A little over five years ago a good friend of mine returned from Berlin with a ridiculously named German compilation album from the late 1970s. Only one of the tracks, Space's seminal Italo disco classic "Magic Fly" was worth bothering with, the rest being a collection of eurotrash that ranged from the forgettable to the downright bizarre. Its name, "Urlaubshits", struck a chord with me, its literal English translation being "holiday hits", putting the album somewhere alongside the throngs of forgotten Ayia Napa and Ibiza compilations of the late 90s and anything with the words "dance", "anthems", and "clubland" in [...]
Well, it looks like my plan to kill my blog has taken a little longer than expected - I haven't changed my mind, I've just overstretched myself. As promised, here's the second of three final mixes, and this one is a celebration of all things techno. The thing that's surprised me perhaps more than anything in the last year is the sheer amount of techno I'm devouring - having gone from listening to almost none to buying several techno records a month. I won't go into any lengthy discussion about it here, but broadly speaking the mix covers [...]
Nearly five years ago I was going through the post-university period of uncertainty that most people go through. Dissatisfied with a lot of things, I knew I needed something to focus on, and at the time I was reading a lot of music blogs. Part me of me thought I could do better than the majority of the blogs operating at the time, and this, along with the aimlessness of my early twenties spurred me on to start Urlaubshits. At that time, at the back of my mind, I thought "wouldn't it be great if one day I could make [...]
Back in October I took a trip to Glasgow to interview one of Scottish music's true legends - JD Twitch. The feature resulting from that interview can be read at Juno Plus , but when I was there Twitch was kind enough to give me a few records from the various labels he's run over the years - each and every one of them a winner. Although these labels are covered in the feature there aren't many releases covered outside Optimo Music itself, so I thought I would do a post on them here as an appendix to that [...]
I failed to write a top records of 2011 list, which is a bit of a shame, because they're always fun, but to be honest pretty gruelling affairs. Besides, I had a pretty crucial role in this top 100 list for Juno Plus, so that felt like enough for me. But still, there's a few records from last year that I never quite got around to writing about that I feel need mentioning for one reason or another. I've probably listened to more techno (and when I say "techno" I mean the fairly severe, greyscale variety) [...]
I thought that the time was ripe for another post outlining a few things I've been particularly enjoying over the last few months as the summer leaves us and we make the inevitable move into winter; albums and tracks filled with cold sounds with occasional hints of warmth. At risk of confusing casual readers and making this sound like a food blog, I'll quickly move on to the music itself. One of Autumn's unexpected surprises has been Surkit Chamber: The Melding , the new album from underrated Detroit techno producer Reel [...]
I've been quiet over the last few months, but that's for good reason this time - I have recently taken up a new writing position over at the excellent Juno Plus . I'm honoured to be part of it and am particularly proud of what we've achieved over the last few months as a team. I'll be putting some kind of section on this site's homepage where I will link to the stuff that I do over there - obviously there's a formality to that stuff which you won't get here, and it led me to think about how [...]
This month's Blogdrone column is a live special, taking in performances seen at Lanzarote and BleeD over the last few weeks (who are both fast becoming London's best promoters for all kinds of leftfield synth music). I begin with Lanzarote on Saturday 14th May at Electrowerkz, whose bizarre abandoned Quasar type vibes and copious UV lighting were actually quite an apt fit for the acts playing: Scottish drone wizard Konx-om-Pax, Nu-New Age synth artist Laurel Halo and horror revivalists Gatekeeper. Starting the night was Konx-om-Pax (aka Tom Scholefield); with a heavy use of samples as well [...]
One of the most intriguing tweets that I've seen over the last few months was delivered by Oneohtrix Point Never ( @0PN ), who simply tweeted the word "blogdrone". Of course I can't find the tweet now, so maybe it was deleted, or my mind is playing tricks on me, but whether seen in reality or simply imagined in a dream, it's a term that really struck me. I've written quite extensively on the recent progression of ambient synth music to the relative mainstream, but has the genre already reached the point of saturation where one of the leading figures [...]
Over the last few years we've seen a disco revival, then a classic house revival; now, there's considerable evidence mounting that we are somewhere in the midst of a revival of 90s styles. This is evident in many corners; the broken beat leanings of Floating Points, FaltyDL and the like, as well as the resurgence of interest in ambient electronic music (after being trapped in the noughties wilderness of "chillout") mainly thanks to material from the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds and Stellar OM Source. But the trend that I am finding most interesting, and that has undoubtedly been [...]
And so on to the final part of my end of year round-up - my album of the year. There was never any doubt for me what it was going to be; from the moment I heard it this album has been on constant rotation. This album is Actress' Splazsh . Actress - Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix) Splazsh is an album of sketches. Tracks quite often finish with a lack of any real resolution; they flit from style to style as [...]
And so on to a round-up of my albums of the year. Once again, they are in no particular order, apart from my favourite, which is covered more in depth in part 2. To be honest I'm going to keep this list shorter than the tracks, mainly because although I have listened to a lot of great stuff this year I'm just going to keep it to the stuff that I've instinctively reached for on the bus time and time again. For me albums have increasingly become things to go to help cocoon myself from the misery of the commute, [...]
And so we come to the final part of my round up of my favourite tracks of 2010. This installment deals with one track only, my absolute favourite of the year. To be honest, it snuck its way to the top of my list only in November after hearing it on the Night Slugs label mix for Resident Advisor (well worth a listen if you want to catch up on their sound). I'd already had my eyes opened to some pretty great music that I was fairly sure I wouldn't like, but this track was the one that [...]
Part 3 of my round up of my top tracks of the year is dedicated to what I am going to call the more "organic" music of 2010. This was a type of music not revolving around any labels, or scenes, but that evolved out of a consummate musicianship and a willingness to look for inspiration in everything from jazz to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop though German kosmische and 20th century minimalism. As a result, the musical inbreeding that can be so rife in genres like house and dubstep were largely absent from the tracks that I have selected. Producers [...]
Part 2 of my round-up of my favourite tracks of the year is loosely devoted to house and dubstep, or more accurately, the point where the two genres have collided in the last year. It's this category which has seen the youngest producers (there's at least five names that I know of on this list under the age of 25) creating some of the most inventive music, picking the shiniest musical elements from these two genres like magpies, as well as from garage, UK Funky, techno, and grime. In a year that saw the traditional sound of dubstep breaking out [...]
I don't know how anyone else feels, but 2010 has been a fairly exceptional year for music. It seems to me that the last couple of years have been lacking a distinct energy, but much of the music that I have really enjoyed in 2010 has had an urgency to it, brought about in no small part by a legion of incredibly young producers talented beyond their years. Maybe it's youthful enthusiasm, or maybe it's a response to the prevailing worldview of misery following the financial crisis, but if there was a "sound" of 2010, it was that of the [...]
About four weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing a live performance (at the excellent BleeD night run by some of the people behind London mainstay Bloggers Delight , at the also excellent new club XOYO ) by one of the most interesting and dare I say it, enigmatic (and I don't mean enigmatic in this way ), producers of the last year or so - Oni Ayhun. Releasing all his music on his own label , with track titles that read like serial numbers, he was completely unknown until he was recently [...]
Probably one of this year's most exciting musical trends (for me personally at least), coming almost entirely out of leftfield, is the wave of artists channelling 70s and 80s ambient synth music and krautrock through their own personal musical filters, creating music that goes beyond the established norms of the music that inspired it. Artists like Emeralds, Walls, ARP and Oneohtrix Point Never have proved that, far from being the domain of new age spiritualists and fans of obscure German kosmische, ambient synth music is becoming just as popular with bloggers and more esteemed music publications. Of this wave of [...]
This Monday sees the release of the T hisisnotanexit Summer Sampler 2010 EP, which includes my debut remix, of Detachments' "The Flowers That Fell". The release also features the long unreleased Faze Action remix of Hatchback's "Jetlag", a new original collaboration by TINAE artists The Dark Esquire and Club Silencio called "You Got To Look" and new TINAE artists Command V as remixed by one of my personal favourite producers, Moscow. All are listenable from the TINAE Soundcloud page . It's available as a digital release on Juno Download now , and [...]
Joakim's label Tigersushi is 10 years old this year, and in celebration, the label has just seen the release of More G.D.M. X , a compilation featuring some unreleased tracks, and some label classics, as well as a continuous DJ mix by Joakim which delves into the more experimental side of the label. Although Joakim is most notable for his dancefloor reworkings of, well, pretty much everybody, it would wrong to say that Tigersushi is a dance label (or even an electronic label), rather, Tigersushi encompasses an anything goes attitude to its musical family, forging a unique [...]
Urlaubshits
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MS MR- “Hurricane (CHVRCHES Remix)”
