Blog: Big Shot Magazine

Michael Diamond (a.k.a Mike D ) and Adam Horovitz ( Ad-Rock ), the surviving members of the Beastie Boys , have signed a deal with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, for a book celebrating the life and times of one of the music world's most influential and groundbreaking bands. The book is as-yet untitled, but publisher is expected to be release the retrospective in the fall of 2015. Spiegel & Grau's publisher Julie Grau told the New York Times that the book deal had been discussed [...]

★★★☆☆ Teej fosters a strength setting up a set of deep house that prides itself on the exactness of its level head, the Canadian looking you square in the eye and daring you to test him. Completely, authoritatively in control, he’s not here to lift you up, or maybe even entertain you; his task-mastery, ignorant to the title’s lo-fi suggestions, pays to pay you physical attention. Pro-fortitude without being stiff or tuneless, color is limited to transient flecks ("Right at Home"), making it a perfect disconnection for the end of the day. "Liking Your [...]

When a single by a recently formed duo garners the attention of heavyweight jocks like Tony Humphries, Sinden and Justin Robertson well before its release, it's safe to say that the artists in question are onto something. Such is the case for DJ pair Semedo , whose '90s influenced deep house nugget "Love Illusion" for Body Work raised eyebrows well before its official release last month. With an upcoming EP on the way for Kerri Chandler's MadTech (download their "After Midnight" here ), it's looking like 2013 will be a breakout year for the twosome. On [...]

• Semedo DJ Mix_April
• After Midnight - (MTDL11) Semedo

★★★★☆ Sidling up to you with the softest of electronic pop and R&B via some attachment to post-dubstep/meta-bass subsidiaries, Brooklynites Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett stretch their arms wide to show they have a lot of love to give. Except everything’s in miniature, bringing music boxes into the studio to use as a metronome and reimagining the grace of its pirouetting ballerina. However tender and fresh-faced, the presence of an anonymous puppet master watching every move they make shows that beckoning for an embrace isn’t enough. "Overseer" is that casual, smoke-blowing observer slash noxious [...]

When it was announced that Dave Smith (father of MIDI and Sequential Circuits) was to team up with Roger Linn (Linndrum) to create an innovative new instrument, it was rumored to take the analog community by storm. That storm has of course touched down, and ravaged all preconceived notions of what drum machines can do. For starters, this unit isn’t exactly a drum machine. It is a drum synthesizer. Which in short means that when you play sounds, you are not just simply recalling samples from a ROM chip, you are actually creating drums from analog and digital oscillators. How [...]

Despite  LCD Soundsystem  releasing the celebratory documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits  in 2012 chronicling the end of the band and continually maintaining that the famed dance-punk outfit is now forever in the past tense, rumors have been periodically popping up stating the opposite since the New York band called it a day in 2011. Call these rumblings wishful thinking. With DFA Records' 12-year anniversary party taking place next month in New York City, frontman James Murphy  felt it was necessary to take to Facebook last night and nix any scuttlebutt that the much beloved band would [...]

★★★★☆ Owner of a well-worn passport, Andy Cato sidesteps going around the world in 80 raves and creates instrumental reflections out of check-ins, layovers and time to kill. Hotel lobbies, lock-ins, road trips and terminals are his canvas, as the co-captain of the good ship Groove Armada re-masters lost cassettes, audio doodles and sonic postcards, in some cases rebuilding them from scratch to preserve their memory. Production both plush and tremulous could just well have seen Cato holed up in an orchestrally-extended studio ("The Coastal Path") for years on end rather than revisiting a [...]

Brothers' Vibe Top 10 for April 2013 1. Jimpster - "Rollergirl" (Freerange Records) 2. Be - "Invisible Heaven" (Hudd Traxx) 3. Detroit Swindle - "Nothing Else Matters" (Dirt Crew Recordings) 4. René Audiard - "Cywilizacja" (Blank Slate) 5. Jenifa Mayanja - "Heading Into Tomorrow" (Sound Warrior Recordings) 6. Andrey Pushkarev - "Gingo Biloba" (Circus Company) 7. John Devecchis - Find A Way EP (Instinkt) 8. Baby Ford - "Ugold Series II" (Ugold) 9. Black Jazz Consortium - "Codes & Metaphors 33 (Soul People Music) [...]

★★★★☆ The comeback of techno X-factors Sandwell District is a meticulous unsheathing of tongs and hammer. Protecting their territory, setting a scene of grim isolation on an eerily quiet battle-scarred backdrop, Function and Regis draw out their pincer movement that you know is coming, but are still thrilled by when it develops the shadows. Suffice to say you have to buy into this protracted build-up if it’s just you and the stereo for company, but Fabric patrons will value the claustrophobia driven to banging down the doors. The liquid drops of a Terminator finding [...]

★★★☆☆ The Frenchman teeming with 12s checks out the past but respects it rather than obsesses over it. Weighty house tunes know where they came from and where they sit now, Franck Roger starting with a slate of clean rhythms, sizing up the then and now, and finishing by polishing up the deep. The vocal track "Sands of Time" could come from any house era, and parallel to the title, Roger is creating his own timeline remixing the evolution of man diagram (pertinent also, as his last album was called "We Walk to Dance"). [...]

Australian experimental electro-rock band PVT , formerly signed to Warp Records who are now with the Brooklyn label Felte Sounds, have recently released their fourth album, Homosapien . Drummer Laurence Pike spoke with us via Skype about a range of topics at the end of the band's recent Australian tour. Congrats on the new album. Did you feel that recording it on home soil in an old, rural Australian mansion gave the album a different energy? Laurence Pike: First and foremost I think being altogether in the [...]

★★★★☆ A real mish-mash third time up from Timo Maas, ploughing what could be termed a dance-punk route that finds thrills in hacking into computers on the run, while including 2011’s Brian Molko collaboration "College ‘84," reasonable hip-hop outing "Grown Up" with Mikill Pane, and crystal-tipped house wandering star "Tantra." After a ponderous, Asian-pinned opening that doesn’t really set the tone other than being one divergent strand amongst many, it’s the sub-goth quiet storms involving road-trippers Katie Cruel and James Lavelle that may leave you hanging, compounded by the twiddles of "Abundance" aiming for edge of [...]

Emerging during the '90s, a time when DJs earned their reputations from throwing down on the decks, not cake at their audiences , Timo Maas literally came out of nowhere. Raised in a small town in Germany, his story of musical fascination and desire to DJ and produce music becomes interesting after he issues his life altering remix of Azzido Da Bass' "Doom's Night" crafted with then studio partner Martin Buttrich. The remix instantly makes Maas a hot commodity on the European trance and progressive house scene and leads to a stream of high profile remix and [...]

★★★★☆ At coffee table level it keeps you company during your day-to-day. At tantric level your aura gets a gentle but thorough workout, and at tightly packed/cheek to cheek dance floor level, it’s a show of love occupying its own plain of grooving. Intense out of a conversely subtle framework shaping spirituality — one wispy synth line or string quiver reappearing in the distance makes all the difference — the profound techno elevation of Fred Peterkin lifts you just off the floor, but leaves enough floating room to be felt. See "Even Greater," doing deep house [...]

★★★★☆ Athletic electro funk pogo-ers Andy Harber and Richard Roberts pull up a neon-coloured legwarmer with utterly groovy avant guardianship high-fiving the right side of plastic. Wondrously-tipped and making deceptive its united variations in tempo, it’s as if Letherette have made their way out the other side of a chillwave fog and sound thrilled at new discoveries seen in sharp focus. Putting boogie in the beats scene and swapping its dark glasses for oversized star-shaped specs, the cool vibrates from kitsch touches and Gallic nods connecting the boldly retro and forward-thinking. Doing Justice on [...]

★★★☆☆ Bass — a twin stroke turbo of skidding past your ears and shuffling your vital organs. Booty-hunting ragga — brought in to hype the party until the cops shut it down. And dusty dub — sent bouncing into a saw-toothed spotlight. Even if you think it’s a 19-track statement featuring a lot of familiar sounds, faces and samples — as big a rush as Bring the Ruckus provides, there’s no denying some same old stories — it seems to be filling a nice gap between EDM and bro-step through its big dipper of [...]

After weeks of teasing Daft Punk finally released their new single "Get Lucky" at 12:01 today. As heard on a  commercial aired during Saturday Night Live aired in March and a trailer video shown at Coachella, the disco jam features vocals by Pharrell Williams and guitar work by Chic axeman Nile Rodgers. "Get Lucky" appears on the French duo's forthcoming Random Access Memories due out on May 17. As previously reported, the twosome will premiere the album in its entirety on the day of its release at the Wee Waa Show, [...]

Grammy award-winning New York City-based DJ/producer/remixer Peter Rauhofer has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, according to a post by Rauhofer's manager, Angelo Russo, on the artist's Facebook. The Austrian native known for his big room house records produced under the alias Club 69 ("Let Me Be Your Underwear," "Take A Ride" featuring Connie Harvey and Jocelyn Brown), plethora of releases on his Star 69 label, remixer of an astounding array of pop tracks and work as a promoter on the gay party circuit, was diagnosed with the tumor after he suffered a seizure and was [...]

★★★★☆ Must...not...use...the...phras e...musical journey... However, both discs start with hall-of-famer François K asking you whether you are dancing comfortably with the offer of poolside house and funky grins, before progressing into barbarian techno seeing the spinner turn from easygoing accommodator to sinew-snapping overlord. Kevorkian is chancing his arm to be honest; his ears have obviously never left the streets, yet you’d hazard a guess that not everyone who starts with him stays to the end. Seeing the sun dip until eyeballing its fiery fury quickly dissolves the homely introductions, Daniel Avery & [...]

After posting an album teaser on YouTube back in March, British techno master Jon Hopkins has shared the first track from his upcoming fourth solo album, Immunity , due out June 4 on Domino Recordings. "Open Eye Signal" is a rollicking cut that rolls along at a breezy clip, clocking in at nearly eight minutes in length. Hopkins will open for Four Tet on May 8 at Webster Hall in New York City, so here's hoping he shares a few new tunes during his set.