SUI ZHEN – MEGA DRIVE

Oooo-eeeeee, wow, so, this is supremely pretty. More than that it's scene-conjuring, evocative, heartbreaking, heartwarming, tear-inducing, smile-making – it's 'Mega Drive' by Becky Sui Zhen aka Sui Zhen (aka DJ Susan), a musicmaker and all-round atmosphere creator from Melbourne, Australia.

'Mega Drive' seems to call out from an unplaceable, nonexistent retro-futuristic crevasse deep in the music world – there is something otherworldly about it, a gracious gentle delicacy achieved by the mix of plaintive, unthreatening keyboard-demo beat and the endearing vocals, like insubstantial wisps of clouds making their way across a splashed-orange sunset sky, or like friendly ghosts trying to make contact. The very title is a conjuring of nostalgia: the Sega Mega Drive: symbol of lost youth for a generation torn between the analogue and the digital age.

Synth strings follow the vocal melody somewhat with effortless simplicity, still that beat gently blooping with its semi-tropical snips of sharp percussion, decayed bass rolling itself around the bottom end of the track with a reserved attitude, wobbling slightly like the blurred edges of memories that make you laugh and cry, the whole thing pockmarked with indistinct shouts of "hey!" rising up as if somebody's trying to wake you up from a dream.

The aesthetic Sui Zhen has employed here is one that seeps into your spirit, cradles your sense of self with a forlorn feeling, effuses the reverie of the past from a chasm of abstract memories. It's like… the sense of unutterable longing for childhood and all its beautiful accoutrements, its comfort and its wonder and the sense of time being elongated into a fantasy future as yet undisturbed and waiting to be discovered, happy days of innocence and simplicity. That's how I understand it anyway.

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• 'Mega Drive' is taken from Sui Zhen's very very recent EP, Body Reset, a beautiful collection of introspective songs much in the same vein as this one, exploring "the resetting of both body and mind" and "influenced as much by late nights in Koenji, Tokyo as at an onsen/sauna in the mountains of Nagano," and released by boutique Tokyo-based label eskers.
• Purchase Body Reset on tape cassette here. (Also, don't you just love the art? The green and pink colours go together just perfectly~).
• Sui Zhen was part of the Red Bull Music Academy in 2010, alongside Daisuke Tanabe, and has previously worked with Andras Fox as Sui + Fox.

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SEIFUKU – NEED U GIRL

This song is just like… Well when I first heard it… It's one of those songs, you know the type: an immediate all-encompassing feeling just seems to emanate effortlessly from the music, each sound playing its part in the effusion of whatever emotion happens to be in the process of being conjured at the time. Just as many musical minds over the centuries, even millennia, have done, this song wrestles listlessly with romance: matters of the heart lie at its core, lovelorn and dreaming.

It's funny you can get all this just from 2-minutes-8-seconds of indistinct music centred around a vague samples from an (internationally) obscure pop song. But that I suppose is where its strengths lie, in the shapes of meaning and intent moving beneath the smooth ambience of the track, like attractive alluring shadows of a mystery crush moving behind a curtain at a high-rise window as you look across from your own apartment… but this is fantasy.

Of course, the title helps in these matters of sonic semantics also; it's called 'NEED U GIRL' and it's by a producer called seifuku.

Founded on a bed of organ-feeling dusty-far-off chords, the heavy muffled thud of expertly placed kicks make up the gentle contours and curves of the track, playing call-and-response with a beautifully simplistic finger click cutting through the soft tide of sound, hi-hats ornamenting it with accented rattle, a brief section of muted bloops intersecting the unending slowdown sample of the chorus from South Korean singer-songwriter Taeyang's 'I Need A Girl'.

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M/D/G AKA MADEGG – M/D/G EP [初演 • PREMIERE]

Here's a new morsel of music arriving courtesy of a newborn label called raum, an imprint of internationalist Tokyo-based label flau (home of releases by Cuushe, Kidkanevil, Ikebana, and many others). raum's second release is a new side project from 22-year-old Japanese producer Kazumichi Komatsu, aka Madegg, aka (now anyway) M/D/G; his more beat-injected side project first offers itself up to the world in the form of a self-titled EP.

Opening up with the cold and mysterious '?????' it's clear that M/D/G is going to be an interesting journey. Amongst the snowy percussion and raw claps you can hear what sounds like birdsong: perhaps an indication that this track is the portal through which you will leave the real world and enter the world of Kazumichi Komatsu. The moment itself even seems relatively clear, when those naturalistic sounds become a threatening insectoid metallic chattering as gloopsome kicks punctuate the abrasive percussion.

We soon find ourselves in the wonky groove of 'Francis', a spot of humour and darkly French-touch cheekiness in the baseline. A sample of someone catching their breath loops mercilessly as cutlass-cymbals sharpen themselves in the space between the brutally truncated snares. Oscillating crushed synths gradually rise up in the sharp sea of chiming cymbals, sub-bass bloopsplosions aggressive and disarming. The keyword with this one is urgency.

'Wah Fruits' dances like an re-animated corpse, clusters of crackling piano on unending loop; dusty and squiffy to begin with, it soon moves into a shuffling vessel of house, treble-sapped hi-hats metronomic above buzzing feedback and vocal samples chopped like slices of speech bubbles or bitesized portions of a bad dream. Imagine a zombie (re-dead type, not the 28 Days Later variety) trying to make you breakfast to this music. Or trying to wash a car. It's clunky and mechanical, but with undeniable unnerving presence, e.g. the unpredictable order in which the samples appear and overlap, and is at the same time fraught with elegant antique decay.

The sounds in 'Current Work1' at first made me think of someone munching on toast, or a packet of crisps (only Quavers could have that intense level of sturdy apple-bite, gravel-drive crunch), a beat, but an abrasive, entirely damaged one. Swirling sounds swathe your ears like supersonic police sirens, snippets of wah-wah-flavoured noise stolen, sucked up by the static tornado and thrown around. Endless vibraphone chords mark the bristling bridge with its clanking percussion, linking the first section to one underpinned by that crunchy marching sound again, with pitch-shifted vocal samples struggling against the tide of noise towards the end.

A mechanical nightmarish menace marks the intro to 'Scum from Social Design', an otherwise robust techno-flavoured track whose analogue qualities lend themselves to breathing bio-engine sounds on an industrial scale, booming and bouncing with jittering decayed hi-hats and shifting piston scratchings: a complex but ancient and arcane machine from a cyberpunk world. Perhaps as we came to this world through the portal of curiosity (quite literal: look at the title) that is '?????', this machine is the abrupt and efficient ticket back to reality.

As you can see and hear, M/D/G is an ornate, hugely plentiful buffet of melancholy peeling-plaster yet industrial abandoned-building sounds precisely and danceabley ripped to shreds, framed antique mechanics of an unknown future, but it's vital and organic (the EP is built on the concept of "sport in 2100"): it also lives and breathes. And giving life to, putting a soul into a machine, as is well embodied by this music, is a beautiful, painful thing.

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• The M/D/G EP is released 23rd March via flau imprint, raum, on very limited 12" run of 250. Pre-order here.

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HERS – TRANSITION

Somehow I'd never heard of this guy before — I mean, I say "somehow", but the reasons are obvious. It's just happened as it happened, as everything in this world happens. There is no vague, ambiguous "somehow" about anything, really, if you think about it. Do you get me?

But the main point: hers is new for me. Talking about hers is a syntactical nightmare – there's hers music, hers sound. It looks weird. But I like that it's an odd name. At least it's, like, different. Anyway. Anyway anyway anyway. His (his first name is Chris) track 'transition' is what we're here for. It's a concoction of different flavours, styles even, making a cocktail out of ambient, VGM sounds, trap heft, footwork fizz… Uniquely – at least from my standpoint anyway – the track's bpm changes as the vibe changes.

Beginning with a gentleish 130, it's a dreamscaping slow jam evoking semi-tropical scenes with glockenspiel clusters and snippets of synth chords, booping sounds like a harp speeding up to the next change at 154, where we're ushered into something dank and stark and anxious for just a moment, until we finish on a propulsive 124bpm: a house-flavoured beat contains tasty judders of slap bass and twinkle-glamourous high-pitched glitterings of high-register synth.

It's a small journey: from home turf, to somewhere anxiety-inducing just for a moment, and ending up somewhere kinetic yet comfortable; all of it glistens with an endearing sun-soaked, splashed-pool-water-on-warm-skin, feel-good, everything's-gonna-be-fine-ness.

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• Since the track got 10k listens recently, hers has put the stems up for remixing purposes. Wanna remix it? Do it! Why not?! All remixes will be stuck in a playlist on hers' (his) SoundCloud.
• And of course you can also download it for free.

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YES/NO GUEST MIX 026 :: MORGAN HISLOP'S CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THE INSIDE OF THE CLUB… AND YOUR SOUL! MIX

Something tasty for you today on this wonderful Saturday. The sun is out, the air is warm (warmer than it has been) and Spring is in the air. The land births itself once more, life emanates from previous barren scenery. Flowers and sunshine. Fresh vitality. If you are reading this you are alive. I am writing this whilst alive. Generally it's good to be alive. Let's be alive together~

Anyway the pre-mentioned something tasty is a Guest Mix, no. 26 (twenty-six) for YES/NO, and it arrives like a cherry pie fresh out the oven from the brain of Morgan Hislop. He is a producer and DJ from the UK whose music is a regulatedly manic blend of ear-exciting experimental emissions and dance-laden flavours, whose music has been released on a bunch of nice labels, including Bad Panda Records, Activia Benz and Astro Nautico. He also used to be the drummer for Tropics (a project of Chris Ward "gone band" – like Caribou or anyone else who makes music and needs extra hands to perform it in a live context), and it's an experience with that band which gave this Guest Mix its title: Can't Wait To See The Inside Of The Club… AND Your Soul!

"A good friend of mine said this [the title] to me a couple of years ago as we entered a filmed 24 hour clubnight we were invited to in Mexico City while touring," he explains via email, "and the joke/quote has stayed with me ever since." The in-joke is paradoxically universal: everyone has them, but only some people understand them – from paupers to kings, we all have our private funnies. But that aside, from the clubby origins of the Mix's title you can rightly surmise that it's a totally club-conjuring collection of sounds: "I've always been interested in the ritualistic layout of clubs and the almost worshipful state they adhere to," says Morgan.

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From an alien perspective it must be a truly eerie and tribal combination of sights and sounds, claustrophobic and euphoric at the same time. 

MORGAN HISLOP on nightclubs

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So from his own intensely skiffling synth-fraught edit of Brandy & Monica's 'The Boy Is Mine' to Slugabed's 2014 rendition of the 2001 emotional dance hit 'Another Chance' by Roger Sanchez, Morgan's mix takes in varying dishes of dance and serves them up as a buffet of delights. French dance don Para One is involved, and so is techno legend Claude VonStroke. There's a remix of Braqueberry's 'Blaque Won' by MikeQ and Divoli S'Vere. MIA's clattering 'Bird Flu' transitions seamlessly into the trance-hinting Tokyo Hands remix of VesperTown's 'Royal Flash'. And he throws in some Ludacris for good measure.

"The mix compiles a lot of eclectic tracks I was DJing out at Festivals and in the second half of last year," he says of the mix, adding: "It also has a couple of unreleased tracks of mine in there."

Without further ado, and without me basically just naming every single track on the tracklist, you should just enjoy the mix. Big thank you to Morgan Hislop. Oh and by the way, he told me that the '?????' intro is a snippet from an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? – remember that? (You're old if you do, just face it). The artwork above is a collage made by the fair hands of Morgan himself, scanned in and sent straight to me, how cool is that? Collages are fun.

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• Ｔ　Ｒ　Ａ　Ｃ　Ｋ　Ｌ　Ｉ　Ｓ　Ｔ •

• 1. ?????
• 2. Sally Shapiro - Prescript
• 3. Hairy Hands - Space (Morgan Hislop’s ‘Interstellar IMAX experience’ Remix)
• 4. Claude VonStroke - The Whistler (DJ Assault Remix)
• 5. Dexter - D-Funked
• 6. Low Concept - Girlfriend
• 7. Ducky - To The Water
• 8. Para One - Vibrations Followed By Poisoned Apples (Club Mix)
• 9. Slugabed - Another Chance 2K14
• 10. Ba-Kuura ft. Branstone - Nothingism
• 11. Sinjin Hawke & Just Blaze - One
• 12. Morgan Hislop - Smitten
• 13. Brandy & Monica - The Boy Is Mine (Morgan Hislop Remix)
• 14. Bruce Smear - Pick & Roll
• 15. MIA - Birdflu
• 16. VesperTown - Royal Flash (Tokyo Hands Remix)
• 17. RX & Shiftee - Act Out!
• 18. Braqueberry - Blaque Won (MikeQ & Divoli S’Vere Ha Crash Remix)
• 19. Ludacris - Splash Waterfalls

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