MUSIC
6073 products
Bebedera takes the style of Tarraxo to a heightened awareness of its sexual nature. Tight, wicked layers of percussion, a suggestive ID ("Drinking is his life"), a slow pace that's not only perceptively slow, it sounds charged with intent, even malice, dissolution. Letting go of morality may be the big attraction in the music, permission to get down, this time in a heavy, conspicuous manner instead of a spiritual, breezy floatation. One has to recognize the impulse in ourselves. Once at peace with this rough nature, there are sublime grooves to follow, mind-boggling arrangements, a freedom from judgement in connecting with what may seem to be at first a very masculine take on dancefloor sensuality but which is in fact only human. Just with less filters.
In other ways, an aural combination of metal and flesh produces this notion of a cyborg, a very expressive physical body making its weight known to everybody around, a sort of walking fortress as in the "Moderan" group of sci-fi short stories. A glorious rattle of lata percussion, scraps from the junkyard. A sense of unease, even slight danger starts a flow of adrenalin. According to DJ Marfox, it's not the only thing flowing, there's also a strong desire for intercourse when a Bebedera tarraxo is playing. His very distinctive style has been a cult favourite for years. Accordingly, it took years to make contact, to reach an agreement, and the result is a set of classics that stretch as far back as 2014. Still the same punch, still the feeling no one has really stepped into this territory with such force.
Flipping the construct on its head, there's two Bebedera house tracks, we'd say almost an oddity, an abrupt change from the previous density of atmosphere, though they retain all the percussive bounce. Sensual, sure, a different tempo also letting through a romantic disposition other than the sheer physical attraction. One of the titles sums up the aesthetical power at play: "I Will Beat The Top High". As in reaching further out, further up. Wanting to. Time freezes - 2014 and 2016 (production years of these two tracks), fold up and melt into the Present. Where it matters.
Eric Broucek was the ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008 (no one knows anything precisely about that time, as it’s all lost in the fog of chaos). His hand was on all of the remixes, LPs, dance 12s. He was there in that over-designed gear dungeon almost every day, recording, mixing, struggling to not roll his eyes at Tim and me. And somewhere in that fog, he quietly dropped limited runs of three 12-inch delayed reaction bombs on his own label Stickydisc Recordings—two under the name Babytalk, and one as Watussi with another DFA regular, Morgan Wiley.
Back in the day, Eric did not want his music released on DFA. He wanted to forge his own identity, which he did, sending out music that wandered from the DFA path with its uniquely wonky, upended and understated power. His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time.
A few years back, I started DJing the tracks again, and saw how the world was still surprised by what Eric had made, and the idea of this compilation was born.
So, in the end, Eric, we totally got to release your records anyway. We heart you, man.
-James Murphy
Florerntino’s Club Romantico label serves a deadly b2b from Bubbling legends Styn & De Schuurman, rendering the roots and future of the viral, Surinamese-Dutch dance style on a scorching, hour-long mixtape.
Since the late ‘90s, DJ Chuckie’s sped-up dancehall innovations have spawned a very particular sound in Dutch Surinamese communities that would break thru to broader acclaim after percolating blogs and forums in the early 2010s. Subsequent releases by the likes of Anti G and later from De Schuurman and DJ Shaun-D have ensured main stage and club headline slots for the sound, which also regularly lights up Florentino’s globe-trotting DJ schedule.
Time is ripe, then, for this tight as heck history lesson spanning the past 25 years of bubbling, pairing one side of rambunctious tear-out tackle from the early-mid ‘00s, sifted from now-obsolete platforms - MySpace, dead blogsites - and P2P services such as Limewire and Bluetooth for a buckshot side of squeaks, subs, and triplet tattoos suffused with Dutch house influence.
The B-side calibrates the crosshairs to bubbling in the present era and into the future, shelling exclusives by Styn & De Schuurman, plus a closing ace by Styn & DJ Rtje, all rife with carnival drum batteries, hybridised with grimy mid-range and UKF-type string vamps with a wile-out torque that galvanises, future-proofs the sound with a chromed-out zing.
A party in a box, basically!
When Jako Maron reimagined Réunion island's politically-charged maloya sound on 'The electro Maloya experiments of Jako Maron', he focused on the genre's distinctive, revolutionary rhythms. Electro-plating the call-and-response thuds, he used the language of techno to upset the expected template, disrupting maloya's 6/8 pulse with modular bleeps and Roland kicks. He takes a different approach on 'Mahavélouz', focusing on the bobre, traditional maloya's only melodic instrument, a long bow amplified by a calabash that's known as the berimbau in Brazil. Maron was fascinated by the bobre's unique sonic signature, and noted that when it's usually played, it's drowned out by the louder percussive instruments. So he enlisted a number of traditional bobre performers to play a series of solos, using them to guide the album's four lead tracks and distorting and compressing the serrated hits until they stood confidently in front of his undulating roulér (bass drum) and sati (hi-hat) patterns.
"These four pieces are the culmination of my research into electronic maloya," explains Maron. "There's no need for words on this music; the bobre is the voice, and it is an ancestral voice. It's a reimagining of maloya kabaré in an electro form." This is the music that Maron has used to drive his recent live performances, so it prioritizes maloya's dancefloor potential. Swapping the traditional roulér and sati sounds for TR-606, TR-909 and TR-707 hits, he generates a hypnotic roll on opening track 'Paré po saviré' (rise up), forming a rubbery backdrop for Amemoutoulaop's acidic bobre twangs. Maron describes the track as a "call to bring spirits and people together", and using piercing feedback squeals to harmonize with the bobre, he introduces us to the voice that anchors the entire album. On 'Bék dann dir (try harder), he augments the bobre with glassy Korg Polysix chimes and Machinedrum sounds, and 'Zésprimaron'(the Maron spirit), ushers us towards a ceremony, shuffling his rhythm into a ritualistic throb, and using squelchy synth sounds to flutter into a trance.
Maron concludes his live bobre experiments with '1 piton 3 filaos' (one hill and three trees), and it's his most ambitious fusion, with hallucinatory flutes and technoid stabs rising weightlessly in-between Amemoutoulaop's frenetic performance. But this isn't the end of his investigation: Maron fleshes out 'Mahavélouz' with tonal studies that replicate the bobre synthetically. On 'Mdé prototrash', the characteristic ping is re-created by his modular system, and it's almost indistinguishable from the original instrument, buzzing and popping alongside Maron's surging percussion. The sound is more uncanny on 'dann kér Mahaveli' (in the heart of marvelous land) but no less affecting, knotted around synthetic bird calls and entrancing warbles. Even more idiosyncratic than its predecessors, 'Mahavélouz' is a bold step forward for Maron that builds on ancient foundations to construct a staggeringly new kind of dance music.
Hailing from Tanzania's bustling cultural hub Dar Es Salaam - the biggest city in East Africa - young beatmaker DJ Travella is setting the breakneck pace for its musical evolution. He's been producing since he was just 10 years old and has already bent singeli into surprising new shapes, welding euphoric EDM breakdowns and earworm-y R&B riffs to the Tanzanian genre's frenetic rhythms. 'Twende' is a straight-to-the-point set of the producer's most requested secret weapons - four hyper-melodic floor fillers that were developed shortly after releasing his acclaimed debut album 'Mr Mixondo'. Featured on his popular Boiler Room performance, these tracks will be familiar to anyone who's managed to catch one of his sets.
Starting things out right with 'Trust', a wonky, festival-ready 170BPM ass shaker that shuffles a familiar singeli beat around wormy synths, Travella keeps things moving with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it 'Believe', a minute and a half of brassy pop fanfares and buzzing rhythms. On 'Mchakamchaka' he introduces quivering soukous guitar phrases into the mix, keeping up the momentum with crowd noise and pneumatic sound design vamps, and 'Vumbi Vumbi' slows things down, just a bit, splaying plasticky, acidic leads over blown-out syncopated beats. It's one for the feet, no doubt.
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force lick another deadly shot of tumbling, tucked-up senegalese mbalax, making their 1st outing of ’16 and a 3rd 12” together in this line-up since 2015.
We’re all over the sloshing Walo Walo Version something rotten. It’s an utter joy to reprogramme yourself to its tangled syncopation, picking out and anticipating particular patterns with uncertain limbs, revelling in its wickedly stumbling, uniquely resolved meter. If, like us you’re nuts for drums, that lone, hingeing clap will leave you equally rapt, and then there’s a locked groove…
Flip side is also amazing: Ndiguel Groove resets the rhythm to a loping, shoe-laces-tied sort of house bustle sprinkled with lissom guitar and suspended in Mark’s mixing trickery, before turning up a denser original mix of Walo Walo Rhythm riding that Prophet 5 bassline and talking drums ‘aaaard.
LCD Soundsystem are back with their first song in two years. “X-Ray Eyes” premiered today on NTS Radio DJ Anu’s show, which is now archived. Find the full episode below; the new song begins around the 19:40 mark of the show.
LCD Soundsystem last released new music in 2022, for the White Noise movie. They played the song, “New Body Rhumba,” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert shortly after its release. Before that, the band had not released anything since 2017’s American Dream, though it has held residencies in New York, London, Boston, and Philadelphia and released the Electric Lady Sessions LP.