Starkey recently dropped an exclusive DJ mix for XLR8R Magazine’s podcast series. It’s chock full o’ new and exciting sonic-flavor-crystals, and includes my remix of Ghislain Poirier’s Blazin‘. The Stark-bot then went on to create his own remix of Blazin‘ which I’ll share with you now:
I started out last week’s journey to my old stomping grounds, partying with my peeps at the Beat Research halloween party where Flack, Wayne, and DJ RNDM threw down hard. RNDM did a VJ set using the Ms. Pinky vinyl DJ system to do live music-video mashups. If you’re having any trouble visualizing what I mean, you’re in luck. Robotkid was in the house documenting the festivities (Flickr pics), and now RNDM’s entire set is immortalized:
RNDM and Robotkid also happen to work at Harmonix, the company that designed the popular Guitar Hero video game, and is about to unleash its latest creation, Rock Band. Robotkid was kind enough to invite me over to Harmonix headquarters so I could get a sneak-preview of the game before it’s released on Txgving day. And man, was it fun! I’m really not much of a gamer, and have never played Guitar Hero but I’ve heard a lot of hype so I was excited to see what this is all about.
For those of you in the Chi, I encourage you to come out to Funky Buddha Lounge tonight to peep me, Zebo, & Flufftronix @ Outdanced! This is by far the most happening Tuesday weekly in town, and is definitely worth checking in on. Funky Buddha is at intersection of Grand, Halsted, & Milwaukee. See you there!
Our friend Starkey of the Trouble & Bass camp etc. just gave us the heads up that BD1982’s The Bigfoot EP will be dropping next week on the Seclusiasis label.
The EP is 6 tracks of oblong, texture-rich beats that reference hip-hop, dubstep, and dancehall among other things. Here’s a taste:
DJ One Duran of the 1200 Problems crew in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, North Carolina runs a radio show there called New Science Experiment. I’ve been meaning to point you toward this interview he did with me for their blog where we talk about heedlessness (one of my favorite words), among other things.
In the meantime he made this tasty new mix-up especially for the Mashit massive. It’s quite an up-to-the-moment mix of bass-quakers that’ll make you get crunk:
Here’s another mix! It’s mainly ’80s Italo- & Montreal disco, hi-NRG, & synth pop, with a lot of super-duper-exclusive re-edits that you’ll never ever hear anywhere else (unless you come see me play out). No grand overarching theme like the New Beat mix; just a lot of tracks I like strung together.
For those of you who haven’t been following this part of Lisbon’s music scene, Kuduro is a musical style that was born in Angola in the early ’90s. The Lisbon branch of Kuduro — Lisboeta — has become a high-energy form of electronic-dance-music that’s now breaking into the mainstream. The popular kuduro band Buraka Som Sistema is in the Portuguese pop charts and has videos on MTV there.
Dublin, Ireland’s Pasta Masta sent me this DJ Mix which skillfully glides through hip-hop, soul, dancehall, dubstep, boston-bounce, funk, rock, and a bunch of other genres.
I was recently invited to spin-up a set over at Northwestern University’s radio station; WNUR 89.3 FM. My man Jeekoos runs the Part Time Suckers (PTS) radio show there and diligently records the guest DJ sets. He’s got what seems like hundreds of them archived on his website.
Here’s another installment of me going on about some under-remembered electronic subgenre of the past–this time the focus is on Belgium, and New Beat. Long before house music made it out of the Midwest, Belgium had a thriving electronic music scene (they called it Electronic Body Music, or EBM, and it was basically a dancier variant of Industrial—think Front 242, à;GRUMH…, Luc Van Acker, Neon Judgement, etc.). They also had a lot of embarrassing Hi-NRG and Euro-Pop (which I also adore, but you can probably guess how Luc Van Acker felt about it). As a response to these up-tempo dance-pop formats, a DJ by the name of Fat Ronnie (real name Ronnie Harmsen) started dramatically slowing down his records. He’d take 45 rpm pressings of tunes in the 135-155 bpm range, and play them at 33rpm +8, bringing the tempo down to 95-120, and then mix them with EBM, some Italo-Disco, New Wave, and what not. By 1986 the “Go Slow” DJ style was blowing up, and you had a lot of DJs throughout Belgium playing this way, and even making purposefully slow records to mimic this sound. At first some people were just calling it “AB music” (after the Ancienne Belgique, a famous concert hall in Brussels where Fat Ronnie played), but eventually the term “New Beat” took hold.
A few of the New Beat DJs (most notably Marc Ickx from A Split-Second) starting incorporating some early Chicago House tracks into their sets; clocking in at 115-120, they were the perfect tempo, and though they were black and American and disco-driven, there was an element of weirdness to them that fit perfectly with Belgian EBM. Soon Acid House was blowing up in Belgium (and being heavily incorporated into New Beat tunes), and it was through this that the first imports started to make their way to the UK (and Ibiza). In fact, Belgian imprint R&S was the first label outside the US to release Joey Beltram, Juan Atkins, Suburban Knight, 2 In A Room, and a load of other US artists.
A lot of the initial New Beat tunes were pretty poppy, but by 1988 the acid house influence had merged with EBM aesthetics to give Belgian techno a much harder edge. It’s from here that the “Belgian Hardcore” sound of the early ’90s evolved (think “Dominator” by Human Resource, “Take Control” by Lords of Acid, or anything with a hoover in it), and ultimately Dutch Gabba/Hardstyle/Jumpstyle. It’s easy to forget just how many huge names in techno come from this country of only 10 million people: Praga Khan, Lords of Acid, 2 Unlimited, Technotronic, CJ Bolland, Frank De Wulf, Milk Inc, 2 Many DJs, Hooverphonic (and that’s not even counting one-hit wonders like Human Resource, Set Up System, Convert, and the like). Perhaps as much as the Americans or the British (and certainly more than the oh-so-fashionable Germans & French), Belgians are responsible for today’s electronic dance music culture.
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, I’ll leave you with a mixtape (and I do mean TAPE, as in two sides, 90 minutes) of Belgian New Beat (with a few non-Belgian tunes of the era thrown in for good measure), and a link to a really good (but unfortunately Flemish-only) resource for this music: http://www.muziekarchief.be. And before anybody says it, yes, I know I left out Telex. Sorry.
Nice write-up on MC Zulu in the Chicago Reader today. "Space Dancehall: MC Zulu works on Planet Lazer Bass?" http://bit.ly/lazerbassTwitter ->2008/11/20
Dear President Elect Obama. Please put Van Jones in charge of the "Green Collar Economy": http://bit.ly/vanTwitter ->2008/11/20
Starkey recently dropped an exclusive DJ mix for XLR8R Magazine’s podcast series. It’s chock full o’ new and exciting sonic-flavor-crystals, and includes my remix of Ghislain Poirier’s Blazin‘. The Stark-bot then went on to create his own remix of Blazin‘ which I’ll share with you now:
For those of you in the Chi, I encourage you to come out to Funky Buddha Lounge tonight to peep me, Zebo, & Flufftronix @ Outdanced! This is by far the most happening Tuesday weekly in town, and is definitely worth checking in on. Funky Buddha is at intersection of Grand, Halsted, & Milwaukee. See you there!
Our friend 
Lisbon, Portugal’s 
Dublin, Ireland’s 
I was recently invited to spin-up a set over at Northwestern University’s radio station; 
Here’s another installment of me going on about some under-remembered electronic subgenre of the past–this time the focus is on Belgium, and New Beat. Long before house music made it out of the Midwest, Belgium had a thriving electronic music scene (they called it Electronic Body Music, or EBM, and it was basically a dancier variant of Industrial—think Front 242, à;GRUMH…, Luc Van Acker, Neon Judgement, etc.). They also had a lot of embarrassing Hi-NRG and Euro-Pop (which I also adore, but you can probably guess how Luc Van Acker felt about it). As a response to these up-tempo dance-pop formats, a DJ by the name of Fat Ronnie (real name Ronnie Harmsen) started dramatically slowing down his records. He’d take 45 rpm pressings of tunes in the 135-155 bpm range, and play them at 33rpm +8, bringing the tempo down to 95-120, and then mix them with EBM, some Italo-Disco, New Wave, and what not. By 1986 the “Go Slow” DJ style was blowing up, and you had a lot of DJs throughout Belgium playing this way, and even making purposefully slow records to mimic this sound. At first some people were just calling it “AB music” (after the Ancienne Belgique, a famous concert hall in Brussels where Fat Ronnie played), but eventually the term “New Beat” took hold.
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