CMJ NYC 3

Friday/Saturday. Batteries Low. Street Seeking. Fader Fort. Le Poisson Rouge.

51

Senseless

Fluff Padded

Dormant Scream

Big Hands Pixel

Top Ten Tunes pt. 1

In no particular order:

1. The Chap - Ethnic Instrument (Joakim Remix)

A crunching robo-thrash take on one of the standouts from the Mega Breakfast album by the French mastermind himself. 

(Ghostly International)

2. Bostro Pesopeo - Falls

Grunt and chant laden flutter scuttle. What rock was this dude hiding under and what else is down there?

(Permanent Vacation)

3. Aeroplane ft. Kathy Diamond - Whispers (Hercules And Love Affair Remix)

Over and over, over and over, over and over again.

(Eskimo)

4. Broke - We Ain't Got It

Matias Aguayo's first tandem project since Closer Musik finds him strutting his sexy stuff all over a brilliant bloop beat.

(Kompakt)

5. LCD Soundsystem - Big Ideas (Babytalk Remix)

A new epic from Babytalk that thwarts the original. Beware the synth swells mid-course, you will grow to love them. 

(DFA)

CMJ NYC 2

Thursday. Walking. Ben's Pizza. Fader Fort. Pianos. Hi Fi

Purple Drank

Agro Tag

Wall Ride

Crystal Stilts

Mother Of Science

Snorkel Snout

Spinning Mullet

This guy is my new hero.

CMJ NYC 1

Wednesday Night at CMJ - Fader Party. Max Fish. Motor City. DFA at Santos. In-Betweens.

My sentiments exactly

Say AH!

Mic'd Up

Vinyl Stevie

Thinking It Through

Between The Lines

 Magillicutty Dweller

Still Going...

Juan MacLean Theremin Multitask

Graphic Shaun

Rip My Stocking

Stickydisc Records

I've been gushing out of every orifice about the Stickydisc camp ever since I stumbled across Babytalk’s Chance 12”. Babytalk is Eric Broucek, DFA right hand man and former touring member of the Juan MacLean. Partnered with Morgan Wiley, Hercules and Love Affair keyboardist, Babytalk becomes Watussi (hopefully a Cluster reference), to round out the Stickydisc roster. Almost more importantly, is that Eric’s little brother Ian was a classmate of mine at Westwood Charter School here in West LA. I grew up around the corner from the school and we all used to go trick or treating together as kids. As we got older we egged teachers houses and jacked little kids for their overflowing pillowcases of starbursts and milk duds. Their dad was a musician and did the DJing / MCing at the Halloween Hoot annual carnival for the school, his booming voice audible from my backyard. I should have known the kid was destined for stardom. A decade and a half later Eric’s in Brooklyn working alongside James Murphy, the top Don of the scene. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me.

It started a few months back when I was DJing a party. I bumped into this kid who was a friend of a friend and we started playing the “Do you know so-and-so” six degrees of separation game and ended up on Eric’s name. This brought up DFA, from which we clicked over the new Syclops album. He told me to look out for Babytalk. I didn’t think much of it, but stored away the name in the mental musical Rolodex. A couple months later, I’m at Amoeba in the Misc. B section and I see the Stickydisc print for the first time. There it was: green black and tan tribal triangle zigzag. If I had any doubts, the Hercules remix cred cast them aside. It is truly one of the purest moments in life when you lay a record that you’ve never heard before down on the platter for its first play. This instance in particular was purer than most. The seed that was planted months ago had finally broken its stalk through the thick dirt. A baby was born.

It’s funny how, as a DJ, I feel like I actually had a part in the creation of the music I play by unearthing it. I guess it’s a way of rationalizing my addiction to consumerism. If I didn’t buy that record, would anyone ever hear it? Well, it’s very egocentric to think that the answer to the question would be anything resembling a “no.” But, in a way, I almost depend on that train of thought to push me forward in my pursuit of progressive tunes.

I opened my radio show a few weeks ago with Watussi’s “If All We Had Was Love” track and a couple hours later I just couldn’t resist playing a Babytalk track. Some guy called in during the Babytalk, blown away, asking what it was and where he could find it. He said he was out of his car for the past couple hours and had just returned to be greeted by the song, but he had heard (what he thought was) the last DJ play another track hours ago that really stood out. After a general description, I realized it was the Watussi track he was speaking of. Those were the only two songs he had heard and he had no clue they were the same artist. The stars were properly aligned for him, and it gave me the reassurance I needed. My zealous worship was not in vain.

A description of the Stickydisc sound came to me in a dream. You’re driving up a hill that gets steeper and steeper as you ascend. Eventually you are completely vertical rushing full speed ahead. The hill ends and you are thrust into the ether. Once you clear the first cloud you launch through a portal. You enter a world of throbbing colors, vibrant to the point that they blur all vision. Engulfed by the light waves you pulse as they do, lacking all control. You lose concepts of time and space and just ARE. The seasons change around you, but you are none the wiser. There are no calendars here. It is a stable realm that exists by chance. But you are there for a reason.

“Rising higher as we get down.”

In more real terms, Stickydisc is unreal. It’s a cosmic sorcery of sultry synth work, horny horn huffs and a healthy helping of snaps, kicks and claps. The seven or eight minute frame that surrounds each track can barely contain most excursions. They build up and break down midcourse, only to swell and bulge again like unrelenting love muscles. Never is a nano wasted. Subdued voices mingle amidst the madness with poignant nuggets of (un)conscious thought that burrow their way into brains like the best of earwigs.

Good luck getting them out!


Buy the vinyl here

and check these tracks

Babytalk - Chance

Watussi - If All We Had Was Love

Seattle

Click on these pics from a recent trip. More on this soon...

I Used To Sell Mixtapes...

The fine peeps at Tiny Mix Tapes have added your boy to their noteworthy roster of music writers. My discussion of the Larytta album, Difficult Fun, has been posted today as the site's feature review. 

You can check it out here. 

Dig Log #1

A recurring section where I dissect my recent vinyl findings. These are all albums I actually purchased. The goal is to keep it under about $43 (usually 3 or 4 pieces depending on the Used luck). Please go out and support the artists you love. Buy music!

Everyday Music, Seattle---

In Flagranti - Firmly Planted Memories - Very exciting Black Mambazo body mover from this super-duper slept on. The vocal sample echoes in my mind, a tribal séance kind of mantra. Please tell me what it says so I can sing along with the right words for once. This Brooklyn duo has hit their stride. The cover design – while not as lewd as I’m used – has taken an interesting turn towards new directions. Banger status from the Codek camp!

In Flagranti - Frimly Planted Memories

Optimo - Psyche Out - Selected cuts from their mix released on Eskimo. Glad I took a chance on this one. Didn’t recognize any of the tracks but one, the Dinosaur (left out the L) jam “Kiss Me Again.” Skatt Bros bring the easy standout with Walk The Night, but every song knocks… cosmic, freaky and fun.

Skatt Bros. - Walk The Night

Michael Mayer - Touch - This one was used and I couldn’t pass it up. We were seeing him the next night and I’d never even heard this solo full length. A solid listen, very characteristic of the signature Kompakt sound, but definitely best for a single song here or there.

It Might Blow Up...

It happens every time. The underground gets “Over”. I used to get bitter, gripping to pre-big-break bands like stuffed pound puppies, all to myself. I didn’t want the wrong people getting their hands on my top secrets in fear of a co-opted movement of fakers and perpetrators. I guess it was the battle-mode hip-hop head in me, “keeping it true.” Who would have thought that same hip-hop head would be beat matching techno and disco records just a few years later? You grow up. You turn in your cotton-padded animals to Goodwill and let others share the love you held too tight to chest for oh so long.

As is the case with a little group called Hot Chip. Passed to me five years ago by my work supervisor Will at the Environmental Design library of UC Berkeley, Coming On Strong was an album that slapped me in a, you never heard some shit like this before, kind of way. Wonderin’ how the hell does Stevie Wonder see things. It was on some other - whiteboy eclectic electric funk with enough tongue in cheek to keep you constantly guessing. Kraft dinners, shiny SUV’s, blazin’ out Yo La Tengo, and I don’t know about babies being born. Far from anything I reshelved books to ever before. Yeah, it made a major mark and lead me into a world of music that could allow the outside world a peak in, while still remaining itself all the while.

Flash forward five years to a few days ago. I show up at the Wiltern for the second of a dual-night Hot Chip stint. The fair share of scenic weenies and bangs-hidden women greet me in the foyer. Despite lacking the coveted purple wristband, I found my way down to the pit area of the venue (good to see my gangster tactics are still in tact) where giddy groupies ogled stage hands, presuming they were band members putting the finishing touches on sound check. A bearded man behind me let out a massive war cry in honor of the headliners and, as if on cue, the five Chippers, joined by the live drummer from the LCD band, made their way on stage to much hurrah.

Trendy or not, the band still knows how to put on a damn good show. Despite only playing one track from their first (and finest) album, a so-so rendition of Down With Prince, they tweaked and freaked synths and drum machines churning out their latest sweat inducing hits Ready For The Floor and One Pure Thought (of which the Supermayer remix is ridic). Not their best show ever - admittedly I lacked the school boy fervor from years passed - but it did rank up there, climaxing with an encore performance of No Fit State that resembled a crazed American Apparel ad once enough flailing hip-kids jumped on stage.

They concluded with a disappointing slow song that I didn’t recognize, deflating the energy that they had surmounted in one fell swoop, but I guess it was a fitting comedown from their high octane set. The lights came on and everyone scattered like vampires into the street. A bombardment of rave fliers from every angle shortly followed. I walked away with a resolved sentiment, realizing, you can blow up a balloon and still stick a needle in its soft spot without it popping.

Difficult Fun

Offbeat, off-kilter, and for the most part off their rockers, Swiss tandem Larytta are making trouble in the best of ways. The phrases ‘degenerate-rock,’ ‘ESLectro,’ and ‘exchange-student afro-pop’ readily come to mind. For an electronic head locked in the basement, this is an uncomfortable breath of fresh air, goose bump material that leaves you looking back over your shoulder to see if someone is watching. Taking the impossibility out of contradiction, Difficult Fun is the best of tests. Like your calculus teacher handing out a problem set of brain-teasers and optical illusions, Larytta challenges you to take a leap outside of comfy confines and expand your notion of what music-making is and can be.

A kaleidoscopic range of styles crammed into a 13-track easy-to-swallow capsule, Difficult Fun manages to teeter between depression, hilarity, confusion, and hope, like a bipolar best friend who always answers the phone on first ring. Not to mention they make dope-ass beats. Lyrically, Christian Pahud & Guy Meldem have amassed a trippy testimony of trials and (mostly) tribs, ups and (mostly) downs. With lyrical gems like “You should really see a doctor/ Yeah I know it’s on my mind” (“Bauch Amp”) and “I know seven languages/ I know the capitals of every country/ But where is the money?” (“The Money”), the duo uses the album to talk each other through erratic fits of scatter-brained malady. The voices themselves represent contrasting hemispheres of the mental — one side, a hard, monotone splotch of drab grey attempting to break through its imposed sedation; the other, a soft saccharine seduction that isn’t afraid to hit the painful high notes. Conversely, if one were to tune-out the actual words, the album would read like a pop scrapbook, pieced together by ethnomusicologists who got their hands on a rusty MPC.

Both clean and gritty, subdued and erratic, plain and edgy, Larytta find a way to be what you want of them, all the while never quite becoming the people they themselves want to be. On  “Is This Cheese?,” muttered vocals mingle with scuttling bass blasts that would easily ascend the rungs of the pop chart if they weren’t so odd in their infectiousness. Elsewhere, tracks like “Ya-Ya-Ya” and “Voodoo Things” bang Konono No. 1 congotronic lo-fidelity below monosyllabic tribal chants, grunts, and toots. “Spoiled Kids” finds the twisted Swiss’ters tweaking dance floor 4x4 rhythms with stuttered synth stabs and vocal snippets that refuse to quit.

There is an insatiable thirst tracing through the narrative of Difficult Fun. Larytta never actually finds the hose, but if they did, a water fight would likely ensue before any quenching was accomplished.

Is This Cheese? on Just Sayin Is All

Bauch Amp and Ya-Ya-Ya on rcrdlbl.com