Blog: Little White Earbuds

Witnessing Paul Rose's perpetual aesthetic evolution has been a thrilling and often confounding experience. While the UK producer best known as Scuba came into prominence making darker dubstep between 2007-8, that sound didn't define him for long. Invariably brave enough to try new styles even as the spotlight grew brighter around him, Rose has moved ever further from his starting and fully integrated his house and techno influences. Now, as his third album Personality looms on the horizon, it's somewhat difficult to believe it's made by the same guy introduced by A Mutual Antipathy . This week's [...]

• Scuba - Flash Addict

[ Skam ] Before Autechre were Autechre, they were, for the briefest of moments, Lego Feet. Rob Brown and Sean Booth's 1991 LP under the moniker came and very quickly went on Manchester's Skam label, where another purported Autechre offshoot, Gescom, put forth its peculiar discography. In the more than 20 years that have passed since it dropped, it's developed the kind of mythic aura (and Discogs prices) [...]

[ Emphasis Recordings ] Steven Tang has covered a lot of ground since debuting on his own Emphasis Recordings in 1998. Whether as Obsolete Music Technology, Misguided, or under his own name, the Chicago producer has tackled several sides of Chicago house and incorporated wider influences. He dove deep into dreamy techno and whipped up a frenzy with more jacking house, often finding the complimentary points between the styles. Yet in all that time he's never [...]

[ Cave Paintings ] Those keeping tabs on the crude daubings of Cave Paintings know the score by now. One session, one take. All analog, all Andy Blake, mastered directly to the vinyl lathe, with no digital interference. Cave Paintings appears to be the most personal of all of Blake's passion projects, but after the ferociously prolific and short-lived of output of Dissident, and with the newest of his new labels, In [...]

Zach Steinman and Sam Haar make up the New York-based duo Blondes, who for the last few years have traded in lush, live takes on dance music motifs. Certainly "live" is thrown around a lot as an adjective for any music that's even remotely unpolished, but for Blondes it's actually a central aspect. Their tracks are honed from a constant flow of jam-outs and live performances, and the results typically feel intuitive and open, full of a kind of elongated euphoria. Over the last year, they've worked with the RVNG Intl. label for a series of 123s that show them [...]

[ Uzuri ] Sean Hernandez is apart from a lot of the producers of Chicago house in that unlike many who favor the genre, he is actually a native of the city. To date his output has included a couple of ethereal sounding EP's on M>O>S as well as harder-nosed fare on Eargasmic and Uzuri. The Londonium EP marks Hernandez's second outing for Uzuri and only one of two EPs he released in [...]

[Hessle Audio] Dubstep at 124 beats per minute? What with Pinch's recent releases on Swamp 81 and this Hessle Audio debut from London/Berlin wunderkind Objekt, you'd think this almost were a "thing." Sure, "Cactus" isn't really dubstep, but it sure sounds like it. Lurching to life with a demented swagger - those tough, deadened drums halfway between techno and metallic dubstep that have become Objekt's trademark - "Cactus" lets off little squiggles of LFO that sound like they crawled out [...]

[ Harbour City Sorrow ] "True house music" - the term rolls off the tongue these days, and many would have you believe it cannot be made without 707 handclaps and an MPC full of Gil Scott Heron quotes. Not only does this kind of thinking limit one's creativity, it ignores a very fruitful decade of house made in (and with) the digital age. Consider, however, electro: it's hard to even conceive [...]

[Hotflush Recordings] Over the past year the music released by Hotflush has become ever more imposing. Grandiose techno such as Paul Woolford & Psycatron's "Stolen," Scuba's own driving and melodic "Adrenaline," the recent Locked Groove 123 - all have seen the imprint grow ever more suited to the biggest rooms while, thankfully, never straying too close to lurid territory. But while the imprint's output has remained high quality, there has also been an encroaching gloss - and conservatism - that [...]

Some producers can plod away for half of their careers and still sound as nondescript as the next faceless electronic music maker sitting in their bedroom trying to replicate the sounds of the music they love. Others hit their stride straight away, indelibly forging their mark on everything they touch. Dave Henson under his Nochexxx handle has achieved the latter with just three proper releases in a little over a year, carving out a sound for himself via hotly tipped emissions on Ramp and Werk Discs. In his earliest musical incarnation he played keys in the English post-rock band Gwei-Lo, [...]

• Nochexxx - LWE Podcast 111: Nochexxx

LWE's 75th podcast, mixed by Baaz, was a wonderfully smooth mix full of his trademark deepness. Be sure to add it to your collection before it's archived this Friday, February 10th.

01. Helium Robots, "Jarza" [ Running Back ] ( buy ) Like Dissident, the label they first appeared on, Helium Robots seemed to burn bright and fast, falling silent after two tracks in 2008 for Andy Blake's since completed imprint. Then in late 2011, the UK-based duo of Ewan Willmott and Lydia Jones showed their first flicker of life in nearly four years by remixing Lana Del Rey, of all people. Helium Robots appear at full power on the Jarza EP for Running Back, delivering two timeless originals that come backed [...]

Penique Productions [ Groovement ] In an interview from 2010 , Ka§par referred to his music as "out of the norm" and cited his Portuguese residence as a contributing factor that kept him from breaking through. In this day and age, geographic location plays less of a role in deciding artist viability than the former. Ka§par's style is nominally house, but walks an interesting and perhaps paradoxical [...]

[ Type Records ] Up on techno's Mount Olympus sits Chain Reaction, content in the fact that few techno labels have ever been quite so revered. Where Basic Channel invented and perfected a sound, they drafted a team of like-minded cohorts to expand that sound, and records such as Vladislav Delay's Multila and Vainqueur's Elevation have few equals. Unfortunately, some of this stuff remains rather difficult to find (unlike Ernestus and von Oswald's own work), and [...]

[ State Of Joy ] Entering underground consciousness as one third of the much-hyped "purple trinity" (alongside Joker and Gemmy) that broke through the Bristol underground in 2008, Guido makes quirky and idiosyncratic dubstep, imbued with eccentricity and a keen ear for melodic progression. His 2010 debut LP on Punch Drunk, Anidea , was a richly satisfying record that scaled the emergent hinterland between dubstep and R&B, adding a bounty of [...]

Peter Kersten first tried his hand at producing in 2000, releasing his first ever effort on Dial, the label he had just set up with friends Carsten Jost and Paul Kominek (Turner). His melancholic, measured brand of house and techno has been consistent in its quality for more than ten years, thirty singles, five full length albums and around fifty remixes. In the realm of electronic music, maintaining such a consistency of quality is rare; having your first releases sound remarkably undated over this length of time is almost unheard of, yet this rings true for Kersten's music. With Lawrence [...]

[Tresor] If you read past interviews with Vince Watson, there's an easily identifiable trend. Time and time again, the Scotsman turns away from being associated with Detroit. "But I'm not from there, I'm from Glasgow," he says (or words to that effect). To Watson - a man who takes inspiration from many places - it seems an incongruous connection. It's not, of course. For the past decade or more he's been releasing music with a heavy debt to the city. [...]

[White] Julius Steinhoff and Oskar Offermann sharing a 123. Not much of surprise, is it? Based in Hamburg and Berlin, respectively, the artists have many ties. Last year, for instance, Offermann remixed Moomin's "Sweet Sweet" for Steinhoff's Smallville imprint. And to state the obvious, the pair's individual styles are highly complimentary, too. Both have a propensity for sleek, basics-are-best house. In saying that, Offermann's cut - found on the B-side of Faces #6 - [...]

[ Our Circula Sound ] As Shifted matures, his techno flows more fluidly and luxuriously: it doesn't take an expert to tell there's a difference between his booming remix of Furesshu's "Lucid" on Project Squared and last year's smoother "Reach" on Syndrome Z. Fellow UK techno producer Sigha opens up his Our Circula Sound imprint for its first non-Sigha release, and Shifted provides his most expansive, thoughtful tracks yet for the fledgling label. If Shifted's early [...]

[ Pittsburgh Tracks ] It was like Pittsburgh Track Authority sprung from the creative womb fully formed. The group - consisting of Preslav Lefterov, Tom Cox and Adam Ratana - debuted last year on Lerato's esteemed Uzuri imprint, unveiling a full-bodied, multifaceted sound that had no trouble articulating its aims. Utilizing their intimate knowledge of techno and house archetypes as starting blocks rather than building blocks, PTA took off in their own direction and proved to be compelling composers with [...]