Nice Post On Werbeblogger.de About Bashed Music Industry
Alas, it’s in German, particularly check the comments, it’s there where it get’s interesting:
Jazz and Club - Or Hendrik Schwarz Live vs. Cobblestone Jazz Live
Ok, it might be a bit late to review Hendrik Schwarz’s K7 mix. Also, the Cobblestone Jazz album came out last year sometime already. But it might be good to let the hype die down for 23 seconds and on before actually trying to talk about “Jazz” (an incredibly wide universe) and “club music” (an incredibly…) - and the way these two styles may merge in the work of these two artists.
Hendrik’s approach is coined by his origins in the West London style. A music which normally has nothing to contribute to anything because it is stuck with standard formulas of old time Jazz trying to melt these into mostly mediocre electronically produced tracks. That style might have had its moment in time in the mid nineties, trying to emancipate itself from that overhyped and just too abvious “Acid Jazz”. But even back in the days, I never understood the hype about Jazzanova and their superficial lounge approach, mostly lacking any sign of deepness, real soul, or innovation - let alone real Jazz, House, or Techno.
So enter Hendrik Schwarz; unfortunately his “Leave My Head Alone Brain” surprise hit just came up with the same old clichés in a more contemporary and a bit more sophisticated disguise though. And so does his live mix, what’s that gotta do with Jazz (the melange of which with club music, the mix was so praised for among other things)? Jazz, namely improvisation, ensemble play, complexity of rhythm, richness of harmonies and a mastery of the instrument? Nothing, but really nothing can be found here. It’s a superficial and typically post-modern (if that wouldn’t be so cliché itself) half-baked mess of boring formulas. Out of context citations of standard Techno and House chords, famous drum patterns and otherwise atmospheric synth pads mixed with obviously black vocals (I am almost tempted to say “Negro” vocals, because that’s what they are reduced to here), dumb lyrics and some Jazz and Blues trash. The mostly too harsh and stump kicks round up the picture. It’s what I would call the ultimate caffé latteism of club music.
On the other hand we have the Cobblestone Jazz ensemble and their live versions of their studio album “23 seconds” (unfortunately I missed their gig in Berlin). Although it is quite clearly a club music act and therefore might have not sooo much of an appeal to classic Jazz audiences, it’s the best ever merger of Club and Jazz imho. Of course do they work with classic Club and Jazz formulas like Schwarz, but it’s not the “What”, it’s the ‘How” that counts (sorry for that standard formula). Cobblestone Jazz just manages to walk this very thin line while making you completely forget that a merger is actually performed here: complex and danceble, rich in harmonies and one chord only, subtle and in ya face, an endless flow and a form, improvised and formula - I could go on. Ony Hancock’s “Head Hunters” or Miles Davies late electric phase come to mind here - from the other side of the fence though.
So I guess I made my preference clear - but it’s beyond taste really, it’s rather about the flat vs. the phat. And that even counts in the club. Just check out that video piece: Cobblestone Jazz @ The End, London.
Vinyl Is Dead - Part 2 (And Hypes Are As Well?)
This is a rather associative follow-up on my recent ‘Vinyl is Dead‘ post. I just happened to have quite an unusal discussion with one of the guys from the Melbourne born mnml ssgs blog. The whole thing started on the occasion of a mnml ssgs post about Rozzo. It is a rather long but imho quite fun to read threat with a lot meandering going on. About politics, “the” media, a lot about rules of hype and finally also about the actual subject which the headline suggests. Thanks for PC’s interesting and original views indeed.
I recommend strongly reading PC’s (my main thread partner) musings about vinyl before starting to read the actual thread. Cheers
Release 3 (GO GO G 3) The Cuddle And Cum EP
First cuddle with your chérie - then do whatever it is you cannot abstain from.
That’s the idea of the “The Cuddle and Cum (split) EP”. The first track “Liebling Password Kuscheln” (Sweetheart, Password Cuddle) is all about grooving smoothly with your sweetheart. Whether it be publicly - i.e. in Café Liebling, Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg - or in private (password required).
The second track is all about what’s happened after your password was accepted and you are logged “in”. But listen to the cheesy vocals yourself. Both tracks’ lyrics share a similar sense for the irony of it all. Whatever that “all” may be (relationships, rituals, sex - you name it). The ‘Cuddle And Come’ EP (GO GO G 3) tracklist:
1. Hagen B. & Zuckermann feat. Très charmante Magali ‘Liebling Password Kuscheln’
2. Lousy Lovers ‘Sex in Progress’ (Zuckermann Remix)
Hagen B. & Zuckermann
Hagen B. started his career in Tresor club, the old one - of course. He soon became resident of that institution but was rather attracted to the (housy) “Globus” floor at ground level than the techno torture chamber downstairs. Now he’s back in the studio after a long break and shares his passion for cool, hot House grooves with Zuckermann, Stalking Go Go Girls’ CEO/CFO/CCO/CSO (Chief Sex… okokok) and whatever you want to.
The latter also used to be Maria am Ostbahnhof Berlin resident plus resident of the incredible “Cinetrip” parties in good ol’ Budapest (mostly in the Rudazs bath, and if we say bath - it was IN the bath and a watery orgy). He played in France and Japan too and had a number of releases on rather breaks oriented labels using obscure pseudos that he thought were cool back then. Now he’s back again too and working with Hagen on the always exciting “new” idea of House: classic sounds mixed with some contemporary ideas, kling-klangs and sexy whims to produce an altogether fresh House sound. And so the redefinition of House continues…
Lousy Lovers is a project of 2 audio stars from Berlin, one of which is above mentioned Zuckermann, the other one now based in Marseille, Southern France. After they had debated the advantages of Berlin Coolness vs. French Hardcore long enough, they decided to clash these influences instead and create “eine elektronische-erotische Tanzkapelle”.
Lousy Lovers was born, transforming both the Southern way of making love - too fierce, too short - and the Northern one - too uptight, too short too - into something of an entirely different quality. Whether you’ll like that might depend on the girl(s) of course.
Their clash “très particulier” of influences merges into a unique House sound, which combines Minimal with fever and heat with not taking oneself too seriously, cheers.
Vinyl Is Dead.
Lately we had an email conversation with a guy working for a club music mag here in Berlin. Let’s simply say, for one of the two important mags in town. After having stated that he liked our stuff, he said in the very same mail, that he’d be sorry but that the mag doesn’t usually review neither mp3 labels nor releases. Apart from the fact that he might not have liked our stuff and that he wanted to hide behind the unspoken of policies of the house, we found that statement sooo typical - but sooo bizarre at the same time.
Fact is, in spite of todays myspace and iPod generation, or world reknown DJs like Dave Angel who use DVS systems or - God forbid! - even a laptop only to spin, many of the influential German club music media more or less ignore the devellish mp3 medium. We honestly wonder why?
Well mixed and mastered mp3s sound as good in the club as any vinyl. Plus they sound much better than badly mastered lo-fi vinyls, lots of which are still produced and spit out on the market every f***in’ day.
The burden of carrying heavy crates with felt TONS of the black gold in them is a real mothafuckin’ pain in the ass.
DJing is about to change radically anyway. Already today, many DJs open for this change include their own effect units like the Mini Kaoss Pad, use some sound producing live gear along their DJing, or go for the above mentioned DVS solutions like NI’s Traktor Scratch to be able to be more flexible, spontaneous and innovative than the oldskool kings. In fact; DJing and Liveact(ing) become one.
And to speak of the oldskool and put that into a historic perspektive: without the boldness and openess for new things of innovators like Grandmaster Flash or Kool Herc, DJing as we know it wouldn’t even exist.
To finally pay our respects to more of these real DJs, namely the scratch wizzards (”what is a DJ, if he can’t scratch”). These always have used every possible angle to manipulate a vinyl in every un-thinkable way. And today even these hardcore vinylistst
use control records of a DVS system AND other gear.
So hey, maybe we should stop to limit ourselves to what’s still widely seen as the only way of playing music in a club (or for that matter, elsewhere). Also, we cannot help but to feel that this is not only lazyness of thought, but that there are tangible business interests at stake also. Since, apart from ideologically triggered beliefs, isn’t it pure lazyness of action that the club music industry is unable to think about new business models and so to re-invent itself? They, who don’t stop critizing the majors for their immobility and the RIAA for its demonization of their very customers can’t come up with more than to sell sound-storage-media? A business model which will be dead by the end of the decade!
Some people at least understood. Beatport.com, Junodownloads - and even some artists like Jay Haze with his wrong context thing whatever net label approach a couple of years ago (sorry, Jay;). But even the latter could only make some waves with his netlabel because he had some vinyl releases out in the first place.
Well, it’s time for a reboot guys. And not only so, because today you’ll only get a distribution deal as a label newcomer if you know the distributor in person plus book him on your parties. No, it’s because vinyl is dead.
Jens Zimmermann Crackles Da House
Alright, I started to listen to Zimmermann’s music because of Ricardo Villalobos’ praise. I mean, if you hear an artist whom you respect very much musing about another artist whom HE respects very much, it’s certainly worth listening. Especially if the recommending artist is a HE (= veeery well known), and the other a somebody you’ve never heard of before. And no, I haven’t even read the Groove magazin article about the guy yet, since - attention stereotype - his music speaks for itself.
Hypnotic, excessivley long tracks unwind in an ever repeating manner without the idea of boredom crossing one’s mind. And if it does incidentally, it’s a sweet boredom which touches us with a stripped down ennui which is far being blasé - if that’s possible… Plus there often is a reference to latin rhythms hidden somewhere. No wonder that Villalobos likes these tracks. The most astonishing thing though is, that his tracks rock the house - crackling and squeaking as they are. Maybe they awake some deeply caché animal instincts:-? To be serious again, I think it’s his excellent sense of drama that make his tracks stand out from the mass of Minimal bullshit that the club music scene has seen these last years. And the words of a HE of course.
Cheers, Zuckermann
You Sure Wanna Switch From Windows To Mac? (Music Productionwise…) PART II
Apart from the challenge to fully understand and master the new OS (not as easy as the average Mac evangelist will tell you – even if you don’t ask…) as well as Win XP Pro, it appeared that the hardware didn’t live fully up to its design. Unfortunately it’s only then that you take all the forum remarks about the MacBook’s bug list seriously… A striking body temperature (yes, we all know that we like it hot, but hot on metal surfaces is too hot) and the noise level of a fan that doesn’t like to stop working rank among its most prominent features.
Plus Boot Camp 1.1 was far from being a stable matter. And since all our music software ran on windows, that was a problem. We installed Cubase SX 3 and finished a production anyway. We began asking ourselves though, whether we had been overrun by Apples wonderful marketing machinery. The “liberty” to work on both systems at native speed turned into a completely unnerving experience. Windows and OS X just don’t go along well. Just a few examples; indeed it is possible to READ an NTFS partition under OS X – but WRITING is impossible (unless you find a reliable 3rd party software). Then it turned out that Bootcamp can’t establish more than two partitions, one for Win, one for Mac. No 3rd data partition possible. By that time the comments of some long term Mac users not to bother, because his holiness Steve in his endless wisdom had created such a stable system that a data partition is just not needed, OS X will never crash and become useless like Window, didn’t appear to be very trustworthy after we did have some inexplicable system crashes. Having partly been turned into Mac heads nevertheless, our hearts were filled with great expectations regarding the final Bootcamp version under Leopard. Alas, that problem persisted…
Which means an external hard drive is rather indispensable. O yes, and it must be Firewire of course, since the 2 USB ports on our 15,4’’ MacBook “ “Pro” are not so Pro after all and more importantly, completely insufficient in a Studio environment. But thanks for the otherwise completely useless Firewire 800 port.
At least the keyboard was legible, due to the illuminated keys. Very cool! So here we finally had some reason to rejoice. The display was also very well received. Non-reflective, with LED’s (which a lot of PC notebooks still don’t have to offer), an ok resolution of 1440 x 900, and fully legible even when working directly in the sun. So some flaws aside, the hardware did its job. But changing the OS all the time was frustrating in the long run. After a lot of discussions we consequently opted for a radical system change, and so our studio became fully Xed. At the moment of decision, nobody could foresee the consequences, though…
Excerpt: …Cubase behaves very unstable on Mac. The program quits for no reason (unlike Reason) – and it can do so any time. To make a long story short, we are looking into buying Logic now… Many plug-ins were never written for the Mac, so go, get some new ones. One unwanted consequence of that is a lacking compatibility to older projects of course. Etc., etc., etc….
So yeah, time is relative – particularly in relation to the desired results. Since we really, really liked the hardware – and some of the charms Mac OS X has to offer - we had a lot of patience with the Mac and even enjoyed problem solving for some time. But after a while it sucked big time, bottom line being that with a Windows notebook we had spent much more time making music instead of finding out, that Windows on a Mac via Bootcamp is just some kind of a half heartedly implemented compromise. So the only USP of the Mac stays its hardware. And even that is not fully true music wise.
Our résumé: think more than twice before you consider a switch from Windows to Mac in your studio because Bootcamp is out there. Particularly if the only reason you want to change for is the legibility on the keyboard….
You Sure Wanna Switch From Windows To Mac? (Music Productionwise…) PART I
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With the arrival of the Intel platform plus Bootcamp, the time finally seemed to be ripe for THAT switch. XP was aging, Vista a pain in tha a**, and very little decent and stylish PC notebooks on the horizon. Unfortunately, time becomes a black hole in the process, and loads of unexpected difficulties arise. So just before you are about to realize that your girlfriend is gone (bad) and your fridge is empty (worse) you can rightly state: “switch carried out, all machines ready to fire”. But by then, the next generation of MacBook Pros has arrived… But lets start from the very beginning.
It was a thrilling notion on one of the first warm spring days last year, me using a notebook as my principal machine again. The power of most laptops being completely adequate today, the first choice was a Sony to begin with. The design, well, slightly organic, but somehow stylish enough. Plus the hardware insight was top for early 2007, a 200 GB disc, 2x 1024 MB RAM, plus a reeeally bright display.
But a “ready for the coffeehouse” batch doesn’t mean it can live up to the necessities of studio work. The reflective display design did indeed reflect all the other LEDs etc. in our otherwise rather dark studio atmo plus the 1280 x 800 pixel resolution is just not enough for 15,4’’ screen – certainly it’s not PRO. But that wasn’t enough to make me seriously think about a change. The thing that really mattered was the keyboard. The letters on the keys completely zoomed out in our studio because of the light grey keys with WHITE lettering on it. That could already become a problem on a normal grey day – well designed, Sony. So that was how it actually started. And after a lot of research it just had to be a MacBook Pro, since at the time being that seemed to be the ultimate hardware. And why not striving for the best - as we do with our music…?
On another beautiful day this wondrous thingy finally lay in front of me, a Core Duo first generation MacBook Pro. The design, plus the look and feel made me and zu Fuss almost bow in respect. What a simple yet refined elegance. But alas, the joy didn’t last long…
Second part coming soon
No Man In A Box!
These days, it becomes harder to box artists into pre-fabricated categories. Whereas in the 90ies it was crystal clear that Blake Baxter stood for House and Dave Angel or Jeff Mills for Techno, in our postmodern or decadent or maneristic age of dance music, it has become quite confusing.
Could anyone put James Holden and his Border Community in a box? Trance or ultra poetic innovation?? Or Radio Slave? Just an old fart of a Minimal producer or a genius of hynotic Pop-remixes?? Or Noze? Cheesy Wannabee Pop heroes or authentic underground artists with a disposedness to refined melodic infiltration??
So, yeah, boxes don’t make much sense anymore, uh? Not even to mention Justice and the whole Ed Banger posse like SebastiAn or Simian Mobile Disco. Although here, we could at least and wholeheartedly say: overhyped (but sometimes still quite, well… ok).
So even though club music seems to be “very dogmatic and almost unchangeable” - as Ricardo Villalobos pointed out in a really cool Groove Magazin (the bible of German club music enthusiasts) interview - it indeed has come a long way. Even Villalobos with his reduced-to-the-bones approach would probably be the first one to acknowledge that. Simply because although he is seen as the most rigid minimalist, it is him who uses ideas from gypsy CDs or samples even by our alltime favourite Johann Sebastian Bach to give his see-through structures some colour and light. Apart from his hypnotic grooves of course.
So club music nowadays becomes much more that just that; CLUB music. It has reached a level of differentiation - and we are not talking about the usual “progressive” House and other shit like that in case you didn’t notice - that makes this “genre” probably one of the most interesting (if not THE most interesting) in today’s “popular music”.
To come back to James Holden again, when we heard his mind opening poetic and for long stretches rather beatless set on Sonar Festival 2007, there was not a single Poom Tchak that we did miss. And no categories needed either. Now I could say: just a musician and his music. But that would make things to simple. I prefer to say: a very strong position in contemporary music.
On “Melancholic tonic” at Infinitestatemachine
What a cool post!
Interesting, that most of the stuff is rather ancient though (I am not talking about release dates only, but about style). I wonder if all this melancholy is a nostalgia issue?
So, what about contemporary sadness in club music? Just a handful, arbitrarily picked from Zuckermann’s “special melancholy collection”:
-> Above all, The Juan Maclean - My shining skinned friend, for example -> Daypak & Padberg - Black Beauty -> Those ‘Incredibles’, Noze - Bike double U Noze -> Carl Craig - Darkness(!) (Radio Slave remix)Not to speak about ->DJ Hell, when he was still hip? Particularly with this incredible Piaf cliché turned from its head to its feet: She Regrets feat. Billy Ray Martin?
And so, the sadness in “electronic” music continues…