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Best Music of 2016 : Deep88

Dance music, especially Disco has gotten an unfair reputation as superficial and not worthy of critical consideration by a large proportion of the public. But things are definitely changing with the sophisticated, positive landscapes that purveyors of this pseudo-retro sound via electronic wizardry and sensitivity are crafting today. Deep 88's The Black Album took a bit of time to grow on me but it reformulates the Disco of the 80's into something new and forward looking. Its straightforward simplicity is music to my ears. Definitely one for your next party.

From 5 Magazine:

In a world where everything seems to be “aspirational,” it’s so refreshing when you stumble upon something that has no ambitions to be anything other than what it is. The Loudness War has reached epic proportions, and most digital audio has, just like a GMO crop, grown in size to unnatural proportions.

In stark contrast to virtually everything else out there, Deep88’s Black Album can only be described as small, but perfectly formed. Listening to this record is a refreshingly intimate experience. There’s no artificial widening of the stereo field or artificial polish, just simple, stripped down musical compositions. Without a plethora of on effects to lean on, every musical part has to be perfectly crafted and play its role effectively. Nothing is surplus to requirement here: a place for everything and everything in its place.

I must clarify here that this music is anything but (that dreaded word) “minimal”; it’s brimming with chords, melody and old-school emotion. It feels human. Although I’d recommend enjoying the album from start to finish, “Rotation” and “Schlagsahne” are particular highlights, with their charming, almost naive musicality set upon vintage, analogue-sounding beats. Deep88 is a producer who provides proof of the old saying, that (even in dance music) the old ways are best.

From 6AM at the Garage:

I sit back and breathe in slowly, completely relaxed. It’s the end of a sunny autumn day. The sun gradually sets in the distance; it’s warm glow so vibrant and rich, it nearly seems permanent. Deep88’s LP, The Black Album, gradually places me into a gleeful hypnosis.

Alessandro Pasini, aka Deep88, is an Italian producer based in the province of Forlì-Cesena and founder of the Zomarec record label. Without having first listened to Pasini’s ‘The Black Album’ it could be easily assumed that its content has some affiliation with the darker side of music. Yet moments into the first track, it quickly becomes apparent that this assumption is incorrect. Deep88 entices the listener into a relaxed euphoria with his beautiful, dream-like melodies that are reflected throughout the whole LP.

The first track, Harmony, fills my ears with a sun drenched melody. Before too long my mind is following the gentle rhythmic guidance of sensitive hi-hat’s and a wholehearted kick drum. Snare triplets keep me on my toes; an ingredient that adds some spice to the slowly stirred pot of lush, deep melodies.

SP1200 gets straight to the point with a solid kick drum and some funky bass to set the groove. Following not too shortly after is an edgy hi-hat, seeming not to worry about subtlety like ‘Harmony’. Just as I’m about to get ready for some funky, industrial beats, Deep88 soothes my slight aural anxiety with a trickle of ambient melodies layered over the rhythm. The bass accompanies the ambient visitor with a free flowing simplicity; all the while the hi-hat is showing no remorse with its harsh and prominent consistency. SP1200 is a driving, yet rewarding track that starts you at the base of its mountain with a slow but steady outlook. Soon enough you’re in the clouds, trekking on with an acid synth induced eagerness to reach the pinnacle. Without delay you’ve reached the highest physical point and gradually the descent draws closer. The hi-hat gives out for a short while, allowing the acid and ambient melodies to give you a heartfelt goodbye.

Me Myself and an MPC is the heaviest and most driving track on the LP. Enlisting the help of repetitive claps and a dense, resonant kick drum, Me Myself and an MPC asserts itself from the beginning of the track. For those more inclined towards easy listening, don’t fret; Deep88 hasn’t forgotten you on this one. With the introduction of some precise hi hats, the distinctive ambient melody glides in over the top, complemented by an even more thunderous kick drum than before. Midway through the percussion fades out and the listener is left with inspiring melodies layered with what sounds like a sample of a gusty breeze. This combination produces a mountainous, high altitude atmosphere similar to SP1200. However, this time there’s no ascent and descent. The track continues upwards, motivated by the reintroduction of vigorous percussion. We finish up the way we left off- hitting the ground running. If SP1200’s conclusion was a guided, meditative path down from the climax, Me Myself and an MPC takes its descent with gusto. There’s no emotional embrace of ambience, but a few percussive, bass driven bars utilizing those repetitive claps. Eventually some atmospheric white noise slowly engulfs our attention and sends us to the end of the piece.

‘The Black album’ maintains a consistent theme of bliss and elation through the use of uplifting melodies, deep, funky baselines and distinguished highs. Deep88 successfully attempts to take the listeners on a range of experiences, starting with some relaxed and vibrant tracks such as Harmony (Intro) and Harmony. Gradually the LP progresses in its intensity, showing off tracks more dance orientated. ‘Rotation’ and ‘Face It’ do exactly this via the use of heavier percussion, all the while remaining lenient enough for melodies to flow freely to immerse the listener in the LP’s beautiful auditory landscape. Following SP1200, side 3 of the LP uncovers some lovely treats, ‘Schangshanne’ and ‘Chord Prog’. These dance ready tracks continue the increase of groove and act as a vehicle for the listener to progress onto the heaviest track of the LP, Me Myself And An MPC. Finishing up, Sunday Morning introduces the sound of some intricate flute arrangements, layered over the rhythm. Quite animated in its performance, the flute accompanies the consistent and tranquil supporting sounds seamlessly, producing a playful, yet soothing end to the ‘The Black Album’.

From electronique:

Dov’è finito tutto il patrimonio house italiano?
Considerando la forza espressiva, lo spessore artistico dei protagonisti e soprattutto la grandezza di tutti quei dischi che a cavallo tra il 1988 ed il 1993 hanno segnato solchi profondi nella storia del verbo di Jack, sembra paradossale lo smembramento effettuato su questo grande patrimonio, condotto in malora da un decennio di carnevali laccati con i soldi delle villeggiature rivierasche, tra alberghi a due lire e lo sfavillante circo della “collina” a maturare incassi ed ingrassare vacche, contaminando poi, con questa malattia, il resto della penisola, di-fatto, americanizzando il tutto in una mercificazione le cui conseguenze sono state il perfetto humus per il successivo vuoto minimal.

L’house è americana, è vero quanto il fatto che Frankie Knuckles e Ron Hardy suonavano ed erano ispirati dai dischi italiani dei N.o.i.a., di Asso o di Kano. L’house é magma reso incandescente dalla passione, la stessa passione che ha fatto maturare un suono prettamente italiano in ambito house. Un suono strumentale e struggente dove la scrittura dei pads, i soli di piano e tutte le partiture melodiche seguono onde che premono sul tasto emozionale. I dischi house italiani sono così, malinconici e passionali, ti prendono per mano e ti portano in paradiso mentre versi lacrime e sudore.

Ne sono rimasti pochi di interpreti in grado di tener alti questi sentimenti, ed è proprio in quest’ottica che va letto il ventennale lavoro di Deep88. Un lavoro che suona come dovrebbe suonare l’house italiana, un suono che non ha mai avuto la pretesa di innovare, diciamolo, perché non è questo né il contesto né l’aspirazione. Questa musica è l’amico con il quale bevi un bicchiere di vino seduto al tavolo di un vecchio bar, è una coltre di sentimento che parte dal profondo per elevarsi e toccare vette immateriali.

Poi nello specifico è musica dance strumentale nella quale Alessandro Pasini riversa i suoi anni chiuso in studio sui sintetizzatori, distillando un brano come SP1200 Jam che fa danzare il dolce-acido della TB-303 con il ritmo di una vecchia e sottovalutata drum machine della E-mu Systems.

The Black Album è un titolo che non vuole certo fare l’occhiolino a Prince, ma va piuttosto interpretato come un ironico attacco a certi poteri forti del panorama attuale, imperniato sul nero colore e sul minimale tratto.

In nove brani segue un concetto ben preciso che è quello di scrivere musica suonando melodie che possano emozionare con semplicità, arricchendosi di samples vocali utilizzati con parsimonia, linee di basso grasse e corpose e grandi bagliori notturni che illuminano di calda luce un altro brano simbolo come Schlagsahne, che nei suoi sette minuti e trenta riesce a scuotere i ricettori emotivi con quattro semplici note messe in sequenza.

Ci sono casi in cui è bene guardare con speranza al futuro ed aspettarsi qualcosa da questo, ce ne sono altri nei quali ci auguriamo di veder tornare a vibrare fasti di tempi maldestramente lasciati marcire.
Ora chiedetevi cos’è l’house.

Bye Pauline Oliveros

Composer/Musician Pauline Oliveros passed away last week-here is what The Guardian reported: US-born experimental composer and electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros died on Thursday, aged 84. She was best known for her philosophy of “deep listening”, an approach to music that she described as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing”. Her work explored the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening. 

From The Guardian, Tom Service writes about her influential music and philosophy:

Nearly sixty years ago, Pauline Oliveros found her mantra. "Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening". This simple but transformative thought has filled her life in music.

Oliveros (born in 1932), then in her early 20s and living in San Francisco, turned a tape recorder on, and, listening back to the sounds she had preserved, heard things that she had not realised were happening in real time – and a philosophy of listening and sonic exploration was born. It's an approach to music that would lead to her Sonic Meditations and to Deep Listening, an album recorded in a disused cistern 14 feet beneath the earth in Washington State that changed composer Simon Holt's life when he heard it (a disc that's become an "underground hit", Oliveros told me – it's also spawned a plethora of puns). Her development of the idea of listening as ritual, healing, and meditation also led to her founding the Deep Listening Institute.

Let's rewind a bit. When she was 16, Oliveros announced she wanted to become a composer. But the five staves of conventional music notation weren't enough to express or communicate the sounds she was hearing inside her, or to reproduce the bird, insect, and machine noises she heard around her. To realise these required new technology, and Oliveros was quickly at the vanguard of electronics, working with early tape machines, and was one of the founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where she collaborated with Terry Riley (she played in the first performance of Riley's In C) and Morton Subotnick, and would develop collaborations with Steve Reich and David Tudor, as well as becoming a friend, colleague, and performer of John Cage and his music (her listening conversion, incidentally, happened before she knew about Cage's (non-)silent piece, 4'33'').

But Oliveros's relationship with technology is philosophically ambivalent. In a lecture at the Her Noise symposium at London's Tate Modern last week, she spoke of how every computer in the post-war period is indebted to the Manhattan Project and the machines that were created to make the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But just as computers can destroy, they can create. The digitally enhanced accordion that's her main improvisational tool these days is proof of one way Oliveros embraces the outer limits of what's possible and how she's still finding new sounds and new expressive possibilities. The Expanded Instrument System is another. Oliveros has always used technology as a means to express human experiences and to connect as directly as possible with her listeners. Listen to Bye Bye Butterfly, a piece Oliveros made in 1965 that deconstructs a recording of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, realised in a single improvisation. It's a witty, tragic, and moving comment on the fate of Puccini's operatic heroine, which, as she says, "bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalised oppression of the female sex."

More

The Loss of this Paradox

From Thump:

In 2010, I was living in Pullman, Washington, working during the day as a Music Director at KZUU my college's radio station, and at night as a cashier at the only record store within 100 miles. Having a reliable source for free music wasn't a priority, but stranded in a small rural town, I desperately needed variety. While lamenting a fruitless Google search for Deerhunter demos from the band's late-aughts blog to a friend, he invited me to what.cd, a private peer-to-peer torrent tracker. A BitTorrent tracker is a server that facilitates communication between file-sharing peers. What.cd didn't actually host any illegal files on their servers, but they enabled people to independently swap files, utilizing a legal grey area to stay alive for nearly a decade.

Launched in 2007—on the same day that another popular tracker, Oink, shut down—what.cd was something of a mythical place on the internet, lauded for its massive library and derided for its stringent application process and strict rule enforcement. Though new releases would appear on the site, what set what.cd apart was its vast, deeply specialized archive of rare and unusual records; users were given a study guide and expected to understand the nuances of analog and digital media, transcoding audio files, and spectral analysis. This combination of uncompromising principles and community sourcing made what.cd incredibly successful: before it shuttered unexpectedly on November 18, the site was possibly the greatest and most extensive archive of recorded music in human history.

What.cd had survived through massive DDoS attacks and threats of shutdown, but two posts from its Twitter account left little question of its demise: "Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down" the tweets read. "All site and user data has been destroyed." The French Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music (SACEM) announced that the Cybercrime Unit of the Gendarmerie in France, in cooperation with the SACEM, had seized 12 servers belonging to the site. The legal grey area that had enabled what.cd to exist for so long had ended up being its downfall. "This is a follow up to the investigative work carried out by SACEM for more than two years, as part of its anti-piracy activities," a representative from the organization told TorrentFreak. "It puts an ends to an estimated damage of €41 million to music creators."

When I joined the site in college, it offered uninhibited access to a fathomless infinity of music. User-made "collages"—what.cd-speak for collections of albums tied together by a unifying theme—were rabbit holes of discovery, user-tagged with genres, featured artists, and producers. Each associated discography was sorted and cared for as pristinely as the one before, and a spiderweb graph of clickable links at the bottom of each artist's page showed you related artists. You could start at the 90s chart-topping R&B trio SWV, and easily end up discovering Mahogany Blue, a similar, yet mostly unknown trio with a single album released in 1993. There was a tab that displayed the top 10 most active torrents of the past day, five of which were often various bitrates of the latest Phish concert; for six whole years, that tab effectively served as my Billboard chart.

Last year, in a piece for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance wrote about the illusory permanence of the internet. "The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It's not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness," she wrote. "[It] is being destroyed even as it is being built. Until you lose something big on the Internet, something truly valuable, this paradox can be difficult to understand." During its 9 years of existence, it seemed what.cd was the exception to that rule. It felt like the greatest realization of what a digital library could be, its longevity a testament to its permanence.

A manifesto on the site's slate grey landing page promised Candyland meets The Matrix: "You've stumbled upon a door where your mind is the key. Beyond here is something like a utopia." It wasn't hyperbole. Past that homepage lay access to over a million albums, most of which had multiple sources, from original vinyl rips, to remastered CDs and rare imported editions, each in different bit rate formats. This massive, meticulously curated database was the sum of knowledge and hard work of what.cd's user base, which was among the most passionate on the web.

If what.cd was a world unto itself, then data was its currency. Users had to maintain a ratio of downloaded to uploaded content, and if you fell below a certain ratio (i.e.: you were leeching too much without giving back), you got banned. This system required you to contribute to stay a member. Many users utilized "seedboxes"—private servers that constantly uploaded torrents—to maintain their ratio. Users increased their ratio by filling requests for rare albums or unique versions and adding them to the library. To me, it always felt like what.cd had perfected the crowdsourcing model: like a utopian society, every user had a stake in the wellbeing of the site, simply because the only way to keep buying in was to keep contributing.

Albums missing from the database had what the site referred to as "bounties," or collective pools of download credit awarded to the first user to upload a sought-after release. Users could add download credit to the bounty attached to a given release, subtracting from their own ratio to entice others to upload a missing album. This led to some absurd bounties: the user who filled the eight-year-old request for Wildflower, The Avalanches' first album in 16 years, earned 10.3 terabytes, or approximately 2,000,000 songs, in download credit.

The small town that had once been a barrier to music discovery was now my key. I used my time at the radio station and record store digging through basement boxes, scouring record racks, and uploading forgotten local college and high school band's records. By the time I had graduated in 2013, I had racked up a healthy ratio that sustained me until the site's shutdown. I think I took the freedom what.cd offered me for granted. When the site suddenly shuttered without explanation last Thursday, I had hundreds of gigabytes of download credit left.

Books and comics were also shared on what.cd, and when one user created a request for three unpublished J.D. Salinger works that have been barred from release until 2060, many threw their proverbial coins into the wishing well, amassing a bounty worth over 6 terabytes. The only known copies of these stories was sealed away inside private, supervised rooms at Princeton and the University of Texas. In 2013, a what.cd user filled the request with scanned pages of the books, leaking the stories to the world for the first time.

This was the beauty of what.cd: its underlying suggestion that anything could be, and should, be accessible to the public. History will remember it as the Fort Knox of illegal pirating, but free music was never really the point of it—you can find free music nearly anywhere else on the internet. What.cd was ultimately an archivist project, a collaborative effort to combine popular and forgotten cultural artifacts into one place, and make it as easy as possible to experience them the way you wanted. It encouraged first-time digitization of hundreds of out-of-print and private press records, and it remained the only place on the internet where you could reliably find them. In that respect, I would argue that what.cd had a salutary effect on music and culture as a whole; after all, studies have shown that pirating does not necessarily equate to lost sales, and that people who pirate music tend to buy more music.

In college, I gave a presentation on sampling in music, pirating, and copyright law. In grading my work, my professor endearingly deemed me a "copyright communist," meaning that I had argued for equal access to artistic works for all, and disagreed with the music industry's obsession with defending capital over art. I realized at that moment how much what.cd had molded, not only my musical taste, but also my nascent political awareness, opening my mind to a world where information and cultural production was freely available.

Late Friday, the site's staff posted one last message to Twitter, celebrating the spirit that made What.CD so special and offering hope that a similar site would crop up to take its place. "We've seen what happens when thousands of people work together to build a tribute to human culture free from concern over profit or acclaim." They attached a link asking fans to donate to archive.org, a nonprofit that works diligently to catalog pretty much everything in existence, including, with Wayback Machine, the internet itself.

If you type in what.cd into that machine, and navigate to any day before November 11th, 2016, you'll see that familiar grey homepage with its static manifesto. "There are none who will lend you guidance; these trials are yours to conquer alone," it reads. "Find yourself, and you will find the very thing hidden behind this page. This is a mirage." It always seemed like a nonsensical way to manufacture mystery, but when I tried to log on Thursday morning and found it gone, I finally understood the paradox LaFrance was talking about. Like a mirage, what.cd had disappeared.

Continued Mourning

From Fact Mad, more on the loss of What CD and how nothing can compare to the personal services that the What CD community brought forth:

By now, you’ve likely heard the news: What.CD, an illegal, invite-only warehouse of music torrents, was shut down by French authorities on November 17. The online mourning that immediately followed must have been a bewildering, even unsightly phenomenon to those who didn’t enjoy privilege of membership to this private club, approximately 150,000-strong. Why the outrage, the concern? Aren’t these just the crocodile tears of wily nerds no longer able to consume music for free?

In short, no. Much more than a clearinghouse of illegal music downloads, What.CD was the latest, greatest, most sophisticated and most comprehensive music-sharing community I’ve ever been part of, and I’ve been part of many. In fact, that had these music-sharing communities never existed (had the law had its way, in other words), I would not be the person I am today. Let’s back up for a minute.

It’s 1997. I am 13 years old. Having convinced my parents to trade the closed ecosystem of CompuServe for the wide-open Netcom, I am running wild on “The Internet,” a nascent virtual world I don’t quite understand. I stumble onto IRC, a loosely organized Mordor-like network of chat rooms, and I soon meet like minds who humor me as I gush about Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM. Eventually I am deemed cool enough, or corruptible enough, and a fellow named Jim from Washington, D.C. invites me to join his private FTP server. He suggests I grab Love’s Secret Domain by Coil and Chiastic Slide by Autechre; each takes a full night to download (28.8 kbps modems max out at about 3.6 kilobytes per second). Then I listen, and I am changed forever. In these two albums — infinite others, but especially these two — I find what I did not know I had been looking for, and I see the contours of my future laid out for me, a truth I am still discovering 20 years later.

I was hooked. I downloaded music voraciously, exploring scenes and sounds I’d otherwise never know, spending what little money I had on CDs and records in the meantime. Soon enough, I became a bit player in “the scene” – a shadowy cabal of professional pirates, according to law enforcement, or a disparate network of internet-obsessed music geeks, in my telling. I eventually gained access to Checkpoint, a database of nearly everything “the scene” had released and where to download it. At the time, I was only peripherally aware of the cultural importance of what I was looking at. It was not until What.CD (and its antecedent, OiNK) came around that I put the pieces together.

What.CD is best understood as a library, or an archive, whose mission was making available to its members the entirety of recorded music known to mankind. (I found countless vinyl-only, hyper-obscure, out-of-print releases available on What.CD.) If that sounds like a lofty (or absurd) goal, it was, but What.CD came closer to achieving that goal than anything else I’ve ever known.

Moreover, What.CD was not only phenomenal for accessing music, but for discovering it too — which, in this author’s opinion, is the primary conundrum facing music listeners today. What.CD’s torrent database was tightly controlled and carefully edited, ensuring uniformity and regularity, and users could mine it via robust search facilities. But the star of What.CD’s show was its user base, who organized its vast catalog in myriad ways. Tags allowed users to search by artist, genre, style, BPM, and beyond. Recommendations abounded on the site’s in-depth discussion forums. Best of all was its “collage” functionality, a tool that allowed users to group together torrents however they liked: by artist, by label, or by more esoteric concerns (“Female electronic musicians”, “Best EPs of 2014”). No hyperbole: What.CD was a music lover’s dream come true.

What’s the point of all this? Should music always be free and readily available willy-nilly? On the contrary: I am deeply, passionately committed to the cause of fair pay for artists, musicians, and creators of all kinds. But over the past 16 years, we (consumers, artists, everyone) have been sold a false bill of goods. Copyright infringement is not stealing. And the solution proffered to us by the powers that be — streaming — has simultaneously disempowered consumers, chipping away at the very notion of “ownership” itself, while decimating the income of underground musicians. Streaming is definitively not the way forward. Its primary value proposition – convenience – is a smokescreen, a cover for entrenched interests (major labels, publishers, tech companies awash in capital chasing growth instead of profit) to trick consumers into a Faustian bargain, the endpoint of which is a narrowing, not a widening, of musicians’ role in society.

What is? For now, Bandcamp is perhaps the closest legal analogue to What.CD, although its library, and music discovery functionality, pales in comparison. It’s no substitute, but the more artists and record labels that sign on, the better it will be.

I’d like to share an excerpt from What.CD’s final statement, which may seem needlessly grandiose without context. But it is not. What.CD was perhaps the most vivid present-day exemplar of the original hacker ethic, until it wasn’t. “All information should be free. Mistrust authority—promote decentralization. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better.”

To Oink: thanks for paving the way. One remaining hope for What.CD’s legacy is that it, too, will serve as a model for whatever comes next. Learn from our successes and learn from our failings. We’ve always avoided politics; our position should be clear. So if our memory is to achieve anything, let it serve as a kind of proof. You were there. You shared an experience with hundreds of thousands of kindred explorers. Don’t forget that there are people who are willing to work to ensure that works of cultural value can be preserved and shared. Granted, we worked within the limitations of our time, place, and model, but the goal supersedes the details.

We’ve seen what happens when thousands of people work together to build a tribute to human culture free from concern over profit or acclaim. The results are beautiful. And now it’s time to move along with that in mind.

Best Music of 2016 : Anderson .Paak

 

The tale is long, syncopated, and adventurous when .Paak raps the life that he and his pack have lived. Malibu captures the panoramic scenes of the "other" as it transcends the pains of the lovely existence of being a person of color in this land of opulence and hate. But it does it with so much personality and flavor. The range is vast and the soul reaches into the realities of our shared past. Nice, solid, credible music that should represent our past as well as our future.

From Consequence of Sound:

While .Paak is skilled as a singer, rapper, lyricist, and instrumentalist (he used to drum for Haley Reinhart of American Idol fame), he’s also aware of his own limits. He’s said that while some of the songs on Malibu were written before he made 2014’s Venice, he wanted to wait until he had the right circle of collaborators in place to put them together for an album. The teamwork is ultimately what gives the hour-long Malibu its expansive shape; it was made with elite producers (like Madlib, 9th Wonder, and DJ Khalil), instrumentalists (like Pino Palladino, Robert Glasper, and .Paak’s band, The Free Nationals), singers (BJ the Chicago Kid, Sonyae Elise), and rappers (The Game, Talib Kweli, ScHoolboy Q, and Rapsody). In pure musical terms, it’s a joy of an album to play all the way through, a radiant blend of styles dense with instrumentation: a blast of horns here, a piano solo or squiggly guitar lick there, with liquid bass lines and hard-smacking drums throughout.

Parts of the album are tighter and more immediate than others. Featuring ScHoolboy Q, “Am I Wrong” is an energetic highlight that, aside from its funky grooves, features horns that keep the song charging unpredictably forward. “Room in Here”, featuring The Game and Sonyae Elise, is the catchiest song of the bunch, an ode to the ecstasy that can happen when lovers find themselves comfortably alone in a room together. “Celebrate” is a tight throwback to ’60s soul, which is not to say there’s anything stale about it. After all, Leon Bridges made it to SNL just last month on the strength of similar sounds.

A song like “Room in Here” could be purely “for the ladies” if it didn’t make .Paak’s own romantic priorities clear. It’s evidence of a defining truth about this album: It’s deeply personal. As .Paak sings on “The Season / Carry Me”: “‘Bout the year Drizzy and Cole dropped, before K-Dot had it locked/ I was sleeping on the floor, newborn baby boy/ Trying to get my money pot so wifey wouldn’t get deported.” It’s not the only song here where he references struggle. Throughout the album, .Paak focuses on the things that will keep him going should there come another time in his life when he has to sleep on a floor somewhere. He reflects on the past that made him the hype-worthy artist he is today and identifies the essential role of honest communication in a long-term romance. “If I could, I’d take you everywhere/ But you know I can’t do nothin’ with you,” he sings on “Without You”, revisiting humbler days. It’s something he had to admit in the moment, not a confession of defeat.

For its lyrical and musical scope, Malibu brings to mind a number of excellent albums, ranging from Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions to, yes, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Proving himself to be more than a unique voice on a Dr. Dre album (there have been plenty of those over the past quarter century), .Paak seems to be in total control of his talent. It might be a challenge for him to make something as relatable and soulful as Malibu again, but fortunately, the album has the kind of substance that suggests he’s built to last.

From Pitchfork:

It doesn’t take long to reach the heart of Anderson .Paak’s new album, Malibu. Just a minute into opening track "The Birds," the West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter offers: "My mama caught the gambling bug... My papa was behind them bars/ We never had to want for nuthin’/ Said all we ever need is love." His voice is warm, strained, and conversational, like a Baptist minister or your favorite uncle schooling you, and the wide-open groove has an unhurried feel. It's immediately clear: This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

Brandon Anderson Paak has seen a lot in his 29 years. His mother was a farmer from South Korea, and his father served in the Air Force and later worked as a mechanic until he was sent to prison. "I didn’t see him again until he was being buried," .Paak told Consequence of Sound in a 2015 interview. All of this life experience is reflected in Malibu, which is both his most assured and most personal project yet.

.Paak's name is more prominent these days given his recent work on Dr. Dre’s Compton, where he appeared on six of 16 tracks, but even his sophomore album, 2014's Venice, showed flashes of brilliance. Venice was an easy listen; on Malibu, .Paak celebrates his progression by acknowledging where he’s come from, the trials he’s endured and things he’s seen. "I spent years being called out my name, living under my greatness," .Paak asserts on "The Season / Carry Me," a shape-shifting album highlight. He grew up performing in church, and on the song’s second half, you can hear a rich gospel flair in his voice: "Ya moms in prison, ya father need a new kidney/ Ya family’s splittin’, rivalries between siblings/ If cash ain’t king, it’s damn sure the incentive." Much like Kendrick Lamar, .Paak skillfully depicts his surroundings while remaining in the foreground.

From Pop Matters:

Contemporary R&B music can sure get a guy down these days. The spacious beats and angst ridden lyrics that inhabit a lot of projects will probably not put a smile on your face. Over the last year or so there have been a few artists providing something of a tonic to the genre with more of a positive energy and a focus on. Artists like Raury and Chance the Rapper’s Social Experiment Collective stand out amidst a sea of ethereal tones. Another artist that should be added to the list is Anderson Paak.

How ironic that an artist with a bluesy influence offers the relief. Anderson has never been one for conventions. His 2013 EP Cover Art saw him remaking rock classics like “Seven Nation Army” with a soulful tinge, in some kind of reverse homage to the white artists appropriating African-American music in the middle of the last century. That project although brief was impressive, and with “Malibu” he carries a similar energy, but with his words alone.

The album begins with “The Bird”, probably the most elegant and understated track on the project. He waxes lyrical on the hardships of his upbringing, “We came up in a lonely castle / My papa was behind them bars.” This track serves an introduction to the life and times of Anderson and it’s the foundation upon which the tales that follow are built on. His history is a reoccurring theme on the album, but there is a clear intention to rise above his past hardships and struggles “Word to the liquor that killed my grandpa liver / I know you finally look proud, a…smiling.”

At times, his words seem like a junior accompaniment to an elaborate instrumental. The song “Parking Lot” is beautifully layered and feels like it could go on for ever. “Come Down” is also an uptown track with strong funk influences as Anderson tells anyone that bares to listen that he doesn’t want to lose his high. It is almost seems like his energy is restricted by the album and it will be interesting to see how he performs on stage when he tours later this year.

From Pretty Much Amazing Everything:

I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have had my eyes transfixed on Paak. See, just a few months later, he dropped Venice, a debut LP that introduced this creative, super-stylish emcee who can rap with breakneck ferocity and Kendrick-like rasp just as well as he can pull off a near-flawless D’Angelo-esque baritone. Even two years ago, Paak was flashing signs of brilliance with a truly unique blend of lyrical hip-hop and bebop-era R&B.

What I’m ultimately getting at here is that Malibu makes me wish I would have heard this shit two years ago.

That’s the long and short of it, really. What Paak has done with Malibu is integrate the best parts of Venice (namely “Put You On”, “Paint”, and “Luh You”) with this guiltlessly likable James Brown…thing. Paak’s got the musicianship down to a science. Now it’s clear he’s working on what his music feels like.

And for good reason. Paak has clearly been taking notes from Brown, Rafael Saadiq and D’Angelo, and his time in the studio making Malibu seems to have been spent refining every single measure to accentuate the soul in Paak’s voice. What we get as a result are monster tracks like “Heart Don’t Stand a Chance”. Listen to literally the very first line of the first verse of “Chance” and tell me your stomach doesn’t sink a little when Paak implores you to “Be careful: The idle mind is a dangerous place to be left in.”

There’s something to be said about the help Paak received in producing Malibu. “The Waters” features Madlib himself dropping a thick, sultry groove as the liquid foundation for one of the most soulful tracks on the album. Double track “The Season/Carry Me” features 9th Wonder going low-heavy on the tremendous first half. And Montreal-based house specialist Kaytranada delivers an earworm of a hook on “Lite Weight”, spearheading the dance sensibilities that make Malibu so vital.

There are so many other talking points regarding this album. Frankly, I’m a little put out that 2016 has been hit so heavily by an LP that will undoubtedly land in the year’s top ten. I thought I had a couple months to chill. But the point is this: Malibu will appeal to you, your mother, your son, your pastor, your record shop owner and your favorite local DJ’s, because you feel afraid to classify it as anything.

A Tragic Ending

If the election of Donald Trump had not been enough catastrophe for a year, I returned from a trip to New York yesterday only to be confronted with the news that the What CD site which I was a loyal member of for over the last ten years had been forced to close by the French authorities on Friday. This member-run site was a place to exchange your music in a Borges-like online library with almost every possible music ever recorded at no cost since you would also make available your treasures to others. The organization of the recorded material was meticulous and members shared their expertise graciously surpassing any other for profit music web site. I can not tell you the music that has entered my ears that under other circumstances I would have never been able to locate. It was an incredibly valuable cultural resource and it seems stupid for our capitalistic oriented world to go out and destroy this exchange which had many musicians and groups as members. I'm not sure how I will continue to learn and add to my library without this perfect resource but I'm so glad I was a member from the beginning to see what the love of music could create for those who have ears and internet access.

Here's an eloquent write-up/obituary to What CD by a previous member:

In 2007, I became obsessed with a musician named Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a nearly forgotten French eccentric who created a singular style of punk-rock deeply influenced by African music and funk. I read incessantly about her music, but I could not find a way to actually listen to it. Amazon’s catalog was limited, so I couldn’t buy a CD. Spotify didn’t exist yet. And even illicit file-sharing sites came up dry on searches for Lizzy.

So I decided to dive into a deep corner of the internet, attempting to gain access to a mythical website that was said to have all the music you’d ever heard of, and all the music you hadn’t. It was called What.cd, and it promised a lot. Its Twitter profile used to read, “Beyond here is something like a utopia—beyond here is What.CD.”

It lived up to this utopian promise, until the site was shut down on Nov. 17 after a raid by French authorities. It now reads:

Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed.

This is a tragedy for music fans, and for humanity: What.CD was an unprecedented cultural repository. It offered something close to the sum-total of humanity’s recorded musical output, organized and classified to near-perfection.

It was a musical Library of Alexandria, and now has suffered the same utter destruction as its ancient predecessor.

What exactly was What.cd?

In file-sharing jargon, it was a “torrent tracker,” which meant that the site did not actually host audio files itself. And not just anybody could join the community. (More on that below.)

As a tracker, What.cd provided downloadable “.torrent” files that connected users who already had a set of files—say a rare bootleg mp3—with other users who wanted to download them. That’s the essence of peer-to-peer file sharing. The role of the site was facilitating the sharing of music, and making music discoverable.

It also developed a rigorous self-policing culture, enforcing its draconian rules on audio quality, and aggressively removing users who did not follow these rules. In the end, it lasted for nearly ten years.

Beyond Spotify

The scope of music collected on What.cd was almost incomprehensibly vast: More than a million distinct “releases” of songs, albums, and bootlegs.

Bach cello suites. Obscure Chinese indie rock. Nigerian hip-hop. Thai psych-funk from the 1970s. Every release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, including vinyl rips and remasters. UK techno tracks that were pressed on vinyl in the 90s, with only a few hundred copies made, and uploaded by dedicated crate-diggers.

The collections of Spotify and Apple Music may seem infinite, but What.cd had thousands of albums that were not available anywhere else—and now, are not available anywhere at all. The site had about 800,000 artists as of early 2016.

“I did sound design for a show about Ceaușescu’s Romania, and was able to pull together all of this 70s dissident prog-rock and stuff that has never been released on CD, let alone outside of Romania,” one former What user told me.

Perhaps most importantly, all of this music was organized by a large community collectively obsessed with musical metadata. Album, track, and artist names were meticulously edited, organized, and collated.

In your iTunes (if you still use iTunes), you might have some files by Beyoncé (accent on the e) and others by Beyonce (no accent). That kind of error was swiftly eradicated on What. There were deep taxonomic debates in the forums about whether some newfangled genre deserved its own tag, or whether adding it would be confusing.

This problem of tagging is distinct to a vanishing era of digital audio files. Once upon a time, people owned physical media: records, tapes, CDs. Then Napster brought us into the age of digital. Listeners stored mp3s (some legal, some not) on their hard drives, transferred them to iPods, burned them onto CDs. What.cd was the last great institution of that era.

 

Now, in the age of Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, having mp3s on your computer seems as quaint as owning 8-tracks in 2007.

 

Invite-only

Gaining access to utopia is never easy, and What was no exception: New users could only gain admission through a referral from an existing user, or via a famously difficult interview process. There are endless threads online with people fretting about interviews, discussing failed interviews, and ranting about the excessively demanding process.

 

In 2007, I studied for days before submitting an interview application on What’s IRC channel. I waited several hours, staring impatiently at my computer, until a What moderator got back to me. I was then subjected to a 20-minute grilling, in which the moderator lodged obscure audio encoding questions at me: What is the difference between constant bitrate and variable bitrate mp3s? Look at these two spectrograms—which of them belongs to an mp3 that was encoded poorly? How can you tell? If you encode a lossless file at 320 kilobytes per second, and then again at 256 kilobytes per second, is this the same as encoding at 256 directly? And more.

Reader, I passed the test.

Once in, users were subjected to a complicated system of incentives to make sure everyone contributed as much as they consumed.

If you downloaded several albums of music upon arrival, without uploading files to other users, you were banned. If your download-to-upload ratio fell out of whack, even after years of contributions, your download privileges would be taken away. If you uploaded an album that was not encoded to the site’s strict standards, you’d get a warning. If you absentmindedly mislabeled a Justin Bieber album as a Taylor Swift album, you might be banned.

Nobody whom I invited managed to stay very long.

These policies may sound excessive, but they facilitated what was arguably the world’s greatest crowdsourcing effort, maintained by a community of dedicated, diverse, and knowledgeable music lovers. A team of volunteer coders created a custom CMS for the site, called Gazelle, that harnessed all of this musical knowledge.

“Collages” were one of What’s best features. Users arranged lists of albums on the site into useful categories like “Intro to free jazz” or “Bands with a male and female singer.” These were indispensable sources of musical discovery.

There were also the magical “staff picks.” These select albums were offered, for a short time, at no download cost, encouraging you to listen to music you never would have otherwise. Then there were the highly active forums, where music nerds of all stripes shared obscure recommendations and reviews.

 

Outside the law

Of course, What.cd was illegal from the beginning. (Most of it, anyway—many users were musicians who willingly added their own music to the What.cd archive.) The entire enterprise was a rejection of the notion of music copyrights, and a middle finger to the music industry’s army of lawyers.

The strict policing of users—plus the site’s low profile, and the fact that it did not actually host audio files—allowed What to deny culpability and exist in a questionable legal grey area. But only for so long.

There’s an important caveat to this issue of legality, though: The site offered much that is unavailable via legal channels, even to those willing to pay. There were the albums that weren’t available anywhere else.

Plus, most of the albums on What were available in pristine lossless formats, meaning that no audio quality had been lost in the transfer from the original recording to your computer. This may seem like audiophile snobbery, since most people can’t tell the difference between even low-quality mp3s and lossless files. But lossless files are important for other reasons, like archiving. Right now, mp3 is the dominant audio format. If mp3 gets superseded by something better, though, there is no way to convert your old mp3s to a new format without losing further audio quality. And if you have to convert again, even more is lost. With a lossless format, there is always an unvarnished original.

There is also the matter of ownership. Spotify is ubiquitous, but it is a tech company, and tech companies fail. If Spotify goes away after you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on an account for multiple years, you are left with nothing but memories.

What’s more, most streaming services use proprietary formats that make it nearly impossible, for example, to turn a Spotify playlist into an Apple Music playlist. With open formats, like mp3, FLAC, and m3u for playlists, users control everything.

Yet there is no major digital music marketplace that will even sell you open, lossless files. Itunes files are “lossy,” meaning they have already lost quality from the original recording. Same for Amazon and Google Play. Some sites, like HDTracks, offer downloads of lossless files, but the selection is limited. (There is no Lizzy, for example, a deal-breaker for me.) This means that the only way to get most albums into a lossless format that you can control is to literally buy a physical CD and rip it yourself. Or, until today, you could use What.cd.

The end of What is the end of the most complete musical database ever created by humanity. It opened my ears to sounds I could not have imagined nine years ago, at the time of my quest for Lizzy Mercier Descloux. On What, I encountered so many life-changing musical favorites, old and new: the Japanese avant-reggae band Fishmans, the Panocha Quartet’s renditions of Dvořák, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, the Blade Runner soundtrack, Swiss funk-house producer Kalabrese, and lots of weird jazz, to name very few.

For me, the end of What is a final reiteration of the ultimate lesson of 2016: Take nothing for granted. No set of values, no repository of human knowledge, no political system, no passionate community, is guaranteed safety from outside forces and from the passage of time. Nothing is too great to fail.

What now says that “all site and user data has been destroyed.” So a decade of meticulous collection and curation work has vanished into the ether. It is not unlike the whole of Wikipedia disappearing overnight.

But there is still some hope. All of the rare and unreleased music that What organized still exists somewhere, on people’s computers. And What users were usually paranoid about losing their collections—I recall reading that one user stored his on an external hard drive kept in a fire- and water-proof safe in his basement.

The treasure is still out there—we have merely lost the map.

Best Music of 2016 : Roisin Murphy

Murphy continues her orchestral theatrical calamitous ruminations with more creativity than any other pop vocalist out there in this full production, Take Her Up to Monto. Some of us lament her lack of recognition by the general public but this is really a bountiful delivery of the real goods for those who recognize gold when we see it. Let us enjoy it while it lasts!

From The Quietus:

The trick of Murphy’s program of becoming-object is that she does so without any illusions of a unified subjectivity behind it all. Even a glam fem-bot like Grace Jones seemed to snarl from behind a relatively stable subject position—she didn’t have time for your shit; all Murphy seems to hold onto for ID is her box of interchangeable dress-up parts and that masterful smirk, which somehow puts across a sense of irony without smugness; knowingness sans knowledge. But such a project also brings with it obvious dangers—spend too long playing out over the edge of your subjectivity and the abyss will inevitably shoot a few looks back at you.

But Murphy’s work has never shied away from those unsettling tensions, and the decade since her time as Molokai’s autonomous-glam-puppet has only seen her push those anxieties into increasingly novel, uncompromising spaces. Last year’s Hairless Toys wore its psychological cracks as dexterous sonic architecture, assembling a dark, sinuous tour through her character’s existential distress with more epiphanic candor than she gets credit for. Borne from the same sessions, Take Her Up to Monto is the schizophrenic underbelly of Toys’ teary composure, and its much less interested in working through earthly lived experience than it is in traversing it.

It is Murphy’s submission to the materialist topography of subjectivity, a wholesale reverence for the objectified surfaces of “self” bordering on the religious/ridiculous that will ultimately define her contribution to The Gradual Collapse of Western Culture. “He had to find religion to measure his evil against.”

Take Her Up to Monto picks up this thread of psychotic materialism more resolutely than any of her previous works, its slick and occasionally menacing sonic eccentricities suggesting an acceleration beyond the subtle insecurities of Toys’ weightless melancholy toward some fucked-up inhuman liberatory chaos ahead—music for Ballard’s High-Rise, with all the energetic pessimism and anticipation that suggests. She faces up to the fact that she’s “fucked if I do and /I’m fucked if I don’t,” and subsequently elects to let the pretty garden grow wild.

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From Drowned in Sound:

Here the disco ball is shattered and the shards fall where they may. Elements of pop, house, jazz and theatrical spoken word combine as Monto eventually reveals itself as a baroque soundtrack of sorts, one worthy of elevating grand works of science fiction and understated horror. On these nine tracks it is abundantly clear that this is Róisín Murphy’s world and she is content for us to merely sprawl about in it, opaque and oppressive as circumstances may sometimes be. “Humans are fucked”, she muses, matter-of-factly, as ‘Thoughts Wasted’ – another layered wander of disparate frequencies that ultimately dance as one - winds down. Such grim tidings are difficult to argue against especially when presented as just another cog in a machine most hypnotic.

Of course, there is every chance that those initial spells of doubt on ‘Mastermind’ are less self-reflection and more the inhabiting of a character. That’s part of what makes Murphy tick; the mystery, the imagery, the nods to everything from Italian literature to the revered music of her homeland, the complete lack of interest in writing more straightforward affairs. She is rarely obvious, never transparent and entirely impossible to pin down. Not every artist can get away with that and still register as compelling, but then not everyone can casually drop a vaudeville ode to the vagina that doubles as a proud declaration of insecurity before moving on because there are other exclamation marks to (dis)quietly attend to. Even something like ‘Lip Service’, awash with sunny holiday resort cadence, has teeth.

Monto occasionally overwhelms as its leading light pivots. Patience is rather vital as the album expands and Murphy continues to contemplate. There’s no padding here, but like any good trip into an intriguing mind you may emerge from the swell a touch dizzy. On that score, ‘Sitting and Counting’ makes for note-perfect end credits. We ought to be unsettled, though. That’s the point. Long past pop not being a dirty word; time now to embrace gloss-coated complexity.

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From Pitchfork:

Fans of underrated Irish post-disco singer Roisin Murphy rejoiced last year as she finally concluded a lengthy dry spell with the release of her third record, Hairless Toys, ending eight years of near-silence from Murphy since 2007’s excellent Overpowered. It turns out, however, that the levee really broke when she decided to get back to work, because just one year later Murphy is issuing yet another record of additional songs from those same sessions.

Unlike other past examples of second records culled from a previous session, Take Her Up to Monto offers neither a strikingly different type of songs as with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, nor are they obviously lesser leftovers like on Jay-Z & R. Kelly’s Unfinished Business. Instead, Take Her Up to Monto is more like Disc 2 of a quasi-double album, offering a set of nine tracks that display a similar tone and feel to the eight songs on Hairless Toys, and maintaining the same high level of quality established by its predecessor. 

That’s not to say though that Take Her Up To Monto is identical to Hairless Toys. Murphy has called the songs of her latest “more extreme: more dynamic or more complex or more pop ... If they were siblings, Hairless Toys would be the nice child and Take Her Up to Monto more of a problem child.” It’s not a dramatic shift, but an evident one—as stable and consistently enjoyable Hairless Toys was, Take Her Up to Monto follows that sonic blueprint but ups the ante with even more experimentation and risk-taking, showcasing Murphy’s range and depth as a songwriter to a fuller extent.

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Best Music of 2016 : Will Long

Late night semblance on the big moon is much appreciated in these dark lands of somber latitudes. The aura is just right with these Will Long pieces that contain DJ Sprinkles overdubs. Mercy, I need this music.  Sometimes its difficult to articulate what works-but this works. I'm feeling ripe.

From Discogs:

"We live in an era when 'change' is a soundbite to sell more of the same old ideas, and 'revolution' has more to do with social trends than social transformation. Will Long's deep house debut on Comatonse Recordings examines that pack of lies dubbed 'change' from the sweaty dancefloor, sounding the aftermath of failure around attempts at equality in 'progressive' societies. Made with a simple setup of rhythm composer percussion, polyphonic synth chords, and rack sampler vocals, these tracks have a minimal rawness that contends we've been wrong the whole time about how far the US - and the world - has come. Although these tracks are sonically unlike anything Long has produced as Celer or his other aliases for minimal and ambient experiemental audio, they share a stripped-yet-full sound that reacts against overproduction - within the dance music industry, and societies at large.

Each track is accompanied by an overdub from DJ Sprinkles, and the packaging features illustrations by Tsuji Aiko. The project will initially be released as a series of three multi-disc vinyl sets (two x2 EP sets and one x3 EP set, seven discs in all), followed by a double CD release with poster. Coming soon to comatonse.com, Will's online shop and Boomkat."


We're in for a treat this year, with 3 Comatonse Vinyl EPs and a full Double CD from Will Long on his first venture into deep house. Super minimal productions, but done exquisitely. To some the simplicity may be misconstrued as "amateur" but to me these tracks sound expertly produced, with a swimming pool of pad to dive right into.

Thaemlitz provides the signature Sprinkles touch on each side. The one for me is the "Chumps" Overdub, with a real sense of retouching that emphasise the sample of "No progress has been made", the strings, the swirling piano. Get melancholic about the world we live in, reflect on the "progression", "hope" and "change" we hear so much about.

And although we may not see any original Sprinkles material for quite some time, we at least have this wonderful series of overdubs. It's all here.

From Bookmat:

Tokyo, Japan-based American artists, Will Long and DJ Sprinkles, present sublime, durational deep house studies examining the dancefloor in light of contemporary socio-political inequalities and failed illusions of ‘Revolution’ and ‘Progression’.

It begins a series of three vinyl sets and eventually a 2CD package that effectively compare deep house’s original, economical aesthetics and function as the soundtrack to marginalised society, with its current position; repackaging and overproducing the same old ideas with empty sloganeering, operating as the catalyst of social trends, rather than an agent of social transformation.

They both make their point subtly but clearly. Two sides feature extended 10+ minute tracks by Will Long, created using relatively minimal means of rhythm composer percussion, polyphonic synth chords, and rack sampler vocals, while the other two sides provide overdub Sprinkles versions.

The beautifully absorbing results - which sound miles away from Long’s gentler ambient and experimental work - prove that it is possible to elicit subtle yet optimal responses with a well-selected palette of grooves and samples, in this case from Jesse Jackson and Rap Brown, rather than current vogue for showmanship and more-as-more arrangements.

DJ Sprinkles' overdubbed contributions quite literally and psycho-acoustically resonate that intention, tactfully rending a farther, lush physicality and soulfulness thru deftly applied daubs of glutinous subbass pressure, airy strings and subtly shimmering FX, really offsetting Long's trax in a whole other dimension; and via disciplined, stripped-down, full-bodied production values that rank as perhaps the deepest yet in Sprinkles’ already perfectly formed canon.

They could be taken as a call for humbleness and meditative efficiency over cliched buildups and preening vanities, perhaps a comment on “deep" house as the equivalent of a fresh tattoo or sweatshop t-shirt slogan.

From Decoder, an interview with Will Long:

BP: What was your first exposure to house music? Did you gravitate toward any particular artists or labels?
Will Long: House music didn’t come to me early. It wasn’t until I left Mississippi after high school and lived in Memphis and New Orleans that I started getting house and electronica records in shops. Trax Records was a major discovery, especially since many of the sleeves have that photo of the Chicago sunset — that’s instantly appealing. Artists like Adonis, Jesse Velez, and Jungle Wonz were some of the first I got, and I still like them.

Aside from the obvious “ambient house” or “ambient techno” intersections, do you see any overlap in ambient and house music?
Not really. Ambient to me is pretty much opposite in every way from house, without much of a style for form to follow. I started making ambient music because I really didn’t know anything at all about music, and if you’re just starting out to actually record music, simple is best. I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno, Oval, and the Hafler Trio, so that was my primary inspiration. I connected it with something more personal to give it some kind of meaning and connection, and went from there. It was good for me, but it has its limitations too.

House music and particularly the different styles of house (deep house, Chicago house, acid house, etc..) have fairly traditional parameters to follow, and as someone who hasn’t been making music with any of those rules, I found it to be refreshing change to find a structure to follow. Of course there’s no concrete rule, but to follow the rules of a style you respect feels like some kind of compliment to the tradition. Besides, I feel like I learned more about music from making house in one year than I did making ambient in 10 years.

Even though the style may be completely different, there’s surely some technique overlap, but it doesn’t always apply the same way, or with the same tools.

How did your early experiments with the genre go?
I’m more interested in traditional electronic instruments, so I used a really minimal setup: a rhythm machine, a synth, and a sampler. It felt really right when I found the right combination with a minimal setup. Going back and listening closely to so many old house tracks, many of them are not always as complex as they seem. I always liked the Roland TR-series rhythm composers, and I had had one for several years already, but digging deep into the capabilities and sequencing entire tracks internally opened things up. It’s amazing what those machines can do.

It was the same with synths — there are always certain synths that sound good for different kinds of music, and the synths I used for ambient didn’t match house. When I started working with chords on polyphonic synths from the 80’s, I knew immediately that was the sound I was looking for. Using chords was something new for me also. It wasn’t ever a concern in the past.

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Best Music of 2016 : La Torre Volume 1

 

 

 

Here is a collection of music from an era roasted in the best tradition of disco and funk jazz-what you want to listen to in the later hours of a long celebratory evening or when you think things will always be alright. Soaked in the aural coolants of yesteryear this selection works today and makes you forget about our quickly dissipating country.

From Juno Plus:

It certainly feels like International Feel has entered a new phase since settling into life on Ibiza after a relocation from Uruguay. The past 18 months or so has seen Mark Barrott’s label coax a new album out of island icon Jose Padilla, embark on a rewarding series of mini-LPs from CFCF, Len Leise and Wolf Müller & Cass. along with more single-shaped fare. A second Sketches From An Island album from Barrott himself arrived earlier this year and it transpires the artistic direction was inspired by his extended residency DJing at Hostel La Torre, a venue on Ibiza’s West Coast.

The residency has clearly proved to be a creative eye-opener for Barrott as he’s just announced details of a compilation that gathers together some of the balmy music that have helped soundtrack the weekly setting of the sun. Due out as the inaugural release on the newly-formed Hostel La Torre Recordings, the 15-track Hostel La Torre Ibiza: Volumen Uno canvasses a wide spectrum of Balearically-minded sounds with the psychedelic sanza of Francis Bebey, reissue favourites Finis Africae and Penguin Cafe Orchestra rubbing shoulders with more contemporary fare from Antinote artist Domenique Dumont, Hatchback and Andras Fox. Barrott himself has the following to offer on how the compilation and label came into being:

“As some of you may know, last summer I started DJ’ing every Thursday at Hostel La Torre, a venue on the west coast of Ibiza with a truly amazing sunset.  I don’t really consider myself a DJ, yet the chance to ‘soundtrack the sunset’ for 16 weeks a year was an opportunity too good to pass up and little did I know when I started, how influential it would become on my music making and in particular, this summer’s second Sketches from an Island album.

Getting the chance to see first hand how people react to this kind of music (particularly around sunset time) became hugely inspirational and as winter became spring, I was approached by Javier (the owner of La Torre) and Pete Gooding (in charge of the music policy) to help put together their first compilation and it’s been a wonderful, stressful and (quite) exciting journey to be a part of this project, which ultimately gives us the opportunity to share all of this amazing and exotic music with a wider audience.”

 

From Resident Advisor:

Given the new strains of Balearic music emerging over the last decade or so, it was only a matter of time before a series like La Torre began. Following in the tradition of José Padilla's Café Del Mar collections, which celebrated that bar's historic dance nights in the '80s, La Torre Volumen Uno recreates the laissez faire spirit of parties at Ibiza's Hostal La Torre. This first edition is handled by one of La Torre's two resident DJs, not to mention a key figure in Balearic's new wave: International Feel label owner Mark Barrott.

La Torre Volumen Uno is grounded in a notion that popularized by early Balearic figures like Padilla and Alfredo: that the music of Ibiza isn't defined by a sound so much as a feeling. You know it when you hear it, but you may have a hard time describing it to the uninitiated. Barrott's selections find him traversing an eclectic array of laid-back music that spans decades, all tested for sun-starched afternoons and dazzling sunsets. There's the minimal murmurings of Cameroonian artist Francis Bebey's "Forest Nativity." Spanish super-group Finis Africae appear with the sleepy-eyed crawl of "Managua," and the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra add the light-footed, acoustic jaunt of "Air A Danser." Following the collection's headier music, the guitar-strummed strut of Ahmed Fakroun's "Nisyan" is sure to get the blood moving, as will the eerie, string-laced sounds of Il Guardiano Del Faro's "Disco Divina."

Much of the compilation's charm comes from how persuasively Barrott captures the Ibiza vibe by combining old rarities with contemporary favorites. Domenique Dumont's 2015 gem "Comme Ça" almost sounds like an extended outro to Bebey's hushed, breezy atmospheres. András's "Gold Coast (Surfer's Paradise Mix)" is a twilight drama in miniature, almost Raymond Chandler-esque with its sweeping strings and soft-lit organ. Not to be outdone, Barrott includes one of the standouts from his debut album, the elegant "Deep Water." It's a testament to the resurgence of this undefinable sound that the newer music meshes so seamlessly with that of the past.

From RA on Dominique Dumont:

A couple of months back, Antinote released a record that came to its attention through a chance find at a Paris flea market. The music on Paki & Visnadi's Imaginary Choreography cassette was then issued on vinyl for the first time, 31 years after it was produced. The label's latest release, Comme Ça by Domenique Dumont, has a sweet, faded quality that sounds like it, too, was rescued from a forgotten pile of secondhand tapes.

As it turns out, Comme Ça is a completely new release, and unlike Imaginary Choreography, it comes with no context or backstory. Little is known about Dumont, except that he lives in Latvia. The two opening tracks—"Comme Ça" and "L'Esprit De l'Escalier"—set slinky French vocals against a dubby backdrop of synths and steel drums. Both are lovely, and it would've been understandable if Dumont made a whole record in this vein. But the vocals disappear for good on "La Basse Et Les Shakers," an energetic Afro-house tune reminiscent of fellow Antinote act Albinos.

Comme Ça's B-side slopes away from the dance floor and towards something more horizontal—this is music for hammocks or sun lounges. There's some of Jon Hassell's fourth world concept in "Un Jour Avec Yusef," whose buttery percussion and stretched-out guitar transports you to an imagined tropical paradise. "La Bataille De Neige" takes a conventional dub rhythm and pretty melody, smothering it in tape hiss; "Le Château De Corail" closes the LP with something Leyland Kirby might produce if he took The Caretaker to the Caribbean. Dreamy keys float by while the looping needle stuck in a runout groove sounds like waves lapping at a shore.

What's most impressive about Comme Ça is how much ground it covers in so little time, sliding by in a breezy 25 minutes. Its brevity is central to its appeal: Comme Ça teases and beguiles, like the final slither of a setting sun.

 

Best Music of 2016: Wadada Leo Smith & Vijay Iyer

Earlier this year I was lucky to attend a concert of this experienced and thoughtful duo in DC-their music translates very well in a live setting, laying out the foundations for a logical and spiritual journey with their collaborative interplay. Likewise the album reveals Smith's strength and subtleties, making me return to his earlier work which there is good amount and all of it adventurous and rewarding. Both players just keep on growing laying out a fertile future for new jazz.In times like ours, we need this music to paint our future.

From Burning Ambulance:

A large portion of the album consists of the multi-part title track, “A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke,” which was inspired by both the work and notebooks of Indian visual artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The correlation is not direct; her artwork acts not as a visual score, but rather an interpretive and impressionistic influence. The first section features Smith’s trumpet performing alone, only to be joined by Iyer’s electronics, and then, in turn, his piano as well. Both men possess immediately recognizable voices on their respective instruments. Wadada Leo Smith often sends out bold, tight clusters of notes. The flurries of notes are performed clearly and purposefully, and repeated listening reveals the architecture present in each fragment. Vijay Iyer performs with a great awareness of dynamics, his piano providing a harmonically rich bed that gives the sound its quiet density.

From its beginnings, the piece runs a gamut of approaches. At times, the two reach a level of delicacy approaching silence, while at other times, they enter a slightly louder zone, utilizing freer rhythms and tonalities. Smith’s trumpet sings plaintively and is often the most immediate presence to the casual listener. But Iyer never sinks completely into the background. His lines simultaneously show great sensitivity and independence. These two musicians demonstrate a wonderful telepathy, and exemplify the kind of egalitarian beauty possible in the duo format.

While the title piece certainly takes center stage on the album, it is bookended by two other pieces. The first, “Passage,” is credited to Iyer and is gentle; it seems to showcase the pianist, even though he plays quite softly through the majority of the song. He only gets louder when responding to Smith’s own soloing.

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From The Arts Fuse:

If my memory is trustworthy, Smith has remained a remarkably consistent musician. His brilliant, optimistic tone is intact and he always seems to be listening deeply as well as playing. Smith’s new series of duets with the remarkable pianist Vijay Iyer was an inevitability; among his many projects, Iyer was a member Smith’s Golden Quartet. In his notes for the album, the pianist explains what sometimes happened between them when they played: “In quartet performances, Wadada and I often became a unit within the unit generating spontaneous duo episodes as formal links. In the process, a space of possibility emerged that introduced me to other systems of music-making.”

A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke is the flowering of that “space of possibility.” The album is made up of a seven-part suite of improvisations, framed by “Passage,” an opening piece by Iyer and “Marian Anderson,” a concluding composition from Smith. The music here is precise and quietly evocative, peaceful and gently probing. After a few moments of complete silence, Iyer’s “Passages” begins with the barely audible sound of pairs of single notes that tread carefully over an occasional chord struck from deep in the bass. Smith enters, at a whisper, with long tones. The repetitiveness of the rhythm is eventually broken up when Iyer moves onto what might be thought of as double time, but the watchful, carefully articulated mood is never dissipated.

The suite begins with a kind of fractured fanfare from Smith. He is joined by long, hollow tones generated electronically. The rest of this section takes place over the repetitions of a two-note phrase emanating from the bass. (Several numbers in this suite feature a sober background of electronic sounds.) Part two begins with Iyer again quietly laying out a vague path; Smith then joins him.

The suite is dedicated to and inspired by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, whose striking line drawings, most likely influenced by architectural sketches, are currently being displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (through June 5). The spontaneous improvisations recorded here were prepared for after the musicians’ discussed her art and philosophy. Their emphasis on a clear and delicate minimalism is indicated by the titles of individual pieces, such as “Uncut Emeralds” or “A Cold Fire.” The latter composition is the one threatening cut on the album — both musicians come off as agitated, even anxious. Elsewhere, as in “The Empty Mind Receives,” the listener is presumably the “empty mind” invited to receive the music. Iyer’s pacific playing  is matched and opposed by the yearning sounds of Smith’s trumpet in this suite of intelligent, musically engaging improvisations.

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From Ben Ratliff at the NY Times:

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith emerged in the 1960s and went along with some of the radical practices of that era in jazz and improvised music, but not all of them. He seemed skeptical around traditional harmony, but he liked structure, dynamics and intimacy. Then and still, he knows the power of a single musical gesture and cuts a clearing around himself when he plays: He uses open, full, melodic cries, and then grainy, blurry, throttled ones; he plays in recognizable rhythm for a short period or lets his phrases crumble.

Mr. Smith, 74, and the pianist Vijay Iyer, 30 years younger, have established a close connection since Mr. Iyer played in Mr. Smith’s band, the Golden Quartet, in the late aughts. “A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke” is their first duo record, as well as Mr. Smith’s first recording for ECM since “Kulture Jazz” in 1993 and, before that, the great and out-of-print 1979 album “Divine Love.” The new record takes its title from a line in the diaries of Nasreen Mohamedi, the Indian visual artist who died in 1990, and whose drawings and photographs are being exhibited at the Met Breuer. A large part of the record — a seven-part suite with the same title as the album — is inspired by that work and shares some of its characteristics: repetition and mysticism, bold purpose and open space, abstraction and gorgeousness. (Mr. Iyer has a performance residency at the museum, until March 31; on the last two days, he will perform with Mr. Smith. The performances are sold out.)

The album is bookended with compositions by Mr. Iyer and Mr. Smith, and in the middle comes the suite, credited to them both: delicate improvised music with an arc, from rigor practiced in turns to a more impassioned, breathing-together quality.

In the movement titled “A Divine Courage” — the fourth of the seven parts — each musician complements the other’s purposeful improvised phrases, quiet and slow to the point of vulnerability; in the sixth, “A Cold Fire,” they race together, but carefully.

Much of the music feels transitory, like smoke escaping. But “Notes on Water,” the last part of the suite, wants to stick around. Here, Mr. Iyer plays electric piano, letting mellow notes linger, and Mr. Smith plays in a seriously fine abstract-ballad style, experimenting with long phrases, developing a language of shouts and whispers through the horn. It and the track that follows it, Mr. Smith’s “Marian Anderson,” are the dramatic spikes in a fairly austere record.