Heard a bunch of the BBC’s Sound of 2010 on Music Week and on the wesbite, apparently ‘165 UK-based tastemakers’ worryingly, and my instant responses:
Daisy Dares You – to be a Lily Allen clone
Little FlorenceMarina and the DiamondsBoots Machine
Stornaway’s Fleet is rather Foxed
Delphic Klaxons of Trojan War, or are they Friendly?
Joy ‘Where’s the Burial?’ Orbison (great name though)
Ellie Golding - La Lady Gagahawke called and wants her sound back
Giggs in Manuva Attack Shocka!
Rox-y Winehouse
Two Door Cinema Club is obviously having a Vampire Weekend
The Drums are obviously from Franzvegas
Devlin will suffer in the autotune backlash of 2010. Do we need another Plan B? Isn’t one enough?
Everything Everything quote Radiohead as an influence but I can hear Peter Gabriel/Coldplay when the industry has gotten to them. Nice to see the african/Vamps influence again. It’s all a bit Simple Minds though.
Gold Panda (Bear, Collective) – like the raga samples though. Could do some interesting collabs or go up his arse like Animal Collective.
(Johnny) Hurts (Jazz)…in Black and 80’s white. Can hear them writing for boybands shortly. Like the return to the embarassing 80’s video though – but surely 2010 is the death of the 80’s revival? Please? Again on the Simple Minds/dreampop mid 80’s ABC thing. Saxaphones? Ugh.
Owl City (obviously The Postal Service is on strike there, ho ho) – reassuringly crap name probably referencing Harry Potter. The return of twee, ffs.
The only ones I liked were The Drums who have been getting airplay already, Two Door Cinema Club cos of the Vamps influence (ditto Stornaway cos I’m a big fan of teh Foxes), Giggs could be interesting and Joy Orbison’s fidgety drumstep crossover might wobble into the charts but it’s all rather generic and sounds like someone else. Meh.
As well as being released and played in part on XFM, 72 the collaborative mashup project will have a live mashup event in London on Thursday 29th October at Loom bar from 7pm-1am with many mashup DJs in a continuous moving mashup feast! Idea is like the old Bastard ‘Bring Yer Own Boots’ – each DJ brings 3 tracks but similar to 72, one track at a time, in order!
This means the night has a dream DJ list of many people picking just the best 3 tunes, which I think should provide great if chaotic results – totally in the spirit of Bastard! And like Bastard it won’t just be mashups, but I’m sure you’ll hear a few
I will be DJing (well putting on 3 tunes) as well as:
Osymyso
Freelance Hellraiser
LV15
Bush No.10
Jez Celebrity Murder Party
Joel 90
Ape
Lee Spoons
Cartelmike
Eddie Pedalo
Dsico
Pheripheral
Scott Cairo
Tizwarz
Gara Gara
and Pom Deter, who ran the 72 project with Eddie Pedalo.
I’m sure many more to be added! Should be a great night, it’s free so come on down, the mashup’s lovely! And it will be one of the few (read: only) events you will see me anywhere near DJ decks in the near future since I am officially retired
Twittered about this but forgot to post about it – Uk Funky (or just ‘Funky’) – a new genre/type of music coming out of I guess house, dancehall, grime and 4×4/nu garage scenes, adding african beats or soca beats and rather simplistic dancehall/aerobics style lyrics, I love the groove though, and seems like every song has a fun simple dance, a bit like those 70’s disco records…this one could go either way
‘Funky’ is a terrible name though, stack it next to ‘Clubhouse’, ‘bassline house’, 4×4 (that sort of makes sense, although 4 step rather than two step = 4 to the floor!) ‘electro house’ and ‘nu breaks’ (when they don’t have a sniff of a breakbeat or broken/off beat).
Love the fact the videos have got kids in, old people, everyone getting funky…like grime not a bling bling supermodels getting low (partly cos they don’t have the money) but brings in the fun aspect, which I like. Unpolished videos are the shizzle anyhoos…gangsta and all that crap is on the way out.
Here’s K.I.G. – Head, Shoulders, Kneez & Toez with a funny video – this penetrated my consciousness earlier this year but then thought it was some grime or novelty offshoot
Crazy Cousinz feat. MC Versatile – ‘It’s that Funky’ with a new dance (of course) for you – love the schoolkids on this, getting down
Bigzy & Unkle – RingaRoses doing a response to Knees and Toes, hopefully with less plague/swine flu otherwise this could be rather portent…
Remains to be seen if this goes all DJ Pied Piper on us though…I’d love to see and hear more african/soca and dancehall riddims coming into dance and hiphop though. Even South America – UK Cumbia anyone? If it’s going overground (cf Metro paper of all places!) there was little sign of it at Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday, didn’t hear much obvious music like this, more dancehall/reggae/rave/techno and ibiza classics
Shouts out to CMP for the last video and posting over at GYBO and reminding me to share these
P.S. What strikes me is that YouTube is replacing the pirate radio (or ripping those tunes and spreading them far and wide) – take this dark house/funky tune from Karizma:
Weird to hear that booming out of my laptop speakers and not from some FM station from a highrise!
Shiny new post on a shiny new host, and something that’s been in my torrent download queue for ages – the film Steal This Film II – a great freely downloadable documentary about file sharing, information sharing in cultures (like teaching) and the social and legal issues within and looking at past technologies like the printing press and how a ‘pirate culture’ helped the French Revolution along.
It’s made by and for the people on the side of angels ie. the pirates so you won’t get a totally ‘balanced view’ (which usually means one biased to the mainstream media and corporates) but the MPAA and heads of Hollywood do get their say and their arguments countered. The strongest impression you get from this is how this struggle of information freedom and ‘piracy’ has been going on a very long time and is constantly on going; how the real fear of the major corporates is probably that the audience becomes the creators and cuts them totally out of the loop, and that the file sharing wars are pretty much lost despite setbacks after this film was made (Pirate Bay and the like).
It’s also much better than Steal This Film I which was a bit of a mish-mash (and out of focus in parts – ouch). Apparently they are expanding both bits into a full film, and then going for a release, which I’m hoping is still officially torrented, unlike RiP: A Remix Manifesto‘ which although very professional looking and interesting sadly seems to be going through the age-old Hollywood distributor/release model – requires different release dates for different world areas (apparently I can’t download it cos I’m ‘not in the US’ – DOH – no release dates for the UK either). Given the subject of that film, it is rather ironic – it may be about remix or online culture in the 21st century but that particular medium is most definitely not the message. Maybe it’s because the film is evolving they’re not officially torrenting it (someone else has put up an unnofficial torrent).
Anyway it has Girl Talk in it, in fact so much the whole film is basically a Girl Talk promo, and y’all know how I feel about him. The Brazil bits showing baile funk are really good, and Cory and Lessig are always brilliant, but it pretty much covers the same areas as Steal This Film I and II, but with more flashy animations/production.
It does have this great funny remix at the end pulled from YouTube seemingly uncredited, but I recognised the Eclectic Method logo:
For those wanting to get into the issues around musical remix/cutup I’d rather recommend Sonic Outlaws by Craig Baldwin, which was created about 15 years earlier and covers the same ground sans some of the later ‘Napster/bittorrent’ stuff covered in STF, some of the footage by/of Negativland is used in ‘RiP’! At the very least you then won’t need to look at a naked Greg Gillis…:-P
Anyway I think the model of Steal This Film and Sita Sings the Blues is the future though, torrenting your movie and letting the world see it in a donation model if they like it, or buying copies if they want them. To trot out my old phrase, they get it. They really do. Go support them.
Here’s the audio(and video if you scroll down) of my International Mash Bash set (btw several inclusions of Lady Sov’s Love Me Or Hate Me means it is a bit sweary in places). The idea of the set was to combine audio and video – a new one for me – and in part represent Bastard and a theme runs through it commemorating 20 years since the Second Summer of Love (1989) – it seems piano house sound is coming back, so I wanted to mix old and new.
Also it includes Far Out – which was one of the first songs I DJ’d back in 1994 at Milk Laboratory (hence the Milk Lab mentions in the video which I also did) approriate as I said in my previous post, this is my last DJ set…at least for some time, might do VJing, might do online DJing, but probably the last one I’ll do in the flesh. Far too stressful, and far too many people ‘not getting it’ even when I try and make a floorfilling set like this one. Time to stop
EDIT: Safari users might want to download and play the MP3 below rather than click the player, looks like Soundcloud’s Flash has a problem with Safari going crashy crashy…
DJ Contaminations – Stand Up Against Bonkers Justice
Funkytown Kiss (Art of Noise ft Tom Jones vs Lipps Inc)
Ian Fondue – Edit!
Instamatic – Burn Yr Radio (PE Edit – Leftfield vs Queen & Public Enemy)
Skynet UK – Back to ‘89 (Calvertron remix)
Black Box – Ride on Time (Dreamland remix)
AC Slater – Jack Got Jacked (Jack Beats Remix)
Sonz of Loop Da Loop Era – Far Out
Juan Maclean – One Day (Surkin Remix)
El Barto & Liam B – Charly the Cat (Prodigy vs Depeche Mode)
Prodigy – Everybody in the Place (AC Slater remix)
El Barto and Liam B – I Feel Out of Control (Donna Summer vs Chemical Brothers)
Dunproofin – Electro Sandman (Metallica VS Deadmau5 VS F*kkk Off)
DJ Lobsterdust – Put On The Red Light (Police vs. Coldplay vs. Thin White Duke)
Soundhog – Dire Bass (Azzido da Bass vs Dire Straits)
Dunproofin – FU2 (Lady Sovereign remix)
La Roux – In For The Kill (Re-edit of Skream’s Remix by High Contrast)
DJNoNo – Supercalibreaks (Julie Andrews vs Shy FX)
DJNoNo – Do Re Mi Bombscare (short version – Julie Andrews vs 2 Bad Mice)
You can also download it here – or if you’re subscribed to this blog you’ve probably got it already
And drumroll – here’s the video. Yes I’ve combined the backing video for the Saarbruecken DJing with the set audio – most of it is synched, especially at the end. It is itself a mashup of films, found video, my own work, stop frame anim and animation. It includes video from:
Unfinished works from 2002 – you might recognise a few people in there
Wild Zero – another exceedingly odd Japanese movie
Medium res (you can share/embed by clicking on the icon in the right hand corner – feel free! – also for some strange reason you have to click play twice with this player – click the centre twice, or the two play buttons)
