☟YES/NO☟: Jacob 2-2

Showing posts with label Jacob 2-2. Show all posts

Monday, 27 October 2014

JACOB 2-2 – SAVE MIRACLES

The way Jacob 2-2 makes music creates a good listening environment; it seems architecturally led, constructed with slabs of robust building materials and decorated with the synth equivalent of glitter to ornament his sometimes towering, sometimes sprawling, winding, tunnelling, labyrinthine edifices. These are not gothic structures however, nor Edwardian or art-fucking-deco or harsh brutalism; in fact, it might be better to say that his music – a mix of hip-hop patterns and glitching noises childhood-memory-summoning – is more of a collage.

And it has never been more of a collage than with the opener on his new EP, The Rec, called 'Save Miracles'. This is a dadaist collage, a plasticine stir-fry, funky fragments weaving in and out of mist left by resonant cold cosmic chords, squelchy bass breakdancing as the beat skiffles in flourishing waves of virtuosity; chopped chunks of sound rapid-fire like kaleidoscopic stills flashing in front of your eyes; its interior is splashed with biomechanical groove, funk flavours written in abstractions on the walls, but otherwise it is another Jacob 2-2 construction with its odyssey of chords feeling like empty oddities, a yellow brick road leading to blank nostalgias, roughly sketched by its creator for you. This is not your nostalgia it is a manifestation of collective recollection.

Um…

Like I said this comes fresh from J2-2's The Rec EP, which is actually aptly described as "late-night lock-in gymnasium funk" – which is about right. You should check it out.
Oh and this comes fairly soon after his album, Herbivore, to which I gave a massive thumbs-up, awesome-out-of-awesome. If those were homely, bedtime sounds, The Rec effuses a slightly more adolescent attitude.
He made a rrrrrrreally cool mix called Abiogenesis for YES/NO, a blender full of jazz, hip hop, electro, prog rock. Really do check it out when you got time.

☟ Jacob 2-2 Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Myspace • official site • Twitter • Tumblr • YouTube • Bandcamp

Wednesday, 2 April 2014

YES/NO GUEST MIX 012 :: ABIOGENESIS – A MIX BY JACOB 2-2 FOR YES/NO MUSIC

Ah Jacob 2-2. I fell in love with him, well not actually him – his MUSIC – last year when I was introduced to his song 'Milo De Venus', a beautifully nostalgic track, via cool Canadian label King Deluxe. This was taken from his album Herbivore, which was like taking a journey through the idealised childhood of a young reluctant hero from an 80s movie where real life is slowly taken over by fantasy – it sounded like shiny red bicycles, oversized baseball jackets, and empty suburban stretches of road in the summer holidays. You'd probably like it. Naturally, I thought his tastes would be cool for a mix; I asked, he was happy to do one, and he even made some super nice artwork for the mix. He's titled it 'Abiogenesis', which is (thanks Wikipedia) "the natural process by which life arose from non-living matter such as simple organic compounds" – a fascinating though now discredited concept, and one that fits his mix perfectly, as it features a lot of older music (the music world's "organic compounds" perhaps) that gave life to what we have today.

From jazz to hip hop to electro to prog rock to jazz to disco, it's a fabulously varied mix and one comprised equally of new, shiny, modern and old, endearing, reliclike. There's the crazy frenetic groove in Ras G's noisy and bleepsome 'One 4 Kutmah', Jacob 2-2's own junkyard clattering remix of Navigateur's 'Breathe' as well as Joob's brand of chiptune hip hop in 'Sacred Science'. But then there's surprise Hammond organ virtuoso in British prog rock band Egg's take on Bach's 'Fugue In D Minor' (featuring, if you'd care to notice, a beat that any hip hop fan'd tell you was decent, and certainly not bad for 1970); French disco champion Cerrone's 1978 oddly hypnotic 'Rocket In The Pocket'; Organized Konfusion's fiery underground hip hop in 'Releasing Hypnotical Gases' taken from their debut self-titled album (1991). Then there's the finale, 'White Eagle' by German electronic outfit Tangerine Dream, still going strong since 1967 having recently provided some original music for the Grand Theft Auto V OST.

But enough of this! Go soak up the sounds and download it for free too. THANKS J22!

T R A C K L I S T :

Like Jacob 2-2 on Facebook
Listen to Jacob 2-2 on Soundcloud
Hear more Jacob 2-2 on Myspace
Visit Jacob 2-2 official site
Follow Jacob 2-2 on Twitter
Check Jacob 2-2 on Tumblr
Watch Jacob 2-2 on YouTube
Listen to more Jacob 2-2 on Bandcamp

Monday, 23 September 2013

JACOB 2-2 HERBIVORE LP

"Like all of nature's creatures, the child must one day go exploring by himself," one of the many samples taken from Jacob 2-2's brand new LP, called Herbivore, gives you a good insight into how the album sounds - to a certain degree, anyway. Herbivore is all about that wonder we all had as children, how amazing the world seemed, how small details of things existing in the world fascinated us, how exploration and adventure lay at the end of each newly discovered suburban road, each new park visited, each new videogame played.

Something somewhere said something about Jacob 2-2's music, something about the inspiration behind it. I think it was about classic 80s sci-fi movies for children, saying how they'd all start in some kid's bedroom somewhere before going on some crazy adventure. That's another theme. Not just actual childhood itself, but the imagined childhood of children in the different media we consumed in our younger years - the magical places where who we wished to be with all our hearts. And it's amazing how this heart-warming feeling transcends above the not-necessarily-heart-warming landscape of hefty beats that Jacob 2-2 throws around with rather a lot of skill.

I've written about just one of these songs before, 'Milo De Venus', a song that reeks of homely, close-to-the-heart nostalgia with a fidgety glitch-hoppin' beat, but now it seems quite a challenge to cover all of them comprehensively without being too waffly. Well, the next logical step is to bop over to 'Empire Plaza'; it contains the ticking of architecture, the glitter of industry, straight-talking beats - schizoid hi-hats and brief coughs of snares - that Jacob 2-2 has used to illustrate Empire Plaza, Albany, with its equally straight-talking brutalist buildings. Did you also hear the slowed-down sample of the opening chords of Tears For Fears' 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World'?

'Platforms' also contains another fantastic example of Jacob 2-2's beatsmithing razzmatazz, with its intricate beat bleeding a swaggeringly slow yet frantic hip hop style into the song's magical melodies; looping, chopped-up vocal samples in the second half are expertly executed and conjure a computerised, adventuresome otherworld - wishful thinking for a childlike mind. Likewise - swaggering, stumbling, half-dancing-half-sashaying onwards - laid-back bass and lickety-split beats give the mesmerising 'Red Heather, Yellow Heather' some attitudinal oomph. This is contrasted with the childhood-recalling sample of those read-a-long cassette books, "Turn the page when you hear the chimes…" The title refers to the tonguetwister constructed by varied sampled voices in the song: "red leather, yellow leather".

Jacob 2-2 animated this video himself as a trailer for the album - cool huh?

In the art of makin' beats the hip hop way, sampling does indeed play a massive part. Huge. So it's not surprising, but still damn cool, that Herbivore is packed full of delicious samples. Cut up bits of 90s-esque sounds hold up UK trackmaker Pogflipper's nostalgia-driven rap in 'Sunrises'. 'Lower 3rds' begins with the sample "In 1978…" and ends with the sample "…when teenage boys forget about girls" - between these two blasts the adventurous kinds of sounds that invaded people's heads when videogames first arrived on the scene. Dinosaurs were an obsession when I was younger - I am sure it was the same with a lot of people, seemingly including Jacob 2-2 himself, who in 'Struck Out / Foliage' samples archive footage of a man talking about the way the dinosaur world worked. This is only in the second part of the song, 'Foliage'; the first half, 'Struck Out', deals with the bummed-out feeling of losing in a game, namely being struck out in baseball, samples of "Hit it!" and "Here I go…!" giving the sense of a baseball field in soft focus, plush with rose-tinted memories. In near-heartbreaking opener, '2LTL', there's a child's sampled voice saying, "Boy, I'm too little for everything…" The song has, in its whirling synths and raining bleeps, the wild determination of a child who does want to do everything, despite their age, size, or lack of comprehension.

Feelings and images pop up out of everywhere: in title track 'Herbivore' there is leaf-eating innocence in its friendly bassline and glittering showers of synth (the carnivores can have their sharp teeth and mean looks, but triceratops, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus - they were pretty cool). 'Construxon Time Again' sounds like what scientific discoveries should be unveiled to - the soundtrack of progress - somebody demonstrating an email being sent for the first time; the slow, touching euphoria of 'Baby Duckbill'; the industrious bassline of 'So Long, Solaris' with its wondrous synths gives way to a vision of loss with lamenting strings (possibly a nod to the acquiring by IBM of Sun Microsystem's Unix operating system, Solaris. Possibly not); 'Rm W1' is a hypnotic dose of spaced-out echoing synths, an ambient journey into an adventure-movie-induced dream; 'Snow Brite' is like watching the frozen outdoors in winter from your window; 'Asphyxiation' - the majesty of a single human floating gracefully through space, without a space suit, but still marvelling at the grandeur of everything. There's such a lot that sparks the imagination.

Two contrasting tracks end this delightful album; whilst 'Quarantine Kid' exudes that listless feeling that went with being stuck indoors as a child, 'The Light Shines' sounds like the freedom of the summer holidays and the glory of playing outside in the sun. I think I've said enough. What more can I say? The exploration of the sometimes downright magical nature of childhood, all the entertainment and adventure and wonder and unanswerable questions, is something that I've never heard before - certainly not to the occasionally harsh nature of the hip hop-flavoured beats that underpin each floating synth, each retro sound. It is the clashing of a half-imagined world and one that is rooted in reality - yet in both there is discovery and ingenuity. So nostalgic. So nice.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Like Jacob 2-2 on Facebook
Listen to Jacob 2-2 on Soundcloud
Hear more Jacob 2-2 on Myspace
Visit Jacob 2-2 official site
Follow Jacob 2-2 on Twitter
Check Jacob 2-2 on Tumblr
Watch Jacob 2-2 on YouTube
Listen to more Jacob 2-2 on Bandcamp

Saturday, 24 August 2013

JACOB 2-2 MILO DE VENUS

Some tender loving beautiful sounds for you today. Hello. It's been raining all day. It's not a matter of it stopping, just a matter of it fluctuating from drizzle to downpour and back again. It's just that kind of day. Nobody's home. The sound of Moto GP yawns through the house from the neglected television. It's so dim that I'm tempted to turn the lights on but then it would almost seem darker outside. Gotta treasure this late-August malaise.

Anyway, it's the kind of day where in past summer holidays of your childhood you'd be aimless, bored, stuck indoors. None of your vast library of videogames appeals to you, the TV seems crashingly dull - what do you resort to? Board games? Arts & craft? READING? Or literally just doing nothing: lying on the sofa complaining, raiding the kitchen every hour or so for a bowl of Coco Pops (or whatever your cereal-fancy happened to be)? Nostalgic, innit. And so is this song 'Milo De Venus' by Jacob 2-2.

I hadn't properly seen the cover for the album where this song comes from, Herbivore, out 23rd September on Canadian label King Deluxe; but you can see - there is the colourful custody of childhood.

This Brooklyn-based producer seems to have burrowed his way straight into my heart with his music. It reminds me of so much, on a general scale, that I cannot even begin to list it, but on the other hand, it reminds me of nothing at all: it's an illusion. Nostalgically charged sounds to float you to that sometimes-bleak irrecoverable state-of-mind that tries to reach far back into the mists of time and search for your dreamily romanticised past.

There are ambient sounds of some cosmic pinball machine at work as clunky percussion, accompanying the nicely scatty beat all the way through, 1980s-adventure-movie synth bass gunning for our collective memories, and the gloriously nostalgic crackle of a record player - all decorated with sparkling high-pitched synth and magical cheese-pop bells. It's the malady and dream of the birth of consumer culture all at the same time, those repetitive images - like the Venus De Milo, here subverted by Jacob 2-2 - all wrapped up in this song that exudes the atmosphere that pervaded all our sunny endless lazy summers. Even if it is a borrowed sense of nostalgia, do we not all feel it?