CATT MOOP – CATT MOOP #1

It's sometimes like really difficult to describe where things actually come from, who made them, what the point of such and such a release is, blah blah blah, it's just tricky. Gotta research things if you wanna properly know but sometimes the answers just aren't there.

Luckily they [the answers] are um kinda here with this track from Atlanta-based beatmaker Catt Moop (love the name – what does it mean? idk – the word "moop" just sounds great). Seemingly created for a newish SoundCloud page called FOODFIGHT, it has no name and arrives in a series presumably under FOODFIGHT's bio: "beat battles for fun!"

I like the idea behind it. Just nice and innocent food fights, I mean beat battles.

'Catt Moop #1' is a cool track. It is sunk with vibrating sub-bass, a moody mire upon which synth bleeps do their thing, pockmarked with nifty little dynamics, like a complete cut out of the volume or a gradual slow-down with the synth gradually reverbing more and more and imploding in on itself. And at the beginning there's a brilliant muted shout of FOOOD FIIIGHT! Yeah! LET'S GET MESSY!

It reminds me of a few things, which I will list now. It reminds me of Mr. Oizo-style French touch kinda stuff, with a cheeky melody that belies a certain idgaf swagger, pointy and electronic and sometimes decaying with squeaky distortion. It also reminds me of the minimal beats of London grime – a repetitive (and cheeky but we don't have to say it cause I already said so) melody against slow swaying beats. Then again, the actual rhythm is more trap than anything. So there you go – a cocktail of attitudinal flavours.

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Catt Moop is also one half of musicmaking duo, HYDERABADD. Check em out.

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☟ Catt Moop Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • Tumblr • YouTube

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ROBOKID – PANTHER

Du lourd! That's what I'd say in French. Means heavy. And this shit from Robokid is rather heavy, weighty – yeah, there's definitely a bulkiness to it, a dense mass of hard sounds. A congealing of liquid sounds into a more putty-like substance that rolls around consuming everything in its path, much like the blob in the 1958 film, The Blob.

Who is Robokid? A musicmaker from Boston. That's all you need to know. His track 'Panther' is pockmarked with vast, fuzzy sludgewalls of brass-ish blares, which form the bassline underpinning the bristling jungle-esque beat, itself a frenzy of urgent broken clockwork percussion. As this assault bears down on your brain, high synth soars in, lingering with eagle-call melodies; beeps 'n' bleeps join in, stuttering to be heard amidst tumbling marimba chimes that glisten through the heavy shades of this track.

It's kinda spooky sounding, but it's also kinda not; it draws you with its punchiness and keeps you there with its dynamic structure – its use of the space between sounds, for instance – and with its atmospheric noises, its busy bustling beat. What could be misconstrued as just one thing ends up being many things at once, without sounding even one jot jumbled or confused, an odyssey of proclamatory and exclamatory proportions. It totally knows where it's going and what it's up to.

• This arrives fresh-ish courtesy of burgeoning artist collective Lifted Contingency and a mini-compilation called 24k. At $1, it's a bargain. In the words of JME, "cop that, it's a deal like Ikea."

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☟ Robokid Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Twitter

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URLCHILD – LIKE YOU ~ FALLING FOR

From this track's first abrasive beats it was kinda sold to me instantly. Then this gnarly vocal sample pops in like a small anthropomorphic whale bouncing around the room after it's crept in through the window, blubbering all the while in hypnotic loops. Wtf, sorry.

Well it's by urlchild (who is 21, from Austin, Texas) and it's called 'Like You ~ Falling For'. I didn't expect it to drop into this really house-flavoured vibe, didn't expect those sharp syncopated piano chords, mainly. These, alongside pulsar whispers of synth that zip in and out of earshot, are the main actual non-percussion sounds that aren't vocal samples, which in endlessly reverbing pitch-shiftedness croon the song's title.

The beat clacks, exploded from underneath with blooping depth charge sub-bass deposits, shifting above with garage-esque hi-hats that provide the fidgety skitter that work for house tracks like this – regular rhythm gets you moving on a basic level; the hi-hats accent this rhythm just so, just so, zapping your limbs into life. And then your brain gets shaken by the dynamic cymbals that crash across the track like haphazard punctuation.

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☟ urlchild Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter

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LAZY INTERVIEW #25: TROPES

← #24: BO EN #26: KERO KERO BONITO →

This is the next in YES/NO's ongoing Lazy Interview series – a set of questions, all the same every single time, sent out to various artists that YES/NO particularly digs. It may be small-time, but it's still a chance to peek behind the curtain, crack the shell, or otherwise reveal something previously unrevealed about an artist. Basically: it's a Q&A.

Here for the twenty-fifth in the series is Tropes, an American beatcrafter who salvages hip hop and rap, new and old, flipping these already existing things into things that have never existed before, resulting in abstract, often mind-bending, chill-inducing, sun-laden beats that shine as bright – if not brighter – than the original source material. In this sense, he is not dissimilar to – but distinct from – vaporwave artists: our URL punks who take anybody's music, slow it down, speed it up, chop it up, make collages in homage of music they love, inadvertently (or ad…vertently…?) creating a whole ill-defined genre at the same time. It's great.

Recently, Tropes had the pleasure of playing a set at Boiler Room NYC, as part of their collaboration with cassette-only label, Dirty Tapes, officially known in this capacity as Dirty Tapes Radio 002. 26 minutes of beats that illustrate some alternative reality – you'd better check it out (you can also watch it with your eyes).

Without further whatevers though, please prepare to meet the jolly nice and down-to-earth man behind the moniker.

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Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
I'm Keaton. I grew up in Iowa. I work as a graphic designer and enjoy making music.

Why did you decide to start creating music?
I've always had an interest, it started with percussion as a kid and moved to melody after that. Now I find myself doing both. I really just enjoy the act of creating and sharing music.

How would you describe your sound? What makes you and your style stand out?
Soulful, slightly smoke-infused, organic, maybe circular.

Is there a perfect time and place for listening to your music?
I'm not sure really, I think it can go with different moods or times of day depending on the feel of the track.

What inspires you most when writing a song?
I'm always following my ear so I get inspired by the melodies that are created by whittling away at an idea for a while. If I'm working with some samples, the majority of the time the end result will sound pretty far from the sample source, so I'm inspired by the whole process from the beginning to the end result.

What is your most memorable musical experience?
Definitely last July, visiting Brooklyn and meeting some really awesome people while getting to play some music.

What are your three favourite songs at the moment?
[omitted; hey – it's a tough choice!]

Who do you most admire in the music world?
People who are doing their thing whenever they can, without connects or an audience.

In your opinion, what is the future of music?
More and more music is becoming a mixture of the past, present and interpretations of what the future is and will/can be, with fuller sound and all. I think the future of music is going to be really diverse because of our urge to partake and draw inspiration from culture, and the internet makes sharing it simple.

What's the future of your music - what do you hope to do next?
I really just hope to keep doing what I've been doing. I feel blessed and I hope to keep enjoying it and hopefully play out.

What, aside from music, is most important to you?
Staying grounded by friends, family and the outdoors whenever possible.

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• Also, DO check out Tropes's Boiler Room set. Big thumbs up; double, if anything.
• Check out a load of other artists answering questions in the Lazy Interview series.

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← #24: BO EN #26: KERO KERO BONITO →

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Tropes on • Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Tumblr

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MEISHI SMILE – LUST

Oh goddd this like everything else has taken ages to actually get from my ears to my brain to my fingers to the keyboard. It was released over a month ago. What is "it"? God damn— it's Meishi Smile with his debut album Lust. Yes indeed it's "The 1st Album" – there can never be another one by Meishi Smile, no no nope. This is the 1st album and it always will be.

But what is it like? Lust is essentially a mix of rough and smooth, a mix of harsh self-berating distortion and endless reverb free-floating out into the gulf of digital voids, all beset with J-pop sensibilities; it's sugar-coated white noise, it's dance music for bedroom dwellers and indoors inclined individuals, it's idealised. Within its 8 tracks, there are many moments where it soars past the boundaries of euphoria with a post-Balearic furore, too happy to be real; a gentle, dream-induced kind of EDM, not the type you'd hear in a massive tent at a festival, but the type that takes you away to weird worlds in the middle of the lonely nights.

Opener 'AJS' perhaps embodies this EDM style most clearly, keeping all the tropes of the so-called genre – like multiple drops and trance-like melodies skirling away in hookish fashion; likewise, 'Honey' drops in with octave-skipping bassline and clean-cut fast-paced synth melodies. However, here is a quirk of the album: the vocoder. There is something retro about the vocoder, yet in its very nature it IS a modern device. It is at odds with itself. But this works perfectly for Meishi Smile. The vocoder appears as a mainstay of 'Pale', which alongside its icicle-esque synth glistenings gives the track an atmosphere of coldness, of chill in the nominal sense. It's also in the chilled atmosphere of the next track, 'Still' – looping vocoders battling high-register hollow synth and wide washes of dreamy chords.

These chilled vibes start the proceedings on 'Heart', a song that moves between swaying seabed ambience and bouncing electro-dance; thick synth bass grooves in a pop mood and the vocoder seems here to be "singing" more than anywhere else. It's a song of slow and fast. That slowness, however, is portrayed so much better on the almost-surprise track 'Ai' – this one sounds like a super-reverbed and super-distorted version of the kind of slo-house synthpop that the infamous Drive soundtrack popularised with artists like College and Kavinsky (in this instance, more by the former than the latter). It reeks of nocturnal stylings, a simple melody and a steady, driving beat fogged by reverb and underpinned by formative rows of saw-wave bass jounce.

That's in direct contrast to the happy-happy pop of previous track 'Summer Blue', a foray into something maybe you'd find on a videogame – squelchy bass, simple but very effective synth raining down in showers of 8-bit bleepery with an overriding melody played by synth lead and vocoder, syncopated toytronic chords in lieu of house piano for extra oomph. This is in direct contrast to the closer and most crazy of all tracks, 'Tears'. Meishi Smile mysteriously describes it on SoundCloud: "Dedicated to the one who was lost." And indeed, in title and in its near-happy hardcore extreme distortion, this aims to reflect not the moroseness, the lassitude, of being sad, but the fury and frustration of sadness, wholly up-tempo yet down-beat, tear-like droplets of synth raining down amidst the whirlwind haze of twisted grey noise synth.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. There are remixes. KOSMO KAT keeps 'Summer Blue' close to the original, adding touches here and there – percussion, a sunset-conjuring breakdown, droplet sample – for what is 'Summer Blue V2' basically. 'Heart' retains its washes of sound, yet is given a gentle touch of officious industry by Uio Loi, and la pumpkin turns it into an almost beatless slice of bassy experimentalism with added instruments, with the original melodies picked out and spotlighted. mus.hiba does likewise with 'Pale', extracting the song from its up-tempo frame and giving it a semi-trap makeover with added 80s synth melody and waves of trance synth. My favourite, I think, is gigandect's redoing of 'Honey' – now essentially a chiptune number, completely overrun with glorious bleeps, from its low-low buzzing bass all the way up to its fluid telephonic melody.

Phew. Well, this ain't conventional dance music; Meishi Smile ain't conventional. This is dance music hazed over with influences from videogame music to shoegaze and beyond, dreams converging like clouds to rain down startling reworkings of various recollections, feelings, and recollections of feelings. It's icy and robotic, but this cybernetic feel exudes nostalgia and emotion with subtle effortlessness; behind a mist of idealised sounds, just as anybody URL is veiled by idealised monikers and titles, Meishi Smile is there with boundless feeling.

• Get Lust for 10USD by clicky-clickin over here
• Listen to the truly awesome guest mix that Meishi Smile made for YES/NO

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Like Meishi Smile on Facebook
Listen to Meishi Smile on Soundcloud
Hear more Meishi Smile on Bandcamp
Follow Meishi Smile on Twitter
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Watch Meishi Smile on YouTube

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