Luis is not a bedroom DJ…

…but more of a "living room" DJ. In any case, I recently posted my first recorded DJ Mix/Podcast on Soundcloud, which you can also find embedded in my most recent post to my new blog.

Radio silence this week

Hey kids! Guess what? I've decided that I'm going to finish my revisions to my second chapter by this weekend, and I'm not allowed to blog until then. Rest assured that my life is currently very boring and un-blog-worthy, so you can just check out for now and come back next Sunday. In the meanwhile, here's something to tide you over:

Masomenos, my dear

OK, I’m a good 1 week behind on blog posts and I don’t foresee catching up in the next few days, so here’s something to tide you over: recent releases by Masomenos, whose tracks have been getting more and more attention. Enjoy!

Coco Feel and Love Shonk by Shonky

Continuing yesterday's post on the top 50 charted tracks for February (on Resident Advisor), I noticed that Paris-based Shonky's recent release on the Contexterrior label was listed at about halfway on the list. The track that was listed from the release was the title track, "Coco Feel and Love Shonk," which I find to be the weaker track on the release; it comes out as somewhat clichéd, overdone house. However, the second track on the release, "Donkey Kong," is way better. It has a certain old-school, Aux88, thumpy feel to it that I quite like.

Alas, I couldn't find a YouTube clip with the Donkey Kong track, so here's "Coco Feel and Shonk Love" for now, and you can click here to go to Beatport and hear an excerpt of "Donkey Kong."

You Have To Dance by Nôze, remixed by Mathias Kaden and Lee Jones

Apparently, the Mathias Kaden remix of Nôze's "You Have to Dance" is the top-charted track for February on Resident Advisor; that is, of all the DJ charts posted in February on that site, this track was charted the most. Although the original track isn't quite dancefloor dynamite, the Mathias Kaden remix is certainly golden. Also on the release are an acapella version also by Mathias Kaden that could be useful for bridging between two other tracks, and a more dubby and downtempo remix by Lee Jones. Here's the whole release from Beatport, so that you can hear a bit from each one. The track was released on Get Physical Music, which was also the top-charted label for February.

Lattice by Marcel Dettman

There was a feature on Marcel Dettman on Resident Advisor which is well worth reading. Not only does it give some insight into how he structures his 8+-hour closing sets at Berghain, it also provides some great photos of the interior of Berghain itself, which is usually a completely camera-free zone.

So here's a track called Lattice (Beatport link) from a release he put out on his own record label, Marcel Dettman Records (natch). I thought this would be a good one to post because it almost perfectly encapsulates the sound of the Berghain room, as opposed to the Panorama Bar room. So when you read my posts and you see phrases like "the techno was a bit too hard and pounding, better suited for the Berghain room," you'll know what I mean. I don't dislike this track, but it's the sort of thing that I tire of relatively quickly. A lot of the tracks I've posted in the past couple of days, on the other hand, would be PanoramaBar material.

Bingo Bongo by Paul Kalkbrenner

So Paul Kalkbrenner has been getting a lot of mainstream attention recently as the star of the film Berlin Calling..., a film about a Berlin DJ who finds himself overwhelmed by the the Berlin techno scene. I haven't seen it yet, as it's mostly doing just the film festival circuit at the moment, but I'm hoping to catch it soon. In the meanwhile, he's released the soundtrack for the album, which was pretty much entirely produced by him. Instead of giving you a track from the soundtrack (which I'm still trying to decide if I really like), here's a release of his from earlier in 2008.

The track is called Bingo Bongo, and it was released on an EP of the same name on the record label Bpitchcontrol last april (click here to see the release at Beatport). I like this track for it's dense but light use of accoustic drum samples, most of which sit at the middle-ground of the mix and don't overwhelm the sound. I like that he's managed to place the different samples in different places in the stereo field (i.e., pan right/left), without losing the feeling that there's a spatial centre to the whole thing. The track takes some time to build, but there's a nice breakdown at around 3:00, followed by a great return of the bass at 3:49. Good stuff.

Afefe Iku - Mirror Dance

OK, this track has been around since early 2008 and anybody that has been going to minimal parties in the past year will tell you that this track has been played to death, but I can't deny the catchiness of the xylophone patterns in this track (they start around 0:50). I had spent the entire year hearing that track, wondering who it was, asking someone nearby, and then either mis-hearing their response or getting bad information. And then today, as I was perusing the reviews on Resident Advisor, I fell across a review of a re-release of tracks on the Secretsundaze label, which included this track. Yay! Finally, I know who this is.

So Afefe Iku is apparently the protégé of Osunlade, a composer, recording artist and DJ that hails from the US but seems to have artistic and spiritual ties to Africa (in particular, he's a priest in the Yoruba religion of Ifa, according to his Wikipedia site). He founded and now runs a house label called Yoruba Records, which has been known for "soulful" house, but has also recently taken a "world music" turn, which presumably includes Afefe Iku's work. Afefe Iku himself hails from the island of Manda near the Kenyan coast.

I'm not sure what the musical traditions are on Manda, but certainly the presence of wooden ideophones (i.e., xylophones) on this track is a strong signifier of African-ness. You can find pitched hammered-wood instruments of all sorts in Sub-saharan Africa, especially in the west and the central regions. Kenya being on the eastern coast, though, I'm not as certain that this reflects his own local musical traditions. Then again, he could be making a more pan-African gesture with this track or he may not have any intention of referencing African music in the first place (although the fact that he's being mentored by Osunlade and he's on Yoruba Records makes this more likely).

UPDATE: According to a tip from my composer-friend Shawn, you should replace the word "xylophone" above with "marimba." I can never tell those two apart.

Radio Silence for a few days

Well, I have a draft of a paper (which will eventually become Chapter 3) due this Sunday and I have little more than a few sketches to show for it. So I'll be quiet on the blog front for the next few days. I still owe a friend my arroz chaufa recipe (finally!), so I might take a moment to post that, and there's an exciting Akufen / Cabanne back-to-back party coming up this Friday, so I might post a few things about that as well. Anyway, enjoy the quiet! I might replicate what I did last November by putting up favourite tracks of mine. In fact, here's the remixes of "O Superman" (original by Laurie Anderson) that I mentioned in last weekend's post. The third one ("Reboot 20 Cubans mix") is the one Monika Kruse played.

Back in the Saddle, musically

Etude 007: Reggaetón Edition

Yay! Back in the saddle, so to speak. After work, I finally got around to making some music again. It’s just a short 2-minute loop with some reggaetón samples that a friend sent me, but I was just happy to have produced something after more than a month of radio silence.

Anyway, I had crashed at a friend’s place the night before, so I got up at 10h00, fell back asleep, woke up again at 10h30, and finally got myself out the door. I was in no shape to go directly to work, so I had to climb on my bike and pedal my way around parc Buttes-Chaumont and make my way over to my place for a hasty shower and breakfast.

I got to work a bit late, but my boss seemed to forgive me, and my day was otherwise pretty unexciting. I headed home and set about making a fish salad out of those two roasted sea bass that I had left over from the night before. It actually worked out pretty well. I made some mayo from scratch with some good olive oil, an egg, lime juice, mustard and a clove of garlic (and with the help of a good hand blender, mind you). From there, I finely diced some onions, fennel, turnip, and carrots along with some of the fennel greens. I took the fish and carefully disassembled them, pulling the flesh off the skeleton without taking too many pin-bones with it; I flaked the flesh with a fork and removed any bones I could find, and then I mixed the fish in the veggies and added the mayo. Not bad, really.

I also made a roasted cauliflower soup, which was “improved” by adding a small container’s worth of crème fraîche. See? It’s healthy, because there’s vegetables in it…despite the pound of cream.

My evening was spent mostly dealing with the banalities of preparing application dossiers for fellowships and dealing with pedagogical issues, but before going to bed I decided to stay up and make a bit of music. It’s been almost a month since I had resolved to make something—anything—musical at least once every couple of days, so tonight was my night to get back to it.

Gas-gettin' and music-makin'

Etude 004: SCIENCE! Lab edition

After finally getting a good night’s sleep, I started today with the realization that I had no cooking gas, and that I would need to lug the butane keg down all 6 flights of stairs, over to the guy who refills them, and then back up those same 6 flights of stairs. Perhaps understandably, I procrastinated a bit and took some time to eat a quasi-breakfast at a leisurely pace; but my need to make a pot of tea overcame me and I finally put myself together and headed downstairs with the butane keg. The whole thing did indeed suck a whole lot, but at least it was done.

I went out again to get some ingredients for a soup stock, and then got some sushi to-go from a nearby restaurant for lunch. After eating my sushi at home and checking up on my emails, I started making soup. The plan was to use the frozen carcass of the duck we ate for Christmas Eve dinner and simmer it with soup-stock vegetables for several hours. Then the plan was to strain the stock and throw in a couple of handfuls of rice to make congee, my favourite Chinese comfort food (yes, it’s rice-based gruel; stop looking at me like that). The stock came out fantastically, partially thanks to the sheer amount of vegetable cuttings I put in there, but also I think partially due to the turnip that I put in there, which seemed to dissolve and thicken the soup a bit.

Anyway, aside from spending the whole day cooking, I also spent a large part of the day putting together another “etude” track using field recordings from a science lab (downloaded from the generous folks at FoundSound, again). Yay, productive weekend!

Oh wait…right; my dissertation.

It's Gettin' Cold in Here...

"...so put on all your clothes!" Who remembers that Nelly single?

Etude 003: Presets Only!

Good god damn, it’s cold out here. I know, looking at the forecasts and the reported temperatures, that I regularly live through much worse in Chicago and Toronto, but the buildings here are not at all prepared for this kind of cold, so even on subway platforms and in office buildings, it’s freaking cold. Don’t even ask me about my apartment.

Anyway, my day was pretty unexceptional again. I was productive at work, had a decent English class in the evening, and then came home and plugged out a pretty decent “étude” track. After spending hours last night pulling samples from field recordings and trying to clean them up for use in Ableton Live, I decided today to only use pre-set instruments and effects, so that I could spend more time building loops and a longer track. The results were pretty decent, methinks.

I noticed today in the subway (yes, I’m not getting on a bike again until the ice on the roads is gone) that the “soldes” season has started today. France has some pretty strict rules about when stores can have sales. Unlike in the States or Canada, there is no “sales rack” at the back of the store. The whole store goes on sale for about a month after the Xmas season, and then again in the summer. Generally speaking the “soldes” in January are a massive shopping frenzy, but reports are suggesting already that this year’s traffic will be lower. As a result, a lot of stores are marking down their stock to 70%, 80% and even 90% down. So I clearly need to go out this weekend and shop with money I don’t have…

OMG ROASTED EGGPLANTS

Etude 002 — Kitchen Edition!

You know how, at the end of my last blog post, I mentioned that it was snowing and Paris? And how it was probably going to freeze overnight? Yeah, it totally froze overnight.

I, stubbornly and a bit stupidly, left my apartment this morning and decided that, since it wasn’t snowing at that precise moment, it would be a good idea to bike to work. I made it there alive, but it involved biking really, really slow. Really slow. My options were to bike along the main roads with the cars, who barely knew what to do with icy roads but at least most of the roads had been melted down by traffic, OR take the dedicated bike lanes, which had not been cleaned and had frozen into various ridges and funnels. What was I thinking?

Anyway, the rest of my day was busy but largely uneventful. After work and then teaching English in the evening, I hit the Monoprix in my neighborhood on the way home to get some groceries and then got home and made some food. I made the MOST AWESOME HOMESTYLE BABA GHANNOUJ EVER. I don’t even know if it counts as a recipe, it was so easy (note, it probably isn’t the proper recipe, either). Here’s what I did:

1. Take two large eggplants (in this case, “graffiti” eggplants), split them down the middle and place them in a grilling pan, cut sides up. Salt liberally and wait for the surfaces to turn wet with leeched-out moisture.
2. In the meanwhile, take a whole head of garlic and, without peeling anything, just cut across the crown of the head, so that most of the cloves are exposed at the top. Pull off any papery skin that is getting in the way, place it on a square of aluminum foil, add a bit of olive oil, then wrap as tightly as possible. Add to the pan.
3. Take two onions, cut off the tops and bottoms, peel, and then cut in half across the rings. Place them, cut sides up, on the pan as well.
4. Place the whole pan in a low-head oven and walk away.
5. When the whole place smells of roasted garlic, pull the garlic out and squeeze it lightly to make sure that it’s totally soft. Unwrap and leave on counter.
6. Turn up the heat in the oven to medium and wait for the smell of the onions to become sweet and caramel-like.
7. Turn on the broiler and char the surfaces of the eggplants and onions
8. Pull out the eggplants, take a fork, and scrape out the meat of the eggplant into a bowl.
9. Take the onions and chop roughly and add to bowl.
10. Take the cooled head of garlic and start squeezing each clove, which should come out like a soft paste.
11. With your fork, mix all of these together vigorously. If you have a stick blender, this is a good time to use the stick blender.
12. Eat!

Luis Makes Music! Sort of.

Etude 001: Look ma! I made something!

In keeping with resolution # 6 from my list of New Years Resolutions, I’m starting a series of “études”. That is, from now on, I’ll be posting every day or two a new short minimal/techni/glitch track, which I’ll be posting to this blog over here. Like a proper étude, these compositions will be primarily pedagogical; each one will involve me focusing on a particular aspect of the musical technology I’m working with (mostly Ableton Live) and making something with a limited set of materials.

So, anyway, be sure to check that out. For the next few days, I’ll be putting a link to the “Etude of the day” at the top of each post here.

My day was very hectic today, as it was the first day of the winter quarter and, for the first time, we have a full complement of 75 students in the center. It was pretty much non-stop work all day, although I’ll admit that wasn’t unpleasant. Most of the students this quarter seem to be nice kids. Seem to be. Check back with me in a couple weeks.

Also, it’s snowing! I woke up this morning to see snow on the skylight above my head. Although I love me some snow from time to time (especially since it tends to bring sunlight with it), Paris is not a city that is prepared for sustained snowfall, so the sidewalks were a treacherous mess today, and I’m pretty certain it’s going to freeze over tonight. Hooray!

No text, just music, Part 6

"Face Control" by Danton Eeprom

I'm suprised that I did think of posting this one earlier. It's not exactly a current hit, but this track was doing very well over the summer in Berlin. It's by a French producer called Danton Eeprom, who has been blowing up over in Europe during the past year and then wowed everyone at Mutek in Montréal last June (I still haven't blogged about that weekend...sigh). His style follows in Ricardo Villalobos's footsteps in a sense--in the sense that he likes to have at least one slow-moving, echoey, atmospheric element that floats over all of the other rhythmic activity. On the other hand, his beats are much more trancey and spaced-out than Villalobos's beats, which tend to be really punchy. I remember posting a few weeks ago about standing in line and hearing someone behind me talking about how Villalobos's music sorta overwhelmed her emotionally in a way that was sometimes rather ambivalent or confusing. Over the summer, a friend of mine played me this Danton Eeprom track, pointed to the perpetually-rising synth line that starts around the 4-minute mark, and said, "It just gets into your head! If this sort of thing hit me in the right way, in the right situation, I might just lose my mind." So listen from about 4:00 into the track and let the sound spin for a while and see what you think about it. There is something hypnotic about it, I'll admit.

In fact, here's one of my favorite Villalobos tracks, just so that the comparison is complete. Note the lovely video.

"Dexter" by Ricardo Villalobos

The corresponding moment where the "atmospheric" element enters in this track is around the 2:39 mark.

No text, just music, Part 5

Today I got a fair bit of work done (for which I am rather proud, considering I only had about 4 hours after work to review a bunch of Levinas texts and organize my thoughts). After that, I went out with a friend from work for drinks, then dinner, then more drinks. Good times were had, but I stumbled home rather...um...non-productive. I slept well, though.

"Requiem of a Dream" by Johnny D

Woo! I managed to get Beatport to create an embeddable player. If I can manage to duplicate this feat, I might go back an insert a player for the track I posted on Tuesday, which didn't have anything on iMeem.

Anyway, this track is rather interesting, from a perspective of affect / emotion. On the one hand, it has a stream of clicks that have the same upbeat, swing effect as a "hi-hat ride" might have for dance-band/jazz drummers. On the other hand, you've got a string quartet playing a series of slowly-shifting chords that approximate the orchestral score for the gut-wrenching film, Requiem for a Dream. As it turns out, the main title track from the soundtrack, "Lux Aeterna," has had its own history of re-use.

So I'm fascinated by this mixture of depressive affect, serious contemplation and "party time!" music. It works as a minimal techno track, although I haven't seen it deployed on a dancefloor yet. I wonder what this does to the mood of a club. It's been listed as one of the top 50 listed tracks of October on Resident Advisor, so it's obviously working for some people...

No text, just music, Part 4

The chapter-writing continues, so the music posts continue as well.

"Ratman (Hugo Remix)" by Minimono

So I love resonant bass on this one (starting around 0:31 and continuing from there); the bass drums are pitched very low on this one, so you need to listen to this through good earphones or a set of speakers with good woofers, because otherwise you'll be wondering what all the fuss is about. I also am somewhat fascinated with the insertion of crowd noises / conversation (around 1:31 the first time, then passim), which I think was the addition of the remixer, as I can't find it in the original. The other remixes and the original mix are also pretty good and can be found here, on Beatport.com

P.S. Tonight was also the night that the Mumbai terror attacks began, so I was up until 3 or 4 in the morning, gripped by the mixture of hysteria and help on the #mumbai Twitter stream. If you are concerned about people you know who are in Mumbai, you can go to the Mumbai Help blog to see a list of the deceased, injured and rescued. They also posted the help phone lines for some of the hotels. Also, take a look at the comment thread in the top post, entitled "May We Help?" if you want to try and help out; people will post requests to relay messages, call numbers, type up the names of the dead, etc.

No text, just music, Part 3

Alas, this next track hasn't been posted on iMeem, so I had no handy player to embed in here. You'll just have to follow the link below to preview it on Beatport.com.

"Lucky Drawls" by Matt Nordstrom

Listen here on Beatport.com; both the original and the remixed version are good. I'm always impressed by Mark Broom's remixes and then disappointed by his DJ sets.

UPDATE: I managed to get BeatportPlayer to work! Here's the release in embedded form:

No text, just music, Part 2

The non-writing continues!

"Bell Clap Dance (Slam Paragraph Remix)" by Radio Slave

Sometimes this guy puts out amazing tracks, sometimes less so. But this was is pretty great, and the remix that Slam does for this track distills it down to a bubbling, churning sort of minimal froth similar to the SIS track I posted here a couple of months ago.

No text, just music, Part 1

Hello hello. I'm going into chapter-writing hiding, so I'm not going to be posting much to my blog. On the other hand, I feel bad not posting something, so I've decided to play the musical curator and post links to tracks that I've been enjoying with some minimal review/description. In general, I'm culling these from recent DJ charts and published playlists, so that what you'll be hearing here is what I've been hearing in clubs in Berlin and Paris these last few weeks.

So, without further ado, the first installment:

"Radar" by Stimming & H.O.S.H.

Those of you who have been reading my blog over the summer and fall already know how much I love Stimming's work. If this boy gets any better, I'll be asking him to marry me. Anyway, this is another track that was featured in his live sets, along with the ever-popular "Una Pena" and "Safari." Be sure to listen to just past the 5-minute point, where a long, siren-like build-up makes this sudden u-turn into mellow electric organ chords. It somehow works, and I can personally attest that it makes for a great climax on the dancefloor. These chords, pumped through a really powerful soundsystem, can have a really tactile "wash" effect. Anyway, great track.