tual Boy, etc. Please go here to read more: Nihon Kizuna and go here to pur­chase via Band­camp: V/A — Nihon Kizuna. It’s quite amaz­ing to think that this huge col­lec­tion of music came together in only 5 days and has already raised a large amount of money.

Decided to do a quick badly-mixed mix today. A bunch of stuff I’m really enjoy­ing at the moment. Most of this music is from the first 3 or 4 months of 2011, includ­ing a cou­ple yet-to-be-released tracks. Like I said above: it’s badly mixed, so don’t expect too much. Track list and down­load link below. More

Trawl­ing my Face­book feed today, I noticed that Doshy linked to a com­pi­la­tion he has a track on. When I got home, I down­loaded Mad-Hop Vol. 1 and started lis­ten­ing to it…always pays to lis­ten to a free com­pi­la­tion, of course. Holy shit, there is some ridicu­lous beats on this thing. Any­way, it reminded me I hadn’t posted any­thing in awhile and I thought I would look through my 2011 down­loads and mixes fold­ers to see what’s up. Check these gratis music releases.…now! More

When I was putting together my lists for the end of the year, I noticed one par­tic­u­lar name that kept com­ing up again and again: Starkey. It led me to think­ing about all of his out­put for 2010 and even­tu­ally the idea of a most valu­able player in bass music formed. I can’t think of any­one more deserv­ing. Read why. More