Musical history seems to happen when things collide, when things get mixed up – certainly in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century. And so it is that one of the most important “Detroit techno” records ever released came out of Amsterdam.

If this were a new artist, the long string of endorsements from a who’s who of electronic music in the video here might seem like publicity fluff. But because Dutch artist Steve Jerome Rachmad, aka Sterac, has had such a deep influence on electronic music since his 1995 debut release, instead you can listen to a network of people in the dance music community, and how those influences form nodes in a neural net of musical creativity. Those networks cross national borders and backgrounds, speaking this musical genre as a common language. As the centerpiece of this docu-short, Rachmad himself is humble and quiet, a Zen-like presence on a sofa in the midst of bubbling techno celebrities, as he talks about how he clawed his way to getting anything released at all, on his first Atari 1040ST computer.

The best part of the video, though, is hearing Sterac’s musical process, often just playing directly from his head through a series of overdubs. I’m sure Rachmad was thrilled to power up his Atari ST for the first time; nowadays, a lot of us find a way to return to the immediacy of directly-recorded one-take overdubs. (It’s not so hard, of course. Just step away from your fancy editor.)

I’ve just listened to the re-release “Secret Life of Machines,” due out in June. It’s a fantastic, fresh-sounding release – unassuming and direct in the way Rachmad himself is in the interview. The dirty reality is, some 90s electronic music – even some that is considered a landmark today – really does sound dated today. These cuts simply don’t. There is this sense, as Richie Hawtin puts it in the video, of music that’s “melodic, funky, like Holland … but [is] rhythmic and beautiful like Detroit.”

I am, not very secretly, an optimist. I wonder what musical collisions may happen next – whether it’s club music or dance music or not, in electronic music as a medium. To me, the most fertile moments in music bloom when these kinds of connections and influences can form.

“Secret Life Of Machines” will arrive in phases, remastered and remixed, starting in June 2012, on CD and digital.

Out of the noise of the Internet, don’t be surprised if some of the music being made is – unexpectedly – wonderful. So it is with a compilation curated by Chris Randall from the Analog Industries community. Unsuspected Sounds is unexpected. It’s proof that those people writing all those comments really do have time to make music.

It’s nice seeing this come from Chris and the community he’s assembled. For his part, Chris doesn’t fit the stereotype of a blogger; he’s got industry experience as an engineer as an artist, is known to many as a veteran of Sister Machine Gun, and now leads dual lives as music maker and plug-in and mobile developer. (See: Audio Damage.) The guy has craft, across technology and art, such that one can see a dividing line between the two. So, fittingly, Chris pulls from his readers people whose music is evidence of the same.

All of this goes to a good cause, as well. It’s the sort of thing so many of us hope online communities will be. It’s nice when, at times, they actually are.

The sounds themselves fit into the amorphous but, for me, delightful category of “ambient/IDM,” into some catch-all of smart, doesn’t-quite-fit-in music made with electronics, inflected with beats without being slave to genre. (Please, someone, if you can rename that zone of music, you’d do all of us a favor. I know it’s my job as a journalist or whatever. But I’ll be your friend for life.) Thoughtfully constructed sounds, venturing into sometimes-moody, quirky, but personal and passionate realms, this is music that makes you feel intimate with its creators and what moves them when they’re being themselves. That’s perfect for a music compilation that itself represents a community that has gathered around common interests online.

I’ll let Chris explain the rest to CDM:

The story is pretty simple: what I did is have Analog Industries readers submit an exclusive track; I got 92 submissions, and curated the 10 on the album (well, 9 plus mine) out of those. 100% of the net proceeds (that is to say everything after production costs are covered) go to charity, specifically the Breast Assured Foundation.

The cover art was done with a Processing sketch created by Stefan Goodchild. [The sketch code is on GitHub.] The sketch does an FFT on an audio waveform and spits out a circular motif; top is left channel, bottom is right channel. I made a single audio file that was the entire album, and created the image from that. (As an aside: Stefan does audio-reactive visuals in Processing for several big acts, notably Peter Gabriel and Blur, and he did the Varese, Schaeffer, and Derbyshire T-Shirts that I sold on AI a while back.)

Chris also has some nice reflections in what he wrote for the release:

“I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.”

-Edgard Varèse (Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music)

“unsuspected sounds” is a collection of electronic music curated from the Analog Industries community, with 100% of the net proceeds of the sales donated to the Breast Assured Foundation, an organization that provides early breast cancer detection services for underprivileged women via a sophisticated mobile screening lab. Featuring ten tracks of all-new music, “unsuspected sounds” is a genre-spanning collection that provides a perfect soundtrack to modern living.

Available now at Bandcamp as both a DRM-free digital download and as a download + 12″ vinyl combo.

Side A:
1. Goldbaby – Ten OP
2. Bitmud – All The Beauty Is Gone
3. Chris Randall – Abstract Sixteen
4. Sabama – Doublethink
5. Pauk – Here She Comes

Side B:
1. Ancient Young – Silica Resonance
2. Russian Corvette – Pattern Recognition
3. Anodize – Bismuth
4. Milkfish – Just Once My Day Blows Yours Away
5. Jukebox – Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Pay-what-you-want, minimum $5 for the digital download only, $15 for the vinyl + download. Get some new music, and help out a good cause!

http://analogindustries.bandcamp.com

Delicate and dense, melodies and sounds from church contexts, found sounds of bells and voices, are set against crisp, sharply-solid, forward-driving electronic beats. And then, there are the visuals: an archaic architecture of mystical symbols and three-dimensional, evolving forms interpret the music in visual form.

Swedish-born artist and technologist Eric Wahlforss, in other words, has been busy. As the artist Forss, his album is an app, appropriately for someone who is the co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud. Eric showed me an early build over cheeseburgers. It’s reactive, perhaps, more than interactive, but there’s still a chance to use your hands to rotate both visuals and music, a bit like picking up a sculpture and viewing it from different angles – though with the added element of sound. What you get is a sense of an interwoven visual and musical world, and an aesthetic vision that Wahlforss has pulled together.

From the man who built the world’s largest online recording business, it’s little surprise that recording features prominently, in two threads:

Recordings of strings, choirs, organs and ambient noise from church concerts which have been cut up into fragments and rearranged into a new mosaic of music, and recordings of wooden, stone and metal objects which make up the beats and percussion. These are the plosive, rhythmical noises that provide the link between the traditional to modern electronica.

That musical combination sounds to me familiar, though also clearly comfortable to Mr. Wahlforss. The collaboration is especially intriguing, though, as a Viennese graphic designer (Leonard Lass) and German computer graphics artist (Marcel Schobel, Untouch) collaborate to produce an audiovisual experience. Berghain, that cavernous church of techno (and occasionally more experimental sounds), seems an appropriate setting in the city that also played home to SoundCloud’s founding. (The fact that the former power station has the acoustics of a church doesn’t hurt, either – even if it’s ill-suited to denser music for the same reason.) Ecclesia will get its launch across media: live show in Berlin, app on iPad, album. For now, you can hear the tracks streamed via – of course – SoundCloud, even shared directly from Ableton Live.

The live show premieres May 2 in Berlin at Berghain/Panorama Bar, with the app out the same day. The album itself releases on June 12.

http://forssmusic.com/

Visuals come from Untouch (Marcel Schobel):
http://www.untouch.fm/
…and Leonard Lass:
http://depart.at

If, in my opinion, you want to see how to run a label in 2012, look no further than Project Mooncircle (PMC). It’s based out of Berlin and was originally an offshoot of HipHopVinyl Records – a store I wandered into one summer day in 2004 and left, several hours later, minus a quarter of my summer tour earnings. The label bills itself as “specializing in the conjunction between electronic and organic music.” I could expand on that a little by saying that PMC’s music falls somewhere in the gray intersection between instrumental hip-hop, soul, and jazz, with a particular focus on whatever the thing is called that’s hip-hop post-Dilla or post-Fly Lo. I’ll call it Future Beats until someone tells me better. Ed. I hear the comment button clicking already. -PK

In PMC’s releases, swung, tumbling, complex, tricky beats weave in and out of melodies and vocals in a sweet cascade of emotion. Their records are the kind I want to play for people who think hip-hop began and ended with Native Tongues, or believe the pinacle of musical creation happened between ’94 and ’96 in the era of Trip Hop. Although just saying PMC is the logical extension of those movements fails to convey how extremely “right now” their sound is.

Apart from just putting out good music, PMC warms my heart by executing its affairs brilliantly and thoroughly. They have incredible art (including multiple reoccurring illustrators). Their catalog only skips 3 numbers in 100 releases. A huge amount of the music is available for sale on their Bandcamp page, with a healthy number of free giveaways. PMC even has two sub-labels, Project Squared and Finest-Ego, the later of which has put together a series of stunning compilations. These are probably the best place in the world to hear interesting new production in hip-hop, and they are all organized by country, one of my favorite discrete units of any scene.

The crew behind the label is above, but as I found out in a recent conversation with Robert Koch of Robots Don’t Sleep and several PMC release, the whole project rests squarely on the shoulders of the label’s founder Gordon Geiseking. Koch painted a picture of Geiseking tirelessly sitting at his desk, working late, surrounded by boxes and boxes of HHV vinyl waiting to be sent off all over the world. It makes sense – there’s no way something like PMC could have reached the heights it has without an extremely dedicated personality at the helm.

PMC’s other catchphrase is: “… an interesting experience for anyone looking for the extraordinary.” Almost absurdly humble words from an entity that’s just celebrated their 100th release with a 10-year anniversary boxset compilation, pressed onto two white and two black pieces of vinyl. That release alone is 46 tracks long if you get the digital version, one track each from just about anyone who currently has something to do with the label. It’s a great starting point to check out their sound, but if you want to delve further, you can listen to nearly the whole catalog on their website. I’ve picked a few past and current favorites below, but really, let yourself stroll through their incredibly deep catalog to find your own favorite future beats from around the world.

Rumpistol and Red Baron – Floating


The next release forthcoming on the label, the veteran Danish producer Rumpistol of Rump Recordings teams up with fellow Dane Red Barron (currently living in LA) to create a haunting soundtrack of etherial broken pop. Snippets from the entire release can be heard above.

Long Arm – The Branches

“The Branches” is amazing organic future jazz that isn’t cheesy in the slightest, from Russian mastermind Long Arm. It’s like he was sitting there in a smoky jazz club in 1955 with a tape recorder running. The true inheritor of the mantle of DJ Cam and his ilk.

Flako – The Mesektet

Beat maestro Flako takes you on a playful stumbling journey through a forest of beats – this is a true beat tape, more simple sketches than fleshed out epics, but it works so well that it’s difficult to tear yourself away from it till the whole thing’s over.

Robot Koch and John Robinson: Robot Robinson

One of my favorite hip-hop albums in a long time – John Robinson not only has a totally unique voice and flow, but he’s a born storyteller, a craft sorely missed in today’s beat scene. Robot Koch is at his finest on production.

V/A: Finest Ego | Russian Beatmaker Compilation

My introduction to the incredibly fertile Russian beat scene, which is almost crushingly large and diverse – but fortunately this is the cream of the crop – 813, Moa Pillar, DZA, Pixelord, Damscray and a bunch of others are all here. Get familiar!

Asusu – Small Hours / Taurean

I had forgotten about this till just now, but Project Squared is home to some of the better recordings in the Future Garage world, with Asusu being one of my all time favorites in this sound. Hope to hear more from this offshoot of PMC in the future!

Ed.: I’d been following Project Mooncircle, too, particularly as they pop up around Berlin, though I think the whole label will have international appeal. Got favorite releases you’d like to add to Matt’s list? Let us know comments!

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. He joins us regularly for our “Created” series, doing whatever the digital equivalent of digging through crates is. (Nominees welcome for that term.)
http://kidkameleon.com

A small note based on Part 1: this is no history of dub – no need to create a list of dub forefathers in the comments! But if you’re interested in such things, definitely watch Bruno Natal’s Dub Echos, he talks to everyone under the sun, and it’s fascinating!)

A Quiet Bump [as seen in part 1] has their feet firmly planted in the heavy Rhythm and Sound aesthetic of half-time, head-nodding feel. The second modern dub label I’ve been impressed with over the years, Qunabu, is rooted a little more strongly in two other genres, the clicks and cuts and glitch of Mille Plateaux (which I’m probably more familiar with) and dub techno (to which I’m a relative n00b). The latter is a sound that’s captivated me over the last eighteen months or so, as I’ve gotten into old Chain Reaction, some of the Echospace / Deepchord projects, and everything on Echocord – but I’m absolutely no expert and I’m sure many readers have been following the genre stretching back well into the 90s.

Qunabu is more than just a netlabel; it actually arose as a twinned project of a design firm and netlabel, founded by Piotr Hatti Vatti and Mateusz Qunabu out of Gdansk, Poland. Mateusz and his brother Rafal sit well within a long Polish tradition of innovative visual design, and they offer a pretty stellar portfolio of all sorts of graphic and interactive design, photography, and video work. It’s all on displace, on the main site under the interactive section. I mention it because, unfortunately, right now the actual netlabel part of Qunabu has a placeholder page – it’s being redesigned and wasn’t ready quite in time for this piece. But it’s easy to get excited for how it will look, and in addition to their portfolio, the podcast series and the shop are up and running.

The amazing coincidence is that I was familiar with both Qunabu and Piotr’s work as Hatti Vatti, completely independently of each other. Hatti Vatti totally captivated me with his track “Different Music,” which came out on Indigo’s Mindset label a couple years ago – a song I still play in sets to this day. Fodder for a different article for sure, but I consider every track Hatti Vatti’s ever produced to be 100% awesome and probably be the finest example of what’s good and interesting about dubstep today – it’s the opposite of this. And in hindsight of course I can hear the connection between his brand of dubstep and the experimental and techno leanings of Qunabu.

The label has had an impressive output so far, and includes some ambient work from NN as well as a few pieces that call more on hip-hop and free jazz like The Strait of Anian’s This Wandering Winter release. But the majority of tracks lope along in the 115-125bpm range of slow techno, ranging in feel from fairly driving to almost muffled. Their two strongest releases so far have been the two volumes of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band”. These are the label’s showcase compilations, akin to the great Staedizism compilations from ~scape (and both put out long before Easy Star All Stars released and album with the same name!) They are both a pretty stunning collection of tracks from producers that haven’t seen many releases elsewhere.

Mateusz and Piotr answered a few of my questions by email below. Also, be sure to check out check out the captivating video of “You” that Qunabu created – showcasing the real love and affection they have for their city of Gdansk, a town that has produced Reza and his CX Digital label among others.

Hatti Vatti feat. Cian Finn – You (HD) from Andrei Matei on Vimeo.

Who is involved in Qunabu, and when did it start?
Mateusz Qunabu [MQ]: It started in 2006. It’s been me, Mateusz Qunabu and Piotr aka Hatti Vatti from the beginning. I’m responsible for the website and technical stuff as well as the first selection of received audio and organizing graphics, etc. Piotr is responsible for finalizing the music and further contact with artists.

If you had to describe your aesthetic to people who didn’t know the label, what would you say?
MQ: Dub Side of the Moon, recently the dub techno side

Hatti Vatti [HV]: We started with dub techno, but right now we are focused on any electronic and experimental minimalistic genre. But dub elements are always somewhere around. HQ open-minded music.

How do you choose which artists to release?
MQ: The first release was from Piotr’s friend from a Polish reggae forum. Then he started to meet people on myspace. It was a time when myspace was full of interesting stuff (2006-2007), so he gathered a collection of tracks for Sgt. Peppers #1. After that we were receiving emails from people around the world. We’ve met a few of them in person, some of them we know only by email. Stendek is the only local friends we have published – I think he is one of the greatest artist in our portfolio.

HV: There’s no rule. We asked a lot of people for EP, but ~50% of our releases are sent as demos… It’s an international netlabel but we are really happy if we will get something cool from our country or city (Gdansk). I’m really proud of our first compilation – it’s 100% polish. All told, Qunabu has released music from 15 countries and 4 continents .

Which project are you most proud of – or was the most difficult?
HV: Making “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Dub Band Vol. 1″ was hard work. We were a bit unknown as a netlabel at the time… I think it’s my favorite release because of the big response and the feeling that we had done something really special in many ways. But I like every single EP and LP… “Sgt Peppers… Vol. 2″ was our biggest project, but it was much so easier after “Vol. 1″. I think almost 100% Qunabu stuff is still “actual”, fresh and very interesting. Also, QNB004 (77′s Schlummerlieds EP) and QNB005 (Misk’s Pathos EP) both came out in the same moment (2007) – now it seems like a kind of prophecy of dubstep and dubtechno crossover…

What upcoming releases are planned?
HV: Avant jazz experiments meets dub techno EP + “Sgt Peppers…” Vol 3.

http://www.qunabu.com/

Previously: CREATED: Digital Dub for 2012, Part 1 – A Quiet Bump, A Conversation with Peak

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. Tune in regularly for his CREATED series on new and undiscovered music, including what to hear, and talks with artists.
http://kidkameleon.com

The link between dub music and technology is as old as the genre itself – you could even argue that dub is THE purest example of a technology expressed through music. At its best, it’s like magic – when I first saw Scientist run the board for Mikey Dread live, it truly was like watching a magician at work. He had a way of flicking faders so fast but so subtly that they seemed to move with a will of their own.

Although there are some core sonic elements of Dub that have been with it since its inception – echo, reverb, tape effects, etc – it’s also been a genre/ethos that’s quick to embrace new methods and new applications in its 40-year lifespan. One particular thread from Dub’s inception to now goes something like this:

The 70s – the warm round sound of King Tubby and his contemporaries.
The 80s – dub in the digital era, with Prince Jammy and others messing around with 8-bit sounds and new drum machines on seminal recordings like Computerized Dub.
The 90s – dub techniques flourish in every possibly form of dance music, including the icy germanic sounds of the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels and artists.
The 00s – that sound expands in new directions with records from Rhythm and Sound, Deadbeat, Pole and the entire long running ~scape label.

(As I said, just one thread through the history – for a much more fleshed-out telling of the story, see Bruno Natal’s Dub Echos or read Michael Veal’s book on the subject. Or if you want to become a dub producer yourself in an instant, you’ve got to check out Infinite Wheel, still as fun now as the day it was released.)

In 2012, two net labels – who so far have given every single one of their releases away entirely for free (!!!) – are unquestionably the proud inheritors of the legacy that runs from Tubby to Scientist to Rhythm & Sound to Deadbeat & Pole. They are A Quiet Bump, from Italy, and Qunabu, from Poland. I’ll cover A Quiet Bump below and follow up on Qunabu in a few days.

A QUIET BUMP

A Quiet Bump is a dub and digital roots label from Italy that’s currently 28 releases deep. They’ve just recently completely redone their website (which is beautiful) and even invented a new double mountain logo for themselves. Founded by Paolo Picone and Carmine Minichiello, the label is home to some of the most innovative dub music on the planet today – following in the vein of their german forefathers but infusing a kind of good-natured Italian warmth that makes the music truly unique and special. They label has been a labor of love since its foundation in 2005 – as Picone puts it “We are very proud in general of A Quiet Bump. We come from Irpinia, a small rural region of midland of Southern Italy… the biggest village only has 15,000 people, so developing an electronic/dub label between the mountains was not easy. A big challenge. Without the label we probably would have stopped playing music many years ago… it’s a survival project, and we are really proud of it.”

To celebrate the relaunch of their website, they’ve released their first CD compilation – UNO, the first thing you can actually buy from the label (as I said, EVERYTHING beforehand from these guys has been given away for free). It’s brilliant, and features many label regulars, the label’s brightest rising star DaDub (who’s gone on to release on Stroboscopic Artefacts) and some new high-profile collaborators like Stewart Walker. Paolo Picone, who records under the name Peak and has recently moved to Berlin, was kind enough to answer a few questions about the label. His responses are best read to a soundtrack of his own music, a captivating sample of which is below.

When and how did A Quiet Bump (AQBMP) start, and how did you chose the name?
The label was founded by me (Peak) and Camine “Gamino” Minichiello (Jambassa) in 2005. It started as just a name and logo to put on the cover of our band MOU’s first CD, a fake label, just to have a greater chance of getting reviewed as an official CD and not just as a demo… a trick! We picked the name to evoke the idea of something without a big clamor, a silent and shy label, a record company for implosive releases … But by the time we’d gotten to our fourth release, we decided just to run it as a label.

Who is part of AQBMP now, and do they have other roles beyond their music work?
Paolo Picone (Mou, Peak, Pantazm) with the contribution of my booking and events agency Soundabbast.
Carmine Minichiello (Mou, Jambassa) with the contribution of his Q-Zone Recording Studio
Giovanni Roma (Black Era, Pantazm, Lich, Voodoo Tapes) with his Blackchannel Mastering Studio
Raffaele Gargiulo “Papa Lele” (Jambassa/Wiseman Dub) the graphic designer of AQBMP
Leo Giso (Mou) the man behind shop, orders and shipping…
Web site design and programming by Nico Vece – the secret sixth man of AQBMP – with his THIN studio.

If you had to choose a word or phrase for your aesthetic for people who didn’t know the label, what would you say?
Digital roots? Contemporary roots? Or maybe in a better way: NON-Conservative Dub … Something connected with ’60/’70 Jamaican roots music and our contemporary culture… just in terms of space and time – places, society, and technologies. What King Tubby would have played now in the XXI century.

How do you choose which artists to release? Are they all friends or from all around the world?
We have no specific method… although usually we personally know the artists before producing them, so the majority of AQBMP artists come from our region of Italy … all friends. But it’s not a rule, everything depends by the music … the artist’s coherence as a producer and his sound are important for us.

Why did you decide to do Uno as a CD?
The main reason was to have a more professional approach to the promotion, and also to give the people a different approach of AQBMP. UNO in Italian means ONE, a number, the first number, just like a new starting point for us… we decide to change and renovate everything.

Plus we were very tired being classified as a “Net Label” – too many times and for more and more people in the net audio scene, the word “net” has become more important than the word “label”… In recent years I think the net audio world has become a fenced-in space – yes, with a lot of nice people, nice networks, situations, and nice ideas – but cut off from the music outside, or at least with a marginal position. The container became more important than the content.

Who are some artists that you might want to work with for the label but haven’t yet?
I don’t know… They don’t yet have names! We don’t have a well-defined idea of the AQBMP sound: we are 5 people with completely different ideas about “sound”. We listen to everything from Dub Specialist to Sonic Youth, from Slayer to Moritz Von Oswald, from David Sylvian to Fela Kuti, etc… Just as some examples! So now we prefer to explore our commonalities based on low bass frequencies and downbeat… and when possible support the idea of research on modern roots.

What upcoming releases are planned?
A new release from PARA as well as VOODOO TAPES (a new dubby project by Gianni Roma/Black Era, the man behind the mastering of AQBMP)… both as digital releases and digital distribution.

To be continued…

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music. Tune in regularly for his CREATED series on new and undiscovered music, including what to hear, and talks with artists.
http://kidkameleon.com

What happens as music peers through the gauze of memory? Our contributor Matt Earp asks that question with the second installment of the new series, CREATED, a column that examines new and undiscovered music and feeds our headphones through the week.

There’s a production technique in a lot of today’s post-FlyLo, beat-driven instrumental hip-hop that’s pretty darn pervasive when you start listening out for it. It’s that woozy, wobbling 80s synth sound – both pads and arpeggios – that once were clear and pristine but have been softened and weathered by time. It’s not just straight recreations of Vangelis or Tiffany, but those sounds as we hear them today – warped, foggy, distorted, heard on tape that’s been physically stretched – the 80s seen through the lens of time. It’s not your Madonna or Michael Jackson cassette as it was when you first bought it (that is, you readers over 30), but that tape as it sounds now, having sat through 25+ summers in the glove compartment of your IROC-Z, pulled out and played again in all its warped glory. It’s the sound of countless TV shows and commercials dubbed and redubbed from VHS to VHS, traded between friends, losing fidelity but gaining character at each interval. Personalized. Distorted with memory. Decaying but well-loved.

This style doesn’t have a name that I’m aware of and it doesn’t really have a progenitor, although Boards of Canada get name-checked by producers I’ve talked to more than anyone. But BOC call more on 70s-era memories (the era of their youth) – filmstrips, 8 tracks, The Electric Company and Richard Nixon. This stuff is firmly rooted in the 80s and early 90s – VHS, cassettes, 3-2-1 Contact and Margaret Thatcher. And TONS of people are doing it. Oneohtrix Point Never (and his dozen other guises). Com Truise. Salem. Kyle Hall. Lone. Space Dimension Controller. Toro y Moi. A lot of those bands are also associated with Chillwave. But Chillwave is a little more crisp and singer-songwriter-y. This style is more instrumental, hip-hop driven, and has intentionally-warped sound elements and heavy muffling envelopes added to the lo-fi synths. When it’s done well, it’s one of the more exciting sounds of today’s electronic music, and I’ll take a stab at coining a new phrase for it – VHSwave. That plants it firmly in the 80s, evokes the sense of the stretched tape, and touches on the fact lots of these artists are also make videos for their creations, usually out of a warped pastiche of strange 80s visual flotsam and jetsam.

For a TON of this stuff, check out Outlier Recordings, especially their voluminous Outsourced compilations. For even weirder sounds and concepts, look to New Dreams Limited, which seems to have some connection to Oneohtrix — but who can say? Fat Dudes is the pictorial companion of VHSwave, and is run by Astro Nautico‘s Paul Jones. And for a far more thought-out investigation into all things retro, check Simon Reynold’s book Retromania.

JACOB 2-2

Jacob 2-2 is a Brooklyn-based sound and video artist who takes his name from an obscure, late-70s movie about a fearless kid investigator. “It’s probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” says the producer, whose first name is David but who prefers not to give his last name. It makes total sense when you listen to his music: there’s a kid-like wonder to it, crossed with a dose of playful humor and an bunch of weird 80s synths. It’s a lot like Look Around You condensed into musical form.

David’s prized possession is an old Roland Juno 6. That particular Juno has no presets at all, so every time he gets something he likes he has to record it immediately. “I always think to myself, ‘I’d better record it now or else I’ll never be able to recreate it.’” Its warm sound in turn drives his beats and effects, filled with pings and blips that could be straight from any 80s video game. Sometimes his beats are muffled, while at other times they shine through clearly.

So far, David has put out three EPs, two self-released through his Bandcamp: (The Gifted Child and Cabazon). His most recent EP, Fantasiarexia, was picked up by Jakub Alexander of Moodgadget. He’s also had a couple compilation releases and a handful of remixes for Aleph, Starfawn, Macka and others. (You can listen to all of them on his SoundCloud page.) A motion graphic designer by trade, David also makes his own videos for his live show, performing against a background of material loosely cut together to his music and full of weird and wonderful nostalgia and color.

“There’s a difference between nostalgia and kitch” David says, “And with my stuff it’s not about recreating what we had or were when we were children, it’s more about the idea of being a kid.” But he might take issue with my labeling his work VHSwave – born as he was in the late 70s, “my family had a huge Betamax collection when I was growing up.” So perhaps for Jacob 2-2 it’s actually BetaWave.

STEPHEN FARRIS

Flash forward a dozen years, and you arrive at the birth of today’s other subject, the prolific Stephen Farris. Half a generation younger than Jacob 2-2, Farris has arrived at a similar sound more by general osmosis of nostalgia through the Internet than by actual memories of the 80s, of which he has none.

A lot of his stuff, though not all, is more influenced by traditional hip-hop than Jacob 2-2 – including its more mellow and jazzy side. It’s not really surprising, though, since he’s from Houston – a city that’s been known for a melted and laid-back approach to hip-hop for two decades. Farris’s stuff is a little bit more upbeat than a lot of Screwed stuff, but he’s also influenced by the Chopped aspect of Houston hip-hop, integrating that genre’s effect of messing with and repeating vocals and samples. Strange cut-ups pop up all through his work and create some of its funnest moments.

“I got into making music my freshman year of high-school, when I got a copy of Fruity Loops 5 and this book Circuit Bending: Build your own Alien Instruments,” he says. From there, Farris started going to Goodwill stores and poking around online to find old Casio keyboards he could hack into new forms, though he does count a Juno 106 among his possessions (seems like the Juno is the synth of choice for VHSwave). For a while he was making music with an MC in a group called Ghost Mountain, but for the past couple years he’s mostly been a solo producer. Almost all of his music is available from his Bandcamp page – and apart from a few remixes and compilation appearances, he’s entirely self-released. He name-checks a lot of fellow producers that he either admires or has plans to collaborate with, like ntropy, Sound Founder, Brock Berrigan and VHS Head, but he is also a bit of a lone wolf. “I don’t really collaborate well,” Farris laughs. “If you ask me to do something or if you want a certain part to sound a certain way, that’s probably not what you’re going to end up with.”

Farris ends up playing in Austin quite a bit with fellow beat-heads in the Exploded Drawing collective. He’s also reached the final round of the Applied Pressure producers’ battle that will be held the first night of SXSW. He’ll be battling Lo Phi at a show that also includes beat-meisters Elliot Lipp, Robot Koch, and B. Bravo. Farris also does the videos for his own works, cutting together elements from his huge library of clips with Adobe Premier. And just so you know he’s no joke in the world of VHSwave sound, if you order it Farris will actually make you a copy on, on VHS, of his Cosmic Sound II album and send it out to you along with your download. “It’s pretty trippy though, I’m not sure I could watch it all the way through” he says. The first 5 minutes are below, and Farris reckons he’s made about 80 so far.

Kid Kameleon is a San Francisco-based DJ, promoter, writer, blogger, historian, archivist, and fan of electronic music.
http://kidkameleon.com

If you can find a spot in the rotation with your Mannheim Steamroller collection for something a bit different, CDM reader Leigh Walsh of Cork, Ireland sends in her work. She describes it as “punky gothy electronic … for Christmas,” with any proceeds benefiting Autism research. The single sounds crazy, but for me, things get good with the game world-like, shimmering “Secret Inside the Ice Level” and “Melody for the Sewn Princess” tracks.

I can find myself mentally wandering an 8-bit ice cave level right now…

Loving her work, hoping to here more, hoping not to get folks’ genders wrong next time… oops.

Heck, let’s take this playlist a little further out.

One darned trippy Christmas: HAPPY XMAS PEBBLES LAILA ROCKET YUSUF! By London-based artist Affie Yusuf, via SoundCloud:

HAPPY XMAS PEBBLES LAILA ROCKET YUSUF by AFFIE YUSUF

Thanks, Laila!

If that doesn’t cleanse your palette after hearing too many of the Christmas standards on repeat, I just can’t help you.

Now, go and use this to freak out your families and friends.

LA-based bang Fol Chen (Asthmatic Kitty records) wanted to go beyond the computer as the playback and manipulation device for their music. So they worked with collaborators to invent a solution. In a new video, sounds, and an interview, we can share some of how this came into being.

Built with the monome creators (Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain) and LA research and experimentation center Machine Project, the Tetrafol is a custom, pyramidal sound device. The object warps Fol Chen’s music using gestural manipulation of playback, but can also use your own samples. And with open-source circuit and firmware, the project could be an opportunity to learn or to build your own creation.

Description:

The Tetrafol is a hand-held tangible electronic sound toy. Circuits enclosed by a wooden tetrahedron detect orientation and motion-gestures to modify the playback of a collection of Fol Chen’s micro-compositions, allowing the user to explore sound through physical manipulation.

The battery-powered device has its own internal speaker but can additionally be hooked up to a headphone or amplifier.

The circuit and firmware are based on open-source hardware and is itself published as open-source, allowing anyone interested to learn about its deepest inner-workings.

Here’s a sample of the project, via the Tetrafol-created Fol Chen track “So Good”:
Fol Chen – So Good by WeGetPress

Built by hand in a limited run of 100, the device sells for US$110 direct from Machine Project. We spoke to monome’s Brian Crabtree about the project – and a new, comically-inclined video shows off the project.

Stems from the track “Back on Kent” come preloaded:
Fol Chen, “Back on Kent” by asthmatickitty

CDM: How did this collaboration come about? How did you work together?

brian: kelli and i have a loving and working relationship with machineproject, a phenomenal organization founded by our good friend mark allen. we’re always amazed at the fantastical variety of projects that are born there. a few inspiring works of recent include a cash machine designed for a children’s museum and a workshop on lockpicking. so when mark approached us on behalf of his good friend adam goldman and adam’s band fol chen regarding a possible collaboration we were all ears. the goal was to design and produce some sort of synthesizer-sampler-effect-instrument-toy-object to accompany the release of their new album. that was about a year ago and we’re happy to see it finalized and soon in playful hands.

in the early stages there was much whittling of ideas (too expensive, too complicated, etc). we arrived at some sort of gestural sample player and a demo video was ready to show the proof of concept (we live on opposite coasts so there was much back and forth through internets and mails) the basic build used a waveshield (by adafruit) and an arduino and some very hacky code i modified.

fol chen provided the sound set. kelli and i proposed a series of enclosures– diamonds, stars, ice cream cones, d20. the tetrahedron ended up being the most beautifully minimal, and incidentally the most cost effective. our friend jason voytilla laser cut a prototype from thin birch ply and we sent the “finished” sample to california where it underwent a series of intense focus groups – thanks to the rigorous machineproject laboratories. after more back and forth, and basic design changes here and there we were in agreement. we used our very reliable production chain that we depend on for monome releases… it was nice really helpful to have that all in place and sped up the process considerably.

the tetrafol accompanies the release of some exciting new fol chen tracks, and there will be a release party of sorts in early december at machineproject. should be very interesting, as the current installation is a 30 foot deep window sill of sorts.

What went into the design? The construction of the thing?

the final circuit board is an arduino, [Lady Ada - Limor Fried] waveshield, and accelerometer smashed together and made very small. i really just put existing technologies together– i can’t take a lot of credit here.

the industrial design was more fun. we didn’t want to use plastic so we experimented with felt and wood. coming up with a size, shape, and feel were the main goals- to create something that was pleasant to hold and sturdy enough to be tossed in the air.

What’s the basic notion of the instrument?

it plays sound loops, or “micro-compositions” written by fol chen. when you pick up and tilt the device it modifies playback: in one axis it changes the playback speed, in the other it triggers a variable-speed stutter (playback position jump). sounds are changed by a shaking motion. given the response is immediate, it comes alive very quickly.

i’d also hesitate to endorse it as an Instrument, though it’s very playable. it’s a bit like a responsive buddha box.

Any other documentation?

i posted the firmware/hardware source on github. there is a no “build your own” guide as you’d be much better off just looking at the waveshield documentation (which is very good.)

this was a fun collaborative side project– and it makes me even more curious to see how musicians continue to create tangible objects to accompany their releases.

More information:
folchen.com

Tetrafol @ GitHub (firmware + hardware, under a GPL v3 license)

Texas-born, Detroit-raised, New York-based artist Matthew Dear has a new EP, to be followed by a full-length in 2012. It’s worth mentioning now for two reasons: one, the driving, “chugging” rhythms of the single, “Headcage,” will pop into your head and stay there, led by Dear’s vocal ability to croon and groove simultaneously. Second, the opening of this video may well make your mind go squish. The work of London-based director Morgan Beringer, seen previously milking monochrome textures out of another Matthew Dear collab, the film makes it look like some very colorful part of the Earth’s crust turned a film into magma. It settles down, but the opening frames are to me transcendent, especially when set to a similarly-morphing sonic backdrop.

You can stream and download the single via SoundCloud:

Matthew Dear – Headcage by ghostly

More on the upcoming release from Ghostly:
Matthew Dear: Headcage

The music writing echoes a bit for me Eno and Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; perhaps channeling that, the album art by Michael Cina for Dear has washes of indistinct color, like a kaleidoscope set into motion, then blurred. Ghostly reports Dear co-produced the single with Van Rivers and The Subliminal Kid, vets of the acclaimed self-titled Fever Ray. The rest of the album is full of other vocal and producer collaborations. More on this when it arrives.