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DJ C makes dope beats.  MIA, The Heatwave and Gregory Isaacs all know this already, since he's remixed them.

He'd pioneered a sound that he's trafficking as Boston Bounce.  His beets are springy and compressed.

This one is free.
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Chemical Brothers

For the last 15 years, the Chemical Brothers have been some of the most uncompromisingly true-to-self producers out there.  Rarely have they adjusted their sound to fit current trends.  Instead they've always just stuck to what they do best, sure that the rest of us would like it.

And that's pretty much always been the case. Even when their albums weren't spectacular they've always had at least a few tracks that reafirmed their brand of Big-Room electronica as relevant and oddly current.

Their latest album seems no different.  They are still working with the same sound palette that made them famous in the 1990s (Hey Boy Hey Girl).  Yet the song sounds fresh.  Corney names aside, Escape Velocity is a pretty solid dance floor track.  It sounds like Blinded by the Light updated for 2010.

The music video is equally solid.  Where some of their old videos were high minded, big budgeted exercises in psychedelia, this one is as simple as laying back on a sunny day and soaking in the simple joys of getting high and staring at the sun.

Escape Velocity from Victor Hugo Mafra on Vimeo.

Mark Henning - Supersonic

Mark Henning is a man on a mission.  As a producer working within the techno genre its hard to resist caving into the cavernous displays of echo that dubtechno is so intent on pushing these days.  Not to detract from the guys out there who are really pushing a great sound, but it seems like a lot of banal, boring and ultimately vapid tracks are getting swathed in reverb and echo and getting passed off as quality music.

Henning on the other hand has nothing to do with that movement.  His latest release, Supersonic, can trace its lineage more directly to Matthew Jonson's Decompression than the type of techno your likely to hear at Berghain any time soon.

Like that now classic track, Supersonic is a builder.  It starts slowly, quietly.  The synth paces around its small room, brooding.  Henning introduces unintelligible, downpitched vocals that seem childish and demonic at the same time.  They're almost teasing in tone.  You can hear the synth getting agitated, flaring up in the mix as the track progresses.

The biggest thing this track has going for it (besides it being a fucking total monster of a track) is how restrained the whole thing is.  Cool hats shimmer and cut across the top of the mix.  Anger and frustration are constantly suggested, but never projected.  Its all a kind of taken in stride, making it that much more bottled up—that much more disturbing.

Reckless With Your Remixes

Azari & III released "Reckless With Your Love" last year to huge acclaim.  The track was the go to tune for DJs looking to evoke Old School NYC house without loosing the modern dance floor crowd.

The chunky chord stabs mixed with the insistent male vocals brought to mind Marshal Jefferson, while the production details made it clear this was a 2009 banger.

Azari & III commissioned some remixes, the standout of which is most definitely Tuff City Kids' effort.  Keeping with the old NYC vibe, they add a heavy bassline, handclaps and some cowbell.  But just to mix things up a bit Tuff City Kids get all euro on our asses, dousing the mix in some Italo Disco style strings, to great effect.

Listen to all 4 remixes below:

Starkey - Gasping For Air In This Vortex

Starkey is an impressive character.  Despite the Philadelphia-based DJ and producer's already massive discography he is insistent and airing out his hard drive, and its hard to discourage him.

Gasping For Air In This Vortex opens like an instructional, "how to chop an orchestra and make it sound like more than the sum of its parts."  Wasting little time on introductions, the first few string stabs feel more akin to the AV club setting up the stage than like Starkey trying to build tension.  Which it inevitably does.

But only briefly. By 0:30 the massive bass line that holds the track together debuts in full form.  Drums stomp in true grime fashion as cheese-ball chords massage the whole production into place.

Download the track free, here.

Lukid - Hair Of The Dog

Werk Discs wunderkind Lukid released this awesome clip for his track Hair of the Dog a few months ago.  The title is supposedly an English (British) term for drinking alcohol to get over a hangover.  Sounds good to me.

Lukid works with the same blunted, humid textures that make Actress's releases so goddamn funky. Hair of the Dog is a more solemn affair though.  The clip is vintage in aesthetic and morbid in theme.  Watch it till the end to get the full effect.

Machinedrum - Carry the Weight

Huge song from Glasglow's Travis Stewart AKA Machinedrum.  The track is an expertly crafted amalgam of all things electronic.  It's pace is perfect, switching from 4/4 squelch to slow-mo hip hop on a dime.

Check out the track below, followed by a batshit remix by London's BOK BOK.

Machinedrum - "Carry The Weight" 
Machinedrum - Carry The Weight (Bok Bok Remix)

Midland - Leitmotif [Midland Remix]

This release from on Phonica Records is an interesting intersection of genres that works surprisingly well.  Fusing the clunky forward momentum of tech-house with joy orbison's cliped vocals and the depth of dub techno, Midland has pulled off no small feet.

Check out the track below



Midland & Furiku - Leitmotif [Midland Remix] -PHONICA005 [128 KBPS Clip]

Jam City

Jam City - Ecstasy [Refix]

Glasgow's Jam City remixes old-school British funk band for this track.

The Refixes EP is out now now via Night Slugs.

Martyn remixes Tiga

Tiga, the Canadian electro-pop producer and head of the record label Turbo, has been making some stylistically interesting moves.  His last CD Ciao! found him moving between rave, indie dance and electro-pop.

For this release he tapped techno man extraordinaire, and fellow Canadian Matthew Jonson along with the perpetually contemplative Efdemin.  Neither of which hold up next to Martyn, the genre defying bass music artist who has been straddling the line between techno and dubstep for some time now.

After a minute long vocal/string workout, things start to move.  Martyn drops in a simple driving keyboard line and a purposeful beat and the stage is set for a pretty effective tune.

As he moves from strength to strength, it seems there is no stopping Martyn
 

Whores: The Movie

El-P, head of the now defunct Definitive Jux record label, released Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 the other day.  The third installment in the obnoxiously long titled mixtape series is an instrumental beat tape displaying the new styles El-P's picked up since his last release, I'll Sleep When Your Dead.

Without his marble-gargling white-boy raps crowding out the mix, its much easier to give the beats the attention they deserve.  Whores: The Movie finds El-Prodcuto fusing the claustrophobic-funk of his now infamous Fantastic Damage era beats with double bass-drum punk/metal drum patterns to great effect.

Every time El-P seems like hes totally irrelevant, he puts out a track that makes it reaally hard to write him off.

FaltyDL: My Friends Will Always Say...

New York producer FaltyDL releases another stellar EP, this one for Planet Mu. The 3 track release entitled Phreqaflex, finds DL reining in his squiggly synths, opting for a more restrained outing this time around.

My Friends Will Always Say... opens with heavy breaths and a simple break beat that sounds like the ghost of 2-step garage circa 2000's past.  Vocals enter the mix, sung by what sounds like Lauren Hill.  Pitch shifted and looped, the simple line "my friends will laugh and say" takes on powerful meaning.

In a scene dominated by UK beat heads, its always nice to hear a fellow New Yorker holding it down.

Throwing Snow

Throwing Snow's new single marks a pretty interesting take on what dubstep has become.  Its a lush chords and jazz shuffle sound calibrated and refined.  And yet the track is undeniably a part of the post-dubstep music scene.

Its encouraging that this kind of music has developed a sound and aesthetic that can be identified as such even when many of the traditional elements are not there.

Good riddance.

Un Vingt by ThrowingSnow

Squarepusher on Ed Banger?

IDM artist Squarepusher has just announced he will be recording for the french filter house record label Ed Banger.  This is a strange move from Squarepusher considering hes almost never recorded outside of his home at Warp Records.  Warp is home to such landmark producers as Aphex Twin, LFO (no not that LFO), Flying Lotus and Brian Eno.

Whereas Warp has long been highly regarded for its genre defying musical feats of imagination, Ed Banger has experienced somewhat of a backlash because of its concentration on the stagnant culture surrounding electro-house.

Regardless, listen to the new track along with a remix from the one and only genius of the Ed Banger family, the singular Mr. Oizo.
Squarepusher - Cryptic Motion Edits by Hypetrak

Cheaters never win

70s kitsch recast as 2010 floor banger.  No generation clash here.  The giddy remix is a seamless declaration of purpose for Teengirl Fantasy, USA's newest dance-pop export.  Weiss and Takahashi—two Brooklyn kids who go to Oberlin college—don't rely heavily on distorted bass or beefy drums to update the sample source for a modern dance floor.

They take the original track and pitch down the vocals, slowly revealing it as the song steadily builds.  The track is sincere and emotive and if cheaters never win, Teengirl Fantasy should be just fine.

Is Matthew Dear the new David Bowie?

The two artists are formidable sex symbols, each working to define their singular identities against the backdrop of an unforgiving modern landscape.  They are both fans of chameleon-like transformations of characer (with Bowie recording as David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust ect, and Dear sporting monikers from False, Jabberjaw, and Audion to plain old Matthew Dear.)

However their similarities are more than superficial.  Beyond their innocent boy meets debauchee via sexual androgyny image construction, the two artists have more than a few things in common.  Each sing in arresting baritone, slowly and disaffectedly as if nothing and everything are at stake.  And through their relentlessly modern, otherworldly dance music they leverage the weight of their problems against the weight of the beat.  Both artists implore their listeners to dance the night away, to dance thier problems away.

Bowie, born in the South London borough of Brixton, grew up in the post WWII era when the area was decimated by Nazi bombing raids.  With urban decay as his backdrop, Bowie went on to produce countless hits of flashy swagger cracked by self-aware insecurity.  One of his greatest hits remains "Fame", a startling example of how the modern incarnation of fame is a process of decay in and of itself - ruthlessly taring apart its subject, much in the same way that hyper-modern cities had torn themselves apart.

The new millennium from Matthew Dear's perspective is equally daunting.  His music is the jittery godson of the Detroit Techno music scene - an artistic movement that draws inspiration from the cultural detritus that has settled in Detroit since the manufacturing giants that had built the city into an  economic powerhouse left it to rot.  Dear's music has the same air of self-assured apprehension that made Bowie's music so affecting and enduringly relevant in our postmodern world.

Anyways, the man has a new album out which i implore you all to buy.  Stream the whole thing below

Matthew Dear: Black City by factmag