To a shuffling march of French touch style rounded meaty drum sounds, we enter into this disembodied club, a cube of strangeness spinning through space like an errant asteroid, an Enterprise of the stars that instead of going where no-one has ever gone before is instead spinning and spinning with this fever dream of dance firmly lodged in its prefrontal cortex. The familiarity of the track, that you know you can dance to it, lies in those sharp thumping kicks, the pugilistic bump of the snare, the thud and tang of it propelling tracts of pinprick starlight glitter and wobbling nebulous string samples across the mysterious expanse, the gloopy groovesome bass and its ascending notes casting a cloak of pioneering exploration over it all.
'Exposure' by sometime remotely conjoined duo Poltraghost lives in this interdimensional zone, a sort of blissful nowhere of its own creation. The alien nature of the track does not come from these regular elements – these tried-and-true tropes of 4/4 kick-snare electronic music: a regular foundation – but mostly from the pitch-shifted vocal that with a silken rumbling tone delineates something unintelligible, resonating richly into the stripped-back rhythmic body-pop space of the track. Theremin sounds call out into the universe searching for the right frequency on which to communicate; synth lead plays out airy and plasma, breezy blasts that colour the solidity of this track with modulating digitised lonely washes, the futurism of it feeling fleeting and ephemeral as it drifts fatefully through starfields and constellations.
🔔
'Exposure' is taken from Poltraghost's debut album, Nineties Business Woman. This can be acquired digitally via the duo's Bandcamp.
The glaze of future funk, glossy vaporwave offshoot, sparkles in the big city flavours of 'NY Is Red Hot', broiling in cola sweetness and carving out a groove that bubbles with feel-good-ness, and in fact with summery red-hot-ness as well. In Amelia Airhorn's single, with its wanna-join-in communal-feeling vocals, the guitar chords hit with a robust shimmer of funk, the brass blares triumphal like beacons of upscale uptown sheen, strings glimmer like streetlights, the bass croons in subtle columns weaving with the deep thump of the beat, the jostle of it all a whirlwind of disco and dancing, the keen future funk fade-ins and fade-outs providing not only subtle parallel to builds and drops in terms of dynamic feels, but also with its irregular amplitudinal consistency conjuring a real life setting: moving through a club, nearer further from the speakers, outside for a cigarette, leaning in for a warm lips-to-ear conversation.
This track, at once flavourful both in danceability and in the inherent nostalgia-summoning, somewhat filmic nature, is or at least was a common feature of the earlier music of Ryan DeRobertis aka Skylar Spence, the pop-infused retro sample collages that awoke from then-vaporwave component Saint Pepsi. This is one half of Amelia Airhorn—the other being The Knocks, a duo with a similar penchant for funk though with a more polished surface, more Kitsuné-ready, more mainstream friendly: they never had to contend with actual Pepsi Co.'s legal team, for instance (DeRobertis' moniker change occurred in 2015).
The evocative yesteryear collage nature of the track plus album artwork and the retro airbrushed typography, this mirrors the collaborative cocktail. On its own 'NY Is Red Hot' brims with energy and noise, shines bright in the nocturnal glitz that surrounds it like mist, conceptually frames it; but with context, this merging of underground SoundCloud musicmaker and pre-initiated pop producers represents a meeting of the new unexplored avenues of making a success in music and the well-trod halls of namedrop beatmaking, traditional and unconventional, past and now, the span of time and attitude that is the foundation of future funk.
🔔
This single is taken from Amelia Airhorn's 18-track debut release, The Knocks & Skylar Spence Present...Amelia Airhorn. You can download it for free from ameliaairhorn.com, where you'll also find fun background on characters in the Amelia Airhorn universe, i.e. NYC itself.
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.
All along the quivering carapace is beset with jabbering angular synth like the ebbflow throttle of an alien machine, driving and forceful. The thud of the beat keeps time with electro sensibilities, the French touch thump-thwack clacking in the backdrop as the track tacks along its overcast path. It's a hearty potion of cold electronics, brightened by the ghostly vocals which seem apart and drifting above the slow gallop mechanics.
And into 'New Preset', by Stockholm-based Djustin, like welcome shards of sun on hard cold land, into the track arrive javelins of synth ablaze with uplifting light, lancing above the dark lurch of the beat and bass below, illuminating these lonely electronics like flashing lamps, the thin-air lustre of love or something like it, friendliness even, a new sheen of life. Dynamics of light and dark are wonderfully illustrated here, with thin synth juxtaposing thick, changes in key and the vocals ascending like the sun above clouds.
🔔
Djustin is Rose Suau and Johan Angergård.
🔔
'New Preset' is taken from Voyagers which is the duo's new album out 7th May on Swedish label Labrador Records.
Mr Oizo, oh Mr Oizo, it's Mr Oizo. I saw a tweet from Mr Oizo at some point in time before today (let's just say this one to be done with it) that said this Charli XCX collaboration called Hand In The Fire was going to drop sometime soon and well, yeah, it's today. It's arrived today, 14 days before Christmas, ho-ho-ho.
The headline and USP of this EP is the Charli XCX-featuring bit and it's what everyone's gone with:
Pitchfork: Mr. Oizo Teams With Charli XCX for "Hand in the Fire"
Stereogum: Mr Oizo – “Hand In The Fire” (Feat. Charli XCX)
Pigeons & Planes: LISTEN TO MR. OIZO AND CHARLI XCX’S “HAND IN THE FIRE”
The FADER: Mr. Oizo And Charli XCX Share "Hand In The Fire"
Idolator: Charli XCX Returns To Springy Electro-Pop On Mr. Oizo Collab “Hand In The Fire”: Listen
Beatport: HEAR MR. OIZO’S CURVEBALL COLLABORATION WITH CHARLI XCX, “HAND IN THE FIRE”
The 405: Charli XCX features on Mr Oizo track, 'Hand In The Fire'
NME: Charli XCX teams up with Mr Oizo – 'I was inspired by Ed Banger'
Paper: LISTEN TO MR. OIZO'S WARPED TROPI-LEANING TRACK FEATURING CHARLI XCX
DIY: CHARLI XCX IS WORKING WITH ED BANGER’S MR OIZO
FACT: Stream Charli XCX and Mr. Oizo’s ‘Hand In The Fire’
And so on and so forth in different languages on multiple sites and blogs around the world (one of the middle ones, The 405, I wrote that one). Oizo and Charli XCX, boom, ruling the world and whatever. It shows that MR OIZO can produce for pop, that's one thing that it shows, and very well at that, of course of course: bass booms and cold skeletal low-end melodies and skiffly swaying beat with orchestra hits exploding, raw tom rolls for extra flavour, plus the hook in FX'd vox wah-wahing in the appropriate places.
Mr Oizo has collaborated with singers before, twice on Lamb's Anger (2008): with Uffie on 'Steroids' and with Carmen Castro, whom Oizo calls "a mysterious person", on 'Two Takes It'; and more recently with Marilyn Manson on 'Solid', which scared and worried me but it was fun nonetheless. None of these, however, overshadowed a whole release, which is the case with the Charli XCX collaboration – three other tracks appear on the Hand In The Fire EP, one of which is an instrumental version of the Charli-featuring title track so what's up with that?
What is up with that? What is the actual problem here? Is there even a problem? Maybe, maybe there is. Like, the instrumental version, although it's a nice instrumental like I said a couple of paragraphs above, does not excite me a great deal, like it's definitely been made with a conscious effort of leaving space to putt a vocal on top, making it with a cyclical formula in pop song format. The actual song 'Hand In The Fire' feels weird: here's a different scenario: This is a Charli XCX track and then it's revealed that the producer is Mr Oizo, nice yeah, it's a catchy tune, jostling and slithering — somehow that feels cooler and more natural than this in its actual obvious collaboration state. Why?
Because the other two tracks on the EP are sooo Mr Oizo you'd be a fool to miss how typically Oizo-sounding they are, and how similar they are in feel and speed, which many publications indeed seem to have overlooked, drooling instead over the "curveball" (misfit???) collaboration itself because Give Pop A Chance and because Pageviews Mean Prizes and because Dat SEO.
I mean, there's 'A Rekurd', which with all its unrelenting repetition of the eponymous sample – "a record, a record, a record" – and mad sirens is an intense dance track, ending with a simple juggernaut of overdriven crunchy kicks and the vocal sample itself, filled throughout with familiar creeping atonal arpeggios. But sitting above this both actually in terms of track number on the EP and also in my esteem is 'Being Flat': yaaaaa! This one is nuts, perfectly nuts, wtf does nuts even mean, it just came out, I'm sorry. It's that blaring dissonant menacing groove that is so comfortable and yet so nerve-singeingly body-affecting that you can almost feel the tiniest hairs on your body vibrating with it.
It's those little ad-libs to the beat, a slicing hi-hat thrown into the pattern; it's that ambient soaring synth break providing liquid gentle oasis between the hard jittering notes of the second part and the delicious substantial bass patterns of the first half. It's the robust sounds in the beat, thumping and full of texture. It's the crowd noises in the background, which add depth and effuse the placebo effect of feeling like you're at an actual party.
When these two tracks finished, and the instrumental 'Hand In The Fire' began to play I paused it. I PAUSED IT. Now all I have in my head is the Charli XCX collab and I'm confused at why I don't like it all that much if it's in my head? I guess labelling things really does change your opinion even before you've sampled such things.
"The medium is in the message": in this instance the message is Charli XCX song, clearly that is the case. The medium, however, via or as part of a Mr Oizo release, loads it with meaning and expectations. Association kicks in and, being a human being, I cannot help but be influenced by how things are packaged; everyone's perception of something changes depending on its delivery. If you don't know Mr Oizo, then cool, Charli XCX is working with someone; do a little google, oh yeah, this Quentin Dupieux, he's done some cool stuff, he's pretty well known – therefore Charli is held in even higher esteem. But for those who know Mr Oizo, or know and like Mr Oizo's music rather, having a Charli XCX song delivered through his musical output feels jarring, even wrong.
This leads me to conclude that this song, this EP with its typical and more digestible Oizo sound outside of the title track, is meant for those who are not well acquainted with the French producer or his music. At the same time, it's sort of fan service because both these tracks do not exactly push new ground for Oizo, serving as a nostalgic vessel for pre-existing Oizo-lovers; indeed as of this current moment, 'Being Flat' has had more plays than 'Hand In The Fire', showing that fans will find their way to the morsel they like the most and play it maybe a few times cause they love it and they gotta show someone else, too. Oizo fans get to see Oizo tackle pop production, and he does it well – perhaps the reason why the instrumental version is also included.
Charli XCX fans, on the other hand, get to hear a new and unique somewhat Santigold-sounding song and then, hidden behind the cover story, there's these other tracks from the same producer, buzzing but not too abrasive and instantly addictive for those with an ounce of dance-leaning tendencies in their souls. Everyone's happy.
It's house music. But it's house music with a difference. It's electro-house music. And not just any old electro-house music, but... well, not every bite of electro-house I take tastes as delicious as the atmosphere given off in the Casino Night Zone from Sonic II; no, it's not every day that the electronic claque of French-touch feeling house gets mixed with chiptune-flavoured VGM-inspired music, as has happened here, but it's always a better day when something like this is discovered.
Something like what? Something like 'Summertime Memories' by musicmaker Ujico* (with asterisk, that's no typo). IRL name, Keitaro Ujiie, he's an 18-year-old producer from Tokyo who also makes music under the name Snail's House, under which moniker he has previously released an EP called Kirara for Japan-based label Trekkie Trax (associated with other dance-based artists like Carpainter, who's also counted as a founder of the label). 'Summertime Memories' is a two-week old track that first, if you have any penchant for anime aesthetics, lures you in with its artwork, and then sucker punches you right in the groove bone with an explosive dab of HOUSE. And it's a free download: double win.
It'd be unfair to call this entirely house, though. Even though the kicks thud and the hi-hats skitter intricately along with the best of 'em, even though its snares boom with simmering pugilism, it seems (after first listen at least) to have more in common with future funk than straight house. Why? Because of the pulsing feel of is continual beat, the ebb-and-flow of sidechained sounds that punctuate future funk jams the world over. Admittedly, however, this style does feel as though it derives from French-touch house anyway, so what am I saying?
Added to this booming feel-good rhythm are stuttering synth chords, bold melody lines bleeping with chiptune aesthetics, saw-wave synth bass, the constant plink of a rhythmic boop, chopped and garbled vocal samples, all of it never jostling for space but running concurrent to each other with fugue-like complexity. It's urgent and dirty, summing up the humidity and bustling joy of summertime in just under four minutes of irrepressible groove, and therefore deserving of the description given by its maker on SoundCloud: 夏に向けたエレクトロなチューンです! ("This is the electro tune of the summer!")
Have I written about anybody from PC Music here on YES/NO yet? Hmm. Not sure. Not that I remember. So that probably means no. But that is by no means a statement against them. I am quite strapped for time most of the time so I'm not able to write about everything that I like. It's often just what I'm in the mood for on that day; for instance, from the last 3 days I have a list of 30 or so songs, some of which I may never write about.
I sometimes wish I were multiple people – it'd be easier to do things that way. Especially if I could have one avatar for doing particularly boring things like… no actually, every experience should be experienced by me. It's my life, after all.
Anyway, A. G. Cook, London-based producer and the final boss of PC Music, has shared some music with us via Annie Mac's Free Music Mondays (meaning this is a free download too – back of the net). Mr. Cook and his label have gained a ridonkulous amount of attention this year, mainly from withholding information and generally making quite groundbreaking music; the sonic equivalent of shock-and-awe tactics; shocking audiences with "unlistenable" (to some) but expertly produced tracks before awing them with ones that are more legible, more conventional – something that might be like an exclusivity clause to 'weed out' people without open minds.
Maybe? Hmm. This is just a crackpot theory by me, however, and must not be paid attention to.
A. G. Cook's latest offering is called 'What I Mean' and it puts me in mind of a roaring fire inside a warm homely room as winter blusters outside in the cold – an oasis of heat in a frozen world – joyful vocal samples skilfully chopped and placed on a patterned paper-chain of melody, ornamentations above the diamond-clusters of synth, flickering above the neo-groove of the squelchy bass and robust, simple beat. It's also laden with vocal samples, a female ooo-ing and some male, I dunno, words and stuff, all serving to decorate this lightly lilting plasma surge of squeaky clean French-Touch-esque music. It doesn't exactly sound anything like any of his other tracks, and why should it?
Brilliant! That's the first word I'll say about this. But before I even begin to tip-tap some words out about the song itself: Just WHO is Valiant Vermin anyway? FURTHERMORE — Eggroll…?!
(The) Valiant Vermin aka Bettina Campomanes is a young (I believe currently she is 17) producer from the Philippines. A self-described bedroom project, the Facebook page for it shows off Campomanes' modesty and humour: her bio reads "I didn't want to go outside so this happened," whilst her description is "I'm 16 years young and bored as hell." The very epitome of bedroom producer if ever there was one. Bettina is also a prized member of the Manila-based artist collective, Youngliquidgang – the co-founder of which, Zeon Gomez (aka Ulzzang Pistol), made a lovely guest mix (#014) for Y/N recently showcasing the group's talent; it included the electro-pop goodness of 'Good Girls Sin' by VV herself.
Her latest track is an impressive remix of an obscure and rather ungoogleable '80s duo, Eggroll. Called 'No Satisfaction', the original is as '80s synthpop as you can imagine: power drums, keytars, twangly guitar. I was gonna just link you to the video (dated 1987, aired on NY Public Access) but I'll embed it at the end of this post because you'd like it probably.
Anyway: the remix is a different kettle of fish.
Taking the strong, soulful vocals of the original, Valiant Vermin puts these to use in an extremely appealing way, setting them above an elastically punchy four-on-the-floor beat and syncopated stabs of robust house piano, as well as the occasional synth chord. Wheeling synth melody screams over the top with all the exciting intensity of Sonic 2's Chemical Plant Zone – but more jazz, less urgency. Speaking of jazz, piano fills spill over between chords in virtuosic fashion, further highlighting the elated funk of this track. It's house, classic 90s house – with a dash of French-touch sound – combined with the fun-loving nature of jazz and electro, simply brimming with energy. Download it for free!
Two things are immediately clear: 1. To find & utilise well such an obscure gem; 2. Production is high quality. Here is a talent still relatively undiscovered, from somebody barely even an adult (in the true sense of the word) yet. You can only hope that Miss Campomanes continues on this creative path; who knows what she will dream up in years to come.
Well, here's something exciting. Music can be fun, lighthearted, addictive, and it can also be exciting. And in this instance, I mean exciting in the way that something epic is exciting. Because this song right here just effuses "epic" – but before we get too much into it. Who or what the hell is SUNSET and why should you care? That's what you're thinking right? Right? Anyway, SUNSET is a duo from Paris, made up of artist Raphaël Siboni and Franck Rivoire (aka Danger). Not much is known about them, but it's that intrigue that keeps people guessing and, in a roundabout way, interested in the music. That's kind of beside the point though, because the music itself works just fine without any intrigue at all (check out their previous song 'Krystal'). Aren't I just contradicting myself… Sorry.
As for the song. It's called 'Ava' and it reaches you in the form of a lyric video; usually badly animated fan-created items, instead SUNSET have created it themselves and literally just provided the lyrics, in small writing, at the bottom of a black screen. And it's a good thing too because I don't speak very good French so understanding the lyrics is a little difficult (not that they matter 100%). Since they're given, it's interesting to note that the lyrics are wildly original, featuring the fictional account of someone's – this Ava perhaps – birthday at a club, where they were born to a techno song on the dancefloor. Bizarre? Yes, but totally captivating in a way. These, I believe, come from the artistic mind of Raphaël Siboni.
On the other hand, we have the music itself. The stoical nature of the spoken-word vocals, in its low register, is drowned by the track's hefty truckload of synth. We have it in lighter, more airy forms, where higher notes criss-cross like icicles in a glitter of reverb; then we have it in almost suffocating, heavy bass crunch form, a dark tooth-grinding saw-wave collapsing your mind and giving it away to the pulse of the song. The drums, booming along in a slow motion ache, almost cripple your ears – the kick in particular nearly escapes the speaker to scoop out your skull. It's a massive sound, wholly entrenched in the mystic, Crystal-Castles-esque side to trance music, yet with a sensibility towards live sound that comes with the high-end production, the distortion being paradoxically cut with precision. What will come next from these guys? It will be interesting to find out; pairing cryptic poem-like lyrics with such a sound is something that will turn a few heads, I'm sure, whilst also breaking some ears with their menacing sound.
Oh and if you're wondering about the "1789" at the end of the video: it's the start of the French Revolution and also the name of Franck Rivoire's label.
Last time I said anything about music from Korea it wasn't about Psy but actually Neon Bunny, whose song 'Oh My Prince' caught my attention. It is a nice bit of pop with a retro atmosphere coupled with super catchy vocals - very nice.
And there I was the other day, thinking, "I wonder if Neon Bunny has done anything new," but before I could bother looking (I am easily distracted, OK?) I got an email from Neon Bunny herself telling me that she had indeed done some new stuff. Namely, she features on 'Singing Bird', a track from Seoul producer Demicat's new EP, Out Loud, which is on the whole a big snub to the onset of Autumn, carrying on instead the humid 90s pop/dance flavours that dripped onto our tongues this summer. One of my favourite flavours, so the EP is WELL worth a listen; it crosses French-touch-style rock-electro guts with lighter electronic noises to provide the perfect correlation between hard and soft. Please do listen.
When I listen to 'Singing Bird', in particular, it is filled with that kind of atmosphere that is almost bursting with the potential energy that summer beams down upon us, and I feel as though the weather outside should be almost unbearably hot. There are noises in here, the occasional lead synth melody at the end of each couple of bars, for instance, that remind me of particular things: swimming pools come to mind - that feeling of lying on the grass in the sun after swimming. But that's not helping you is it?
But maybe it is. Because the song smells of summer. Its synth lead arpeggios glitter sultrily, like the sun on rippling pool, ambient synths fill the spaces between Demicat's funkily placed chord stabs as if a true summer haze wobbled down to the horizon, or heat warped the air above hot tarmac. Piano chords dot the song with a nice progression, as if each one could be a different cut in a film or... The beat is meaty, literally like chucking a hefty steak repeatedly on a kitchen worktop (if yo American or something else it's synonymous with your word 'counter'; counters are in shops here) - and a little touch that I like is the alternating sounds of the snare, heavier and lighter by turns.
Then of course, the cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the dot of the i and the cross of the t, is Neon Bunny's vocals - she breathes an extra breath of spirit into the song. She sings languorously, softly in contrast to some of the harsher edges of the song, decorating it with faint glimmers of pop aesthetic. Even her vocal melody sounds similar to something you would've heard on the radio as a younger person in the 90s. Lovely really.
To a shuffling march of French touch style rounded meaty drum sounds, we enter into this disembodied club, a cube of strangeness spinning through space like an errant asteroid, an Enterprise of the stars that instead of going where no-one has ever gone before is instead spinning and spinning with this fever dream of dance firmly lodged in its prefrontal cortex. The familiarity of the track, that you know you can dance to it, lies in those sharp thumping kicks, the pugilistic bump of the snare, the thud and tang of it propelling tracts of pinprick starlight glitter and wobbling nebulous string samples across the mysterious expanse, the gloopy groovesome bass and its ascending notes casting a cloak of pioneering exploration over it all.
