The connection between music and place is inextricable, both the power of the former to soundtrack the latter, and for location to alter our listening experience. This is deftly put into practice by Tokyo-based producer and musician aus (Yasuhiko Fukuzono) on 'Below the Surface We Shimmer and Shine', a track originally intended to be listened to whilst bathing in an onsen — a hot spring, thousands of which are nestled in the forested folds of Japan's mountainous interior.
This piece of ambient music, with additional production magic courtesy of Manchester-based the humble bee singularly encapsulates the onsen experience. In its granular textures are promises of mineral goodness, countless intricate rough-hewn gemstones that speak of hygiene in body and mind, while a golden glimmer of sound illustrates a refraction of light in the hot spring waters.
Not only the onsen itself and its ephemeral liquidity but its surroundings, captured by aus in his field recording work, are brought to life. A coarse backdrop echoes a bristling tree-clad mountainside and the vast unknowable nature that surrounds the onsen town. Icy tuned percussion hints at frigid winter air contrasted with the waves of warm synth representing the steaming hot spring waters themselves. (A warm bath outdoors is super nice).
Though there's a contrast between human warmth and our desire to control nature (i.e. bathing in an onsen, comfortable hotel surroundings), and nature in its giant forboding splendour (i.e. the reason hot springs exist naturally, the harshness of the mountains), here they exist timelessly and harmoniously etched in sound.
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'below the surface we shimmer and shine' is taken from the collaborative album Chalybeate, which is scheduled for release on 13 February via flau. Originating as a sonic document of the onsen (hot spring) town Ikaho, Gunma Prefecture, by aus during a month-long stay, he enlisted the humble bee (Craig Tattersall, known for his releases for labels like Dauw and IIKKI) for production and mixing duties.
The cutting abrasion of this garage beat has that divine angularity that impels you to some semblance of rhythmic movement, a tight swing between the subtle shuffling thud of the kick and that cracking snare, with the hi-hat pattern effusing a boneless energy, the fairy zing of triangle ornamenting in the midst of those furioso metallics – yes, and here we have ourselves a staunch conveyance of UKG from the minds of Manchester musicmaker Murlo and Bristol-via-London producer Conducta. But it’s not just the sharp and shiffling scrappy beat that makes ‘Together’ a wonderful vessel of vibrant music.
No, it’s also the wonky synth chords that crown this song in tracts of gemlike glossiness and refraction, combined at some points with occasional crystalline clonks; and it’s also the soft scampering synth leads – like an urgent team of spirits working to lift this track off the ground and into some indescribable ether. These sounds shroud the track in otherworldliness, but it remains gloriously grounded with clean bulges of bass that give it a wide, bouncy flavour. And here we have the rhythm, and the atmosphere, but the soul of the song is in its pitch-shifted vocal, the nightcorey low-quality lifting of vocals from somewhere, their reverb, their high frequency, give it this quality of decayed siren-song that, alongside the punchy beat, the mystique of the synth, animate ‘Together’ with splendid heartache and melancholy.
"I’ve wanted to start my own label for ages, but I feel like now is the perfect time," says Murlo. "I’m really looking forward to having the freedom to drop music whenever I feel like it, and getting more of my visual work into the world too."
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The artwork that came with the announcement of the label (below) is very lovely, super atmospheric, and is drawn by label progenitor Murlo himself. You can watch the trailer for the inauguration of Coil Records on Instagram, amongst other places.
The delicacy of this tropical track is beautiful, charting its namesake – liana, a species of woody vine that climbs to the top of a forest canopy for sunlight – as it twists slowly onwards towards life, glassy synths illustrating the robust nature of these vines with their percussive feel and full-bodied warmth, as well as the clack-clopping of subtle snare-woodblock. Manchester musicmaker Hidden Spheres inches his track towards brightness, gradually adding elements that conjure dappled sunlight, like vital breathy hi-hats, and a simple two-note horn refrain that blasts out low-key triumphantly.
The natural element to this chilled and breezy lounge-flavoured track is more than in the name, however. It begins and continues throughout with a backdrop of the rainforest itself, ambient sounds of insectoid white noise and mammalian hoots and indistinct birdcalls, taken from 1970s documentary Wonders Of The Rainforest. And so with the veil of nature draped firmly over the bumping kicks and skiffling percussion, which includes the tactile rolling of bongos, 'Lianas' is with those gorgeous chords and the aching rise and fall of more fizzing synths, lush and living, playful and paradisiacal: music for the splendour of the natural world.
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'Lianas' is in fact taken from the producer's upcoming Wonders Of The Rainforest EP, directly inspired by the documentary of the same name. It arrives on 2nd February, and will be the first release on Hidden Spheres' brand new label, Fruit Merchant.
Paris resident and human person Teki Latex has done a lot. From associating with production company and artist collective Kourtrajmé, appearing in videos and shorts alongside people like Vincent Cassel, as well as rapping with seminal French rap group TTC, to heading up A&R on pioneering underground label Sound Pellegrino which he co-founded with fellow TTC member Orgasmic, as well as his own online "DJ-centric" show Overdrive Infinity, Teki has been spearheading a new style of sound this year: Bérite.
Earlier this year Teki posted a mix on SoundCloud called 'Bérite Club Music'. He accompanied this with a description which outlines the birth of the new genre, originating from a group of online acquaintances who would come to Overdrive Infinity every week. "They were all lovers of Grime, US Club styles, Ballroom, Kuduro, Global club music, you name it, just like me," recalls Teki. "As I befriended them, we got the idea to try and think of a new identity for a french club sound that didn’t exist anywhere else and that would be a confluence of some of the various electronic music styles which had an impact on the French audience."
However, as this "embryo of a new genre was slowly being born" a gas explosion in the building next door made the studio unusable and later forced the parent company Dailymotion to shut down all the projects attached to it, including Overdrive Infinity. "We no longer had a place to meet regularly," Teki tells us, "but that idea of a new french sound kept flourishing, becoming more and more concrete as we all kept getting together at club nights and whatnot."
Towards the of 2016, and named after Rue de Bérite in honour of the street where the studio was situated, the first Bérite tracks appeared online and at small club nights.
"And just like that a movement was born."
And as 2017 lays itself to rest, we ask Teki for his top tracks of the year. Arriving from musicmakers 50% French, 50% other European, these morsels are indicative of newness, Bérite, experiments in merging forms and styles, and though dance-ready very suitable for home listening. Plus a surprise at the #1 slot. Read on☟
10) Lorenzo Senni – XAllegroX
I've praised Lorenzo Senni's music so often in the last few years it has almost become ridiculous but what can I say, his latest one is yet another beautiful slice of drum-less trance. With 'XAllegroX' it's almost as if he has reached a point where the difference between his music and the music of Swedish House Mafia has gotten virtually non-existent, which is obviously a fantastic thing.
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9) Finn – Sometimes The Going Gets A Little Tough
I am amazed by Finn's skills and cleverness of selection behind the decks, as I am obsessed with his ability to create music which applies a grimey way of chopping up samples to classic soul-sampling house music. This big end of year banger is a perfect example of that. Even better when played at 150 bpm in the middle of a juke/ghettotech set.
8) Clubkelly – Need U
A French Bérite Club Music-sympathising member exiled in London and signed to Crazylegs, Clubkelly is a musical prodigy, a lovable troll, a troublemaker but also an amazing person to hang out with. With 'Need U' he explores a sound at the crossroad of weird broken club music, vintage Roulé/bangalter house, and Bérite. Filtered house, but distorted and raw with no fucks given.
7) Lanark Artefax – Touch Absence
This one is already in everyone's end of year list, what can I say that hasn't been said already? It's a dope track with a definitive "Detroit by way of Glasgow" feel. I missed electro as a genre and even though it never went away, it's great to have it back in the spotlight through a new generation of producers like Lanark Artefax.
6) Images – Les Démons de Minuit (Le Dom Edit)
A Bérite Club Music anthem and a favorite of my year-long residency at Nuits Fauves in Paris. To foreigners it's a dope Bérite edit of a catchy French boogie song but to French people it carries a whole different sort of weight. 'Les Démons de Minuit' is the song that was playing at my mother's wedding. Since the '80s it has been a bit synonymous with low-brow mainstream French pop in the mind of a lot of so-called purists. So remixing it and tapping into that sort of weird French popular music heritage to create something new and avant-garde is almost a political act in itself. On French dancefloors, it gives that track a kind of "Oh no did he really go there?" dimension which I absolutely live for. Le Dom's Castle Owner EP dropping in 2018 will confirm that he is an absolute genius and a master at creating a new form of electro-tinged Bérite sure to become a landmark.
5) Sunareht – Hyul
Like Le Dom, Sunareht is a member of the Paradoxe Club label/crew and like Le Dom he makes Bérite Club Music except his approach to the genre is completely different. His way of paying homage to the French club genealogy is to apply a sort of experimental approach to the art of sampling filtered loops as heard in the classic "French touch" era. He takes French touch music and turns it on its head, mutating it into a drum-less, post-everything, permanent-build-up-with-no-drop state. The result is a beautiful home listening experience which remains playable (or at least mixable – superimposable in clubs – akin to Lorenzo Senni's work). With this first EP he established his signature sound and the demos I heard from the 2nd one confirm that he has now fully mastered this incredible unique style.
4) Kekra – 9 Milli
This was a big hit in France in 2017. Basically a dope French rapper dropping super catchy bars on top of an old school 2-step garage beat. So fresh and alien and made with style and different from everything in the French rap world these days. This song really made a difference and it's a pleasure to hear French kids singing it by heart whenever I played it this year.
3) Errorsmith – My Party
I have been a fan of Errorsmith and all the projects he's been involved in since the early 2000s and his album Superlative Fatigue is the album I've always dreamt he would make. Techno in spirit but rhythmically closer to African and Caribbean dance music rhythms mutated through the filter of the synth he created: Razor. This track is just his voice gone through weird effects + a hand clap. It's a simple as fuck techno-organic crazy weirdo party starter and you wish it would never end. I have never heard anything like this.
2) De Grandi – 94120 Groove
The one original Bérite Club Music hit we needed in 2017 by De Grandi the most active producer in the genre, another member of Paradoxe Club label. This Afrotrap-influenced banger goes so well with everything and bangs so hard as a standalone track as well. I'm so proud of that whole crew for creating a genre and a scene in Paris in 2017. We needed that so much.
1) The Super Mario Players feat. Kate Davis – Jump Up Superstar
So this one has a story. It started when I first watched the trailer for Super Mario Odyssey early in the year. I was scared to commit to buying a Switch, I was still living in my old TV-less apartment with vague dreams of moving in the near future. Zelda looked great but felt like too much of an emotional investment (I remember getting nightmares through Ocarina of Time when I was younger, same with the one where you turn into a wolf – way too stressful – and I never managed to finish any of them) but Mario is the kind of stuff that appeals to an old casual gamer uninterested in first person shooters and fascinated by colorful Japanese graphics like me. So the trailer blew me away and I thought the music was perfect. I moved into a new apartment later in the year and got myself a giant-ass television and I thought, you know what let me treat myself to the maxxx and get a Switch with Mario. I enjoyed the shit out of that game but halfway through it i remember thinking "when the hell are they going to play the fucking awesome song from the trailer already??? Probably at the very end..." Spoiler Alert: it comes right in the middle, in an unforgettable sequence taking place in the fake-New-York-equivalent-level in the Mario Odyssey world "New Donk City" (actually the city where the ancestral game Donkey Kong took place). It's the level that made everyone go "oh that new Mario game looks like GTA Mario!"
So Basically Pauline the girl you saved in Donkey Kong back in the '80s is now the mayor of the city and she asks you to help her putting together a festival. Once that is done, the reward comes in the form of a truly beautiful sequence; It's night time in New Donk City and the whole population is outside celebrating, there are lights, beautiful visuals, business men and women in fedoras (as they should) and fireworks. While the mayor and her band are singing the incredible 'Jump Up Superstar' song, you are required to play a rendition of the old school 8-bit Super Mario Bros. game (actually a cross between that and Donkey Kong) on big transparent panels held in between the skyscrapers of the city, and each segment of the song corresponds roughly to a segment of the game, so it creates some sort of semi-synchronized rhythmic build-up between the action and the music... all the while this crazy, insane, catchy, perfectly-executed Broadway showtune is really resonating with someone like me who grew up with those cliché images and sounds of classic New York with its yellow cabs and pastrami sandwiches and who is fascinated by nocturnal views of big cities with skyscrapers. Add to that the nostalgia effect of playing 8-bit Mario... It was an incredible moment, I was playing alone with the lights off and wondering "what the hell is happening to me, am I, for the first time in my life, ACTUALLY crying while playing a video game?" Simply put it is the most beautiful sequence in a video game EVER and you can quote me on that.
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Keep up to date with the latest Sound Pellegrino releases on SoundCloud.
There is a majestic languor in this track that suggests a lack of full wakefulness and somnolence equally, a crepuscular pre-morning wash of hazy colours before the sun climbs up over the horizon and yawns at the wide open open sky, a twilit post-day swirl of burning flavours, the mystical feeling of this neither-day-nor-night mirage evident in the glittering shoals of sound that gently glint and glimmer glorious as the glamour of Clara La San's vocals gleams with graceful detached R&B sultry vigour, its layers and harmonies tantalising in the totality of room-to-breathe that this song exudes, everything seeming to have its moment to carve out its own shape on the nothing noir of the song's quiet spaces.
The creator of this vessel of lounging emotion is the Manchester-based TD_Nasty fka Trap Door, who like a modern day electronic underground Janus two-headed watching yesterday and tomorrow simultaneously in a crystal ball of formless shapes materialises the preened parchment of the past with the retro-facing chords and their marginal complexity – these classic progressions of familiar slow-jam songwriting, the clunking percussive keys – and distills the amorphous future into drinkable clatterings of percussion and pummelling spacey beat blent experimentally alongside various qualities of digitised sound rounded and glassy glistening, far-flung futuristic hollow synths, all the while this synthetic backdrop frames the humanistic aching vocals, so at once this is assuredly recognisable at the same time as being so wonderfully alien exotic.
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Fiona Jane Burgess (of London band Woman's Hour) directed the video for the song, which stars Dutch dancer Naomi Weijand in an improvised performance shot in one take on 35mm.
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The Clara La San-featuring 'Where U Wanna Be' is taken from the recent TD_Nasty EP, released via collective Gang Fatale. For just a fiver you can be a digital owner of this 6-track project, or you can listen to it for free, on their Bandcamp.
TCTS's original 'Do It Again (Icy Feet)' is a brooding slice of funky house that features rapper Sage The Gemini and the lilting voice of Kelis aching in the almost taunting pseudo-hook "icy feet…"—but in this re-do the Manchester producer's track gets more than just a facelift: the cold synth syncopation and robust rigid beat, the dark aura, the digitised mechanical body of the track – as well as all its shuffling funk – gets new life injected into it, becoming a warm, organic, living-breathing track courtesy of Merseyside producer Melé. Snare rolls drop in and snake through lively rattlesome, carnivalesque percussion clatters between bars: it lives!
The serious slightly screwface nature of the TCTS track is, like a frown turned upside down, put on its head and has in this remix all but dissipated, with Melé adding a few cups of French touch-flavour impiousness, the bassline up-front and playful as it bounces through. Similarly the vocals get a slightly oddball treatment, warped and layered and twisted with atonal robotic pitch-shifting, taking the brazen almost cocky nature infused in the original vocals and making them less confrontational, more fun and trivial and leftfield as they repeat unrelenting, "I bet you can't do it like me…"Melé has birthed a yang to the yin concocted by TCTS, conceiving and delivering not just a light side, but a lighthearted side for his body-moving remix.
Here is a freshly dropped track from Manchester beatmaker, Mecca:83, a chillmatic sunsoaking piece of swaggery boom-bap inclined cocktail-by-the-pool-flavoured sample-led sultry optimism. But whilst it would fit hot sunny weather like a missing puzzle piece, there is an underlying iciness to 'Body Glow' that exists in its cold muted bubbling of the soft synths, the desolate reverb on the hollow snare clack, destined for a rise in temperature.
This frosty morning feel, animated by the alien synthetics and their continuous ambient wobble, is melted by certain elements of the track, perhaps giving it its name – take into consideration the warm glow of another human body amidst freezing bitter weather drifting around, or the warmth of love in a haze of emptiness. You have the rounded gloop of bass that grooves through, but the vocal samples lead the cheer, expertly selected for tonal variety, cut and served with rhythmic precision, each distinct from yet melting into the next. And if you take into account the trickle of birdsong at the beginning, it's nothing specific as it is general: this track is Spring itself after the thaw of winter.
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'Body Glow' arrives courtesy of London "Movement & Record Label", NINETOFIVE.
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Recently Mecca:83 worked alongside British rapper Scorzayzee on their collaborative Cherish The Moment EP. You can listen to that on SoundCloud.
