You’ve probably been reading my posts this year in a pleasured stupour, basking in the radiant joy of the process, agreeing with each and every comment, telling your friends that you read the single greatest blog on the planet. The ease of it all, one post and one song, a perfect ratio of title to word to song image. It’s almost interplanetary alignment in its precision but even the movement of planets must eventually make way for the asteroid storm that is today’s post. It’s a wrap-up of some of the [Australian] electronic based tunes I’ve been listening to of late, tunes that each deserve a post to call their own but this is a shoe-string universe and the recession hit hard so we’re I’m forced to make do with the limited rations I’ve been allotted. So read on in the knowledge that this post is a game changer. India might be in the midst of the single biggest election in the history of humanity but right here on Sound Doctrine is where you’ll find a deconstruction of several tracks from Australian producers. Think on it.
Laptop Destroyer – Commercial Sellout Rubbish
Not everything on this list is necessarily shrink wrapped and straight off the shelf this week, in particular this Laptop Destroyer track from ZZAAPP Beats Vol. 1 EP, borne of Summer’s warmth back in February. It’s named of its father label ZZAAPP Records who you may recall from the Sparkle Gang track Reggie wrote about earlier in the week. ZZAAPP looks like it’s going to be a promising source of diverse and talented artists and certainly they’re two from two so far. The beat sounds like the thunderings of a body against a corrugated iron roof and the (what you’d have to call) choruses are powered over still by that acidic distortion that lends an industrial cut to the whole affair.
This is fight music – Eminem.
Andrei Eremin – Voynich Manoeuvre
This one from Andrei “The Colossus” Eremin has a broadbrushed spaciness to it that’s normally reserved for the minimalist, heartfelt Enya-isms of post-Oliver Tank Australia. No shot at Oliver Tank this, he does what he does better than most that followed in his wake and if you want to feel what he wants you to feel than he’s the man to help you feel that. Again, still sounding kind of neg on OT here, certainly not meaning to be. What I’m getting at though, is that it’s not so easy to deliver the warmth and breadth of a song as “big” as ‘Voynich Manoeuvre’ without the skillset that Eremin clearly possesses. He’s worked with plenty of the now up-and-comers within the bounds of mastering and mixing and it’s clear he’s taken a whole bunch of beneficial cues from the process. The whole thing reminds me of that late nineties era where club and goth formed an unlikely ven diagram and within that central sector might sit a track like this one / the rave scene from Blade.
Holomorph – Want
Holomorph spent his formative months remixing the likes of Ciara, Missy Elliot and Christina Aguilera but in the last few months he’s attempted work entirely his own, his White Sea EP. The EP itself is frought with a issues of palette and would benefit from a departure from the trap based drum sample set but as a stand alone single ‘Want’ is worthy. There’s a pitched up, cut up vocal sample that hits interchangeably with the maxed out floor drum but the real joy is the twinkling arpeggios that send me straight back to Final Fantasy VII’s opening theme. My kingdom to any beatmaker who can remind me of gaming’s hay day.
ZZZ – Honey
That unashamed Pikachu (“Pika!”) sample in the first few seconds. The croaky pitched shifted bass bites that reference Ginuwine’s equestrian heyday (“you mean that WASN’T a Rihanna original!?”). The slightly off pitch high synth that serves as the warning sign of an impending Wave Racer/Sable chorus-drop. The smorgasboard of sample and synth sound on this song is entertaining to the finish and is the DNA of what may be the funnest song of the year. There’s even a section between 2:45-2:55 wherein ZZZ not only affects the pitch of the track but even (*gasp*) the tempo! Is that allowed? Has he applied for the relevant government permits? Does he even know how much taxpayer money is wasted litigating producers like these who haven’t followed proper process? Probably not but I laughed out loud the first time I heard that pace change in the track so I know in my heart of hearts that it’s right. This is justice.
Shūnya – In The Woods
“These songs are all too long Tommy! I’m but a barber from an upper middle inner-west boutique cafe/face-stylist studio, how am I too come to terms with anything over two minutes long?”
Worry not my beard sculpting contemporary, Shūnya is similarly disenchanted with the world’s self-indulgences and has opted into no more than sixty two seconds of our planet’s fleeting discourse, his fingers skitting quickly across the bass-sound programmed track pad in an act he knows can only temporarily lift the yoke from the back of mankind. The suffering continues but in Shūnya the pain abates for but a single moment. His dissected harp and twinkling marimba-like (I know it’s not a marimba, I just don’t know what the hell that instrument is called) tones are a balm on our long-anguished souls. Praise be.
De’ Kcuf – Diamonds
Because this roundup wouldn’t be complete without a track design to truly level the bassend of your system, here’s the newest offering from De’ Kcuf. De’ Kcuf loses points for having an impossibly difficult to pronounce name but two minutes into the track those points are regained in the act of utilising a stadium synth sound that was undoubtably informed by Darude’s Sandstorm in ’02 (and pretty much every other song Darude did, for that matter). If I were to put a marker on anything but the low end I’d be missing the point here so ensure your system is sufficient before turning the decibels clockwise on this one. If the name sounds vaguely familiar to you (which I doubt since it’s a bile inducing cross breed of strange grammar and mental consonant structure) it might be because you’ve heard FBi presenters attempt to back announce Coconut Bounce, the equally juicy ‘other track’ by De’ Kcuf.
The Ship Shape – Sprinkler
In describing this last one I was tempted to use words like exuberant or bouncy but there’s an ankle breaking lurch to the beat and movement of the rythm that seems to object to such rounded terms. You’ve only to look at the wave form and see the moments of near silence that pepper the track to come to terms with why this is such a fundamentally strange song. Many impressionist painters famously had their works described as ‘unfinished’ when they went to exhibition, notably in that there was rarely any varnish on the ultimate canvas and I get a similar sense on this track. It feels unfinished but it’s a producer’s decision and not one made out of ignorance. The silences and spaces and tactically used to galvanise the blips and beeps and that are spattered amongst them.
Reesepushkin – Scrunchie
So I’ve published this post with this so accidentally omitted and this is a late edited inclusion. The track is out through Yes Please and the moniker is the alias of young unearthed high finalist JaysWays. He realeased it simulatenously with a single under his JaysWays mantle and this is easily the more interesting though the JaysWays track might have more crossover appeal and has a vocal part by Nicole “Feature Vocal” Millar.
The industry standard method for generating hype in the lead up for a release or what those fatcats will refer to as the first part of a ‘release cycle’ is to break a long period of silence with some mutterings of a brand new single (and/or video) before following up with the single itself. Fergus Miller (more commonly referred to as Bored Nothing) doesn’t seem to attend to these more strategically orchestrated plannings and as a result it can be difficult to know whether his latest soundcloud offering is a demo, some throwaway noodlings or the lead single from his next record. Now I’m ninety-five percent sure this one is the first single of a new record but if not, sorry Fergus and sorry readership but you’ve always known I dealt in feelings rather than facts.
For brevity’s sake I’m going to compress the Bored Nothing timeline for you; He got some Unearthed love and then put out a record with Spunk and toured a bit. The record was really, really good and now here with are with single one (probably) from a new record (probably). It plods forward, the bassline drunk with regret while the twanging guitar sways between either side of the street, equally intoxicated and dampened by the 4am mist. ‘Why Were You Dancing With All Those Guys’ is the type of question and song that encapsulates the dilemmas you’ll find in the latter part of an episode of Freaks & Geeks. You know what, I think that’s as good as it’s going to get; this song is basically an episode of Freaks & Geeks.
With a bold opening groove underpinning a killer melody line, this song grabs your attention and white knuckles it for all three minutes. Every few bars a new element is added to maintain interest, be it a (very) interesting vocal harmony, a glitchy synth line or an acoustic guitar. It is the greatest kind of sonic mash, one that assumes the best from us; that we can handle it.
Sparkle Gang is Mel Stringer, and not much is known except that she wrote this song on the 22nd floor of a Surfer’s Paradise apartment building, has buckets of talent, and a unique taste in album art. The tune is out through ZZAAPP Records, the Darwin-based project of Kris Keogh (who interestingly enough put out an incredible ambient album a few years ago with New Weird Australia that involved processed and cut-up harp sounds. It was great then, and it’s aged as well as a 1959 Penfolds Grange).
This release is more interesting still because they’ve included Mel’s original stripped-back acoustic demo for the track (which is stunning, incidentally) and comparing demo to final product really serves to highlight how much a song can evolve during the recording process. Like language, music isn’t static but alive and mutating constantly n dis iz wat makes music heapz gr8 lol*. There’s a soundcloud full of her very, very, very pretty acoustic wares that you should spend a while involved with.
*[Editors Note]: Sorry
As soon as you hear the first chants of “Kobe Kobe” you recognize that this is going to be a basketball song. “Chase your dream” croons Yeo, early in the piece. It’s hard to tell at this point whether the song is written to Kobe Bryant or from the point of view of Kobe Bryant but it becomes apparent at the 1:53 mark with the line “Summer heat on an empty street”. In that moment it suddenly blooms like a spring orchard and you know, you just know that this is Kobe dissing Lebron. Heat on an empty street? Oh no he didn’t.
(Yes he did.)
It’s hard to imagine Lebron letting this one slide and we’ll probably see him shoot back, maybe through a song by Gossling or Panama, though sources say he has some tendrils in the Saskwatch camp. This is the first time we’ve seen an NBA player commission a song from an independent Melbourne artist and given the profile of the player this might set a precedent we’ll see followed many times over upcoming season. It’s also interesting to see Yeo moving in this direction given the sentimentality of his previous gendered anthem ‘Girl’. That song managed to cultivate some audience for Yeo and this one is a strong followup for an artist who has been more active over the past few years than you may already realize. ‘Kobe’ features the same rumbling bass sound in the verses that was present in ‘Girl’ but the chorus is a far brighter synth overload. It’s right on the verge of over-polish but retreats before vertigo sends the whole thing plummeting into unlistenability. What we’re left with is a legitimate pop song cloaked in the greys and browns of an independent Melbourne production. Strong song Yeo, strong song.
So you may not realize but you know all these laptop DJs making huge cash money while perpetuating extreme digital beats? Well, that whole gag is actually more difficult than it looks. In the late 90s it was as easy as plugging in the right numbers and generating a track based entirely on an algorithm. Artists like The Chemical Bros and Prodigy were actually just fabrications of big business music moguls who were ready to cash in on current trends using prepared equations. They didn’t even exist as musical entities and their music videos were generated entirely using CGI to give the illusion that there were actually human faces behind the music. The scary reality is that all those songs were simply the output of a supercomputer that became known as Pilcrox-II from 1991 onwards.
Sadly, sometime during the 2005 pop-punk resurgence, the technology was lost. Guerilla organisations stole the powerpoint charger for Pilcrox-II which was only available at [the now defunct] Games Wizard in Chatswood which effectively heralded the end of electronic music as we knew it.
These days it takes a lot more work for our “computer music” friends to craft their songs but there is one has never stopped fighting the good fight. He is Tim Shiel. I’m contractually oblige to tell you that Tim Shiel is actually so good at using these modern computer software systems that he actually delivers webinars to underprivileged bedroom producers (many of whom don’t even have bedrooms) to give them the skills to pay the bills or at the very least, score a whole bunch of plays on soundcloud. In Tim Shiel there is hope that maybe we can still excavate some of what was lost in that golden age of electronica. Timothy’s most recent full length body of work is the Duet Soundtrack. This series of songs was designed to be heard interactively whilst playing the IOS game of the same name. It’s hard to say whether the game or the soundtrack is stronger which is testament to the quality of the both.
As if that weren’t enough, the whole entire damn thing has been handed over to some of Tim’s friends who have obliged him with shifty new takes on those thrumming originals. Actually that’s not quite right, these affairs are more than just remixes, extending into the realm of collaboration- taking and reshaping the fabric of the originals. Listen to this record from start to finish twice because this package shifts and changes and develops your mind with each submission. If I had to offer a complaint, and contractually I do have to offer a complaint, it’s that I would have liked to see a Shiel joint layered with some scuzzy vocal work over the top so as to take the recontextualising even farther. Not that this missing piece in any way damages these new incarnations which compile a diverse and interesting release and stand a bold contrast to the direct and focused work that was the original soundtrack. If I had to pick a favorite (and I do, contractually) mine is Clue To Kalo’s work on Pachinko. The guy has brought in a nod to videogame history by injecting a bassline akin to the Mario pipe segments, then pushed and pulled the beat around the song and thrown in a sub-continental vocal section.
I am also acutely aware that for a guy who claims not to enjoy remixes I’ve been writing about an awful lot of remixes these past few weeks. Forgive me my inconsistencies.
