subvasion!! subvader single!

Subvader's 1st single, 'Y'all Can't Handle Me,' just got released! Heard it in a mix by some dubstem forum's dj's show and thought it was pretty wicked. I like when the dj's all like 'whoo-o-o-oahh phaze mann!'

The other songs on the Bloodlines EP are awesome. I seriously love the chillstep vibes-->great for coolin ya down in the summer heat! EDS, J Courage and Aquadrop are awesome, very creative producers.
You can buy it on iTunes, Beatport, Amazon, among some others. All Subvader's other music will be given away for free.

Speaking of, his ep is soon to come out! all 4 tracks are done and mastered and ready to be sent out! Stay tuned!!

Love,
Tweaking Trays

It's April and....

I'm swamped with finals.  Big whoop!

Got a lot of stuff I've been wanting to post about recently, but with my brain being hacked by Csound and Poincare Duality there isn't much room for blogging.

However, in light of all this swampness there seems to be a little room for procrastination, eh?

I now present you with the one track that's been blissing out my brain all day.  Caribou has done it again with new album Swim, and even put up a remix contest for one of my favorite tracks on the album, Sun.

Enter new Waaga Records signee Spirituals (a solo project of sample-based electronic musician / drummer / producer / graphic artist Tyler Tadlock) and you've got one of early summers first splice and dice irresistable dance tracks.  Tadlock does an incredible job here of taking an already great track, and turning into something very much his own with added jazz samples of horns and drums.

Be on the look out for Spirituals' new album due out on Waaga Records on June 22nd--

mp3:

Caribou - Sun

Caribou - Sun (Spirituals Remix)

AFREAKCAN RIDDIMS 4 SUMMER!

ZOMG IT'S SO HOT OUT!
Great weather in the AA, and everyone knows sunny weather calls for appropriately "sunny" music. And while Sublime and Bob Marley may be staples for tropical tunage (at least for me), recently I've been really digging on "African themed" dance tunes. There's just something so happy and vivid about contemporary African dance music that I find completely irresistible in weather like this.


If ur into the whole mixtape-dance-music-'electro-bro'-blog-scene thing, then the Culture Club Mixtape #1 by DJs Genie and M!G!H! is a must download. I threw it on my pod when I read about it on Mad Decent and didn't really give it much of a chance, but after listening it today amidst the warm sunshine and budding trees, I fell completely in love.


Download/listen here:
Genie & M!G!H! - Culture Club Mixtape #1

Now I know what yall cynics is thinkin: all that 'modern african dance music' is too repetitive and abrasive for me. And yeah, this is true a lot of the time. I prolly like the stuff that's like "140+bpm (lil faster than house, doubletime of dubstep) with 4 on the floor kicks and sporadic snare/tom offbeat flurries and repetitive mono-chordal samples on the downbeat" as much as the next bro, but srsly, the stuff on this mixtape digs deeper than that.

It's able to retain pop sensibilities and interesting samples that keep middle class white boys like me listening. at about the 4:30 mark, for instance, the mix goes into some African bros singin over Architecture in Helsinki. There's even some lion king samples in there! (Think 'aahhhhh-za-bennya---a'feli-si-mamaaaaaa' etc.)

I don't speak any African lingos, but it sounds to me like it spans more than just Angola (which was all the rave for like a week late last summer) and maybe even more than Africa (do I hear portuguese/espanol around the 25 min mark?) Not very many repetitive moments in this mix that characterize all too many 'niche-mixtapes'.

(wish i took this photo but i totally jacked it from flickr)

I work on the radio @ WCBN FM Ann Arbor 88.3 FM, and one day while I was jes chillin in the fm studio I decided to rip some South African dance chune 'best of' compilations. Among the many gems, the "hope diamond" among them (if you will) was def this 1999 tune by Brenda Fassie:

LISTEN YO! (=^D) (<
Brenda Fassie - Vuli Ndlela


Prolly the sweetest part of the whole thing is the intro before the beat drops (cuz the beat just sounds a little uninspired to me, but it's not bad). I relly want somebody to sample the beginning and use it in a mixtape or something. Her voice is just so perfect. and did you here them ANALOG SYNTHS? Just sounds so sexy to me. And it really truly does make me want to get up and dance. The downside is that it comes in at around 110bpm... too slow for an electro house mix and too fast for hiphop... Maybe could fit in a disco set or sumthin? It's funny cuz the rest of the tracks on the compilation are about that tempo, too.


Okay, I couldn't help myself. I love this track too much to not put it up. It's from the same comp as the last track. The organ is absolutely fucking unreal. Trust me. You'll listen to it and be like, goddamn... that organ is fucking unreal. but, kinda like brenda's jam, it kinda loses something once the track gets goin. It's not that it's not a great song--cuz it is--but it just doesn't continue to keep picking up. BUT-->great sample material nonetheless.


All I ask is you hear like the 1st 30 seconds and not fall in love.
Soul Brothers - Mama Ka S'Bongile

Yeah, so that's all I gotta say. We're gonna have an interview with electronic artist BOAS comin up real quick. And also>>>>

SUBVADER'S EP IS COMIN SOON!!!
Like, we're talkin it's a matter of less than 2 weeks or something. Here's the artwork:

You can preview one of the tracks on his soundcloud called "Ghost Ship." There gonna be some CRZY, bizarre vibes on it, you can betchurr booty!

most importantly:
Kkeepp the SUNSHINE COMIN!!

Much sunny love,
Pac to the Man

Baths

Heard about this dude earlier this week from my pal Brian over at When We Were Younger and Better.

Baths is the solo project of Will Wiesenfeld, hailing from Los Angeles, and currently about to start a residency at LA's infamous Low End Theory. The sound seems to be a modern match of the broken hip/hop of FlyLo, and recent Bibio with the pop sensible vocals and side-chain compressed synth-bliss of Toro Y Moi.

"Maximalist" does an incredible job of mixing together bibio styled hip-hop beats with some gorgeous synth textures and vocal samples: A real killer track for the getting your summer started right.

If you think you've got him figured out from that one track, take another look. "Hall" comes across at first with a spazzed-out speed-altered-samples intro, and blisses out when the beat is joined by his soothing falsetto and gorgeous harmonies.

mp3:

Baths - Maximalist

Baths - Hall

Be on the lookout for his debut full length "Cerulean" out on June 22 via Anticon!


-djdr

Lazers Never Die (even in Ohio)

Call me a fanboy, about 3 months ago I bought tickets to see Major Lazer (and Bassnectar) twice in one week in April. That week is finally here and I finally saw the greatest dancehall/rave act of the century...
...in Cleveland fucking Ohio on a Wednesday night.

Needless to say, the dancefloor was a strange array of people: hippy-dreadlockers for Bassnectar, bros in Ed Hardy for god knows why, and the occasional guidette/sorostitute/raver/hot chick. So maybe I'm exaggerating about the lack of girls, but I'm not exaggerating when I say the dancefloor smelled like BBQ, corn and chicken pot pie. Golly-gee-willickers, I love the midwest.

Major Lazer put on a great show--Skerritboy mindfucked the wholesome audience by daggering the shit out of some girls they brought up on stage. All sizes of girls. It was awesome.

Skerrit also continued to climb around the light fixtures that enclosed the dancefloor. motherfucker is crazy.

Diplo held shit down--wish he would have laid off the house in favor of something a bit more fresh, but can you blame a DJ for trying to please his audience? People were responsive, but as I woulda guessed, everybody seemed to confuse Skerritboy with 'Major Lazer.' Skerritboy is not Major Lazer. Major Lazer is not a real person. He's a cartoon/concept Jamaican post-apocalyptic zombie killer whose story is told through the tunes produced by Diplo and Switch. So really, Major Lazer was everybody on stage (diplo, skerrit and that one girl they tour with). He is less of a personifiable entity than a thing which exists only in and of itself, therefore allowing the blanket term to be applied to the whole crew. Less of that, more of what came next-->>>>

<<<<----bassnectar. I was a little sad that the soundguy kept ML's set noticeably quieter than bassnectar's. I suppose this is a standard of club-gigging ethics, but it still pisses me off a bit. He was pretty sick to see live, tho... kept the energy at 110% the entire set. I've only seen that sort of crowd working at metal shows.

come to think of it, his set was very metal. maybe too metal for me, but the dancefloor ate it the fuck up. he hit the brown note and then some (approx sub-10hz). The place was flexing under his turntables. Speaking of, the guy is a fucking turntable whiz; adding crazy shit all over the place.

i scored some autograffs 2! Had a mini-convo w/ diplo in which i told him how awesome i thought his music is. I tried really hard to not suck his cock, but that's really what ended up happening.

all in all, exceeded my expectations for a venue in ohio. with friday comes their next show... in the mother fucking D. PUT YO' HANDS UP FO' DI-TROYYIT!!

!!!

oh yo, peep these crazy urinals! they bees in there! painted on like!

<====-PAC MOTHERUFCKNG MAN

I drove my car into a cop car the other day

...well he just drove off (and left me with this sweet cover) sometimes life's ok.

Just caught wind of this little bird the other day, Bye Bye Blackbird to be exact,  who recently did a great synth-driven, drugged-out, and beat heavy cover of Modest Mouse's Float On, available for free via their bandcamp.  Very brief, but like all of their tracks, it just leaves me wanting more!

mp3:

Bye Bye Blackbird - Float On (Modest Mouse cover)

Check out their debut EP, Happy High, available now for free from from those awesome folks at Arcade Sound Ltd. (MillionYoung, Magic Man)

The EP consists of 4 tracks, none of which clock in over 2:40 seconds.  Reverbed blissful vocals and retro drum/synth sequencers might sound like the description of every other band you hear of these days, but these guys know how to play the 'short and sweet' game better than anyone I've heard since the 2-minute pop-punk song.

Blast Your Face with...

Candy Claws - Two Airships/Exploder Falls (2008)

Recently got word of this free 2-track EP over at Peppermill Records from a source I can't quite remember.

Bottom line: Candy Claws have been tearing up my iTunes playcount and my shitty speakers silmultaneously for the past week.

These 2 tracks, Two Airships and Exploder Falls round up each at roughly 12 and 17 minutes a piece, totalling to about 30 minutes of crazy exploding instrumental electronics.  The songs move between noise, more dancy / lo-fi disco vibes, and glitch all abound.  The result is a wash of beats with constantly changing shape and form that without a doubt legitimize their 10+ minute duration.

mp3:

Candy Claws - Exploder Falls

Download the full 2 tracks for free via Peppermill Records.

Check back in a few days for another one of my favorite finds from peppermill!

************