Artist: Instiga
Song: “Mariachi”
If you don’t remember Instiga, our favorite band from São Paulo, Brazil, you are missing out. Great indie pop, unique South American flavor. And if you want to know more about them, we conveniently have an interview with them in Issue 19, which you can back order! Huzzah!
Aidan Moffat from Arab Strap likes to wrap himself in pink bedding and film it. He also likes showing off in the shower and on the toilet.
That might weird some of you out, but my guess is that the true Arab Strap fans in the house — most of whom already are aware of their reissues coming out on Chemikal Underground — wouldn’t mind the amusement. Not to mention a chance at winning said box set of reissues, an iPod, or their entire catalog.
So, if you are inclined to watch Aidan be his weird-ass self on camera, as well as earn the chance at a few of those prizes, enter their Twitter contest.
And if that’s not good enough for you, perhaps you should back-order Ghettoblaster issue #17 for an interview with Arab Strap’s own Mike Ladd or check out a few mp3s below:
Arab Strap – The First Big Weekend (from “The Week Never Starts Round Here”)
Arab Strap – Packs Of Three (from “Philophobia”)
Arab Strap – Daughters of Darkness (previously unreleased!)
In a world where experimental electronic music exponentially splinters into a multitude of rogue genres that slowly shuffle the globe from demilitarized dance floors to sleeper cell bedroom studios and back, a team of disparate scientists tracks this solanum-like pandemic while desperately trying to interpret cryptic field recordings of Samhain’s past, not one day at a time, but from Amen to Zombie…
AMEN
Ahhh, finally the spring heat has subsided and summer has people lazy in the shade sipping blood orange margaritas. It also means that most working DJs are out working the festival circuits. Which generally means that whatever is going to be the summer hit has already been released and the 12″ tap starts to squeeze shut and releases drip out.
However, Klute just put out Music for Prophet and ASC finally dropped Nothing is Certain in early July. Both albums vie for top spots on the Juno bestsellers chart. And not much more in the way of good beats on the top of that list right now.
Icicle‘s Xylophobia is out on promo on Shogun Audio, a flash in the pan, been wanting a release of that one for a while.
Anyway, d&b as a genre has its summer persona and it’s all out in smooth vibe style. Let’s check out the Juno catalog in our journey through C:
Guys! Just a quick heads up: we have a new print issue of the magazine out on stands now. I know, we already told you that. That means that, before you know it, mixtape #24 will disappear from the internet and a new one will arrive.
So if you want free jams from the likes of Titus Andronicus, Quasi and Frightened Rabbit, you better get on over to the Mixtape page before we kill #24 and give you the next round of awesome via mixtape #25.
If you’ve cracked open a single issue of Ghettoblaster, you are well aware of our continual fascination with all things Robert Pollard. So you can bet your face that we were excited when a Guided By Voices announced a reunion for a one-off show in Las Vegas for Matador’s 25th anniversary.
But now the news has reached us that our Ohio heroes will be touring as well. Hear that faint squealing noise? That’s the sound of our collective electric joy rising up over the heat of summer.
From ActiveDayton.com:
Although no dates are confirmed, GBV will follow that reunion show with some United States dates. This will be Pollard’s first tour since the Boston Spaceships outing in 2008 and the first GBV shows since disbanding in 2004.
“I’m not sure this will end after this particular tour,” [Pollard] said. “But after this has run its course, that’s the end for Guided by Voices. My justification for even doing it was, we’re old, but we’re not completely feeble yet. We can still do it a little bit, so we better do this before that happens.”
Dudes. Who play rock music.
Some bands toe the line between hardcore and metal, creating a third genre that doesn’t follow any of the rules. Gray Area attempts to catalog these works.
Gray Area Deluxe, however, is a spotlight on a fantastic band’s brand new album.
In a world where experimental electronic music exponentially splinters into a multitude of rogue genres that slowly shuffle the globe from demilitarized dance floors to sleeper cell bedroom studios and back, a team of disparate scientists tracks this solanum-like pandemic while desperately trying to interpret cryptic field recordings of Samhain’s past, not one day at a time, but from Amen to Zombie…
Amen
Still reeling from that last entry I’ve dug back into the sounds of my DR 202 and came up with this little John Carpenter inspired loop. And that got me pondering if we’ve come to an age where a drum machine has as much functionality as a toaster or a waffle iron. That loop took me about an hour to edit all the sounds, write the little ascending synth melody, and place all the sounds in an loop. And although that mp3 is a bit tinny, it doesn’t sound that far off from anything on the They Live OST, in my opinion that is. But I don’t have extensive knowledge of programming drum machines, and the apps you can get for your iPhone today greatly simplify the process. Yet, it was a quick hour’s worth of work to produce something passable.
With the implosion of the music industry in the States, are we that far off from making a few quick choices on a box plugged into the wall to have it spit out completely new music that suits our mood or taste? Could we be far off from adding a sort of drum machine to your home stereo set up? One that had the capability to gobble up your favorite tunes, then spit them back out at you in endlessly new and interesting permutations?
And what about our music needs? With user content flooding the web, there is more of a need for license-free music to pop up in the background of someone’s crappy YouTube home movie. What will our listening needs be in the next 10 years? Muzak has gone from The Girl From Ipanema to Mos Def (don’t kid yourself; Quite Dog selling cellphones has made me want to ignore that joint from now on).
How far are we away from choosing the tunes we hear on commercials ourselves? Maybe a new iTunes app where your TV is synced with your library and every time a commercial comes on it selects a tune from your “TV commercials” playlist? What if instead of making a mixed CD for the next BBQ you could just tell a drum machine what you were cooking and it would give you some tunes to accompany?
In case you’re wondering, I would be in favor of all this. I think there also lies at the center of a musician the desire to produce music that they would like to hear, rather than listen to everyone else’s ideas of what music should be. And now that everyone can have the technology to produce “content,” that technology might start to embody that DIY spirit in a strange, mutant way. I would love to see this. I think it would further break down the poles of consumption and production. Or at least tip it more to the production side of things, where instead of a huge collection of music, you’d only have to buy one tiny drum machine and make a few simple choices.
The drum machine would have a utility similar to a blender or something, but not it a bad way. In the way that a blender will not give you a smoothie unless you put some fruit, milk and ice cream in it, this new drum machine I envision wouldn’t give you any tunes unless you made a few simple choices or fed it with some of your other favorite music. The way the DR 202 is, you have to farm your strawberries and milk the cows to get some beats kicking. But remember that the DR 202 is like 20 years old. You can run down to the grocery, AKA internet and pick up some beats at a bargain price. Then just put them into the blender and enjoy. The ghost of Mitch Hedberg would say, “I don’t have a futuristic drum machine, but I do have a clock that can DJ my Hawaiian BBQ!” Sure he would. Now on to:
Notable Releases:
C.A.B.L.E/Noah D - Burning/Soul of Sagittarius
This one is a promo from back in ’07. True to promo form, the artist and track titles are messed up/missing. But Barry and Levon would be proud because “Soul of Sagittarius” is a rolla! Bouncy/punchy bass line, nice drum programming, and enough synth riffs and catchy hooks to keep you interested, but not too much to make it sound like they just threw in the kitchen sink. Burning is some straight bullshit though. Can’t win them all… yeah.
Jonny Cage – Bass Hertz/Terminator X
Real quick on this, Bass Hertz is a wonky sort of tune with rattling Amens and dub techno appeal. ”Terminator X” is just a nod to PE with some jump-up bullshit. Really like the A, really don’t the B.
Calibre
This week’s artist in residence is D. Martin. A man of few words, at least spoken and then written down and then published. But like all artists worth their salt, the product and production speaks for itself. The style is mostly a kind of smooth, Romantic d&b particularly on his Signature Records label. I hesitate to use the label Liquid, but I think some of it does deserve to get lumped into that sub-genre of d&b. Here’s a few smooth ones:
Makes Me Wonder/Got to Have You
It’s a special kind of groove on these ones for me. Although they have that snare on the four, it never feels too in your face or out of place. Just the right mixture of percussion and vocals and melodies and groozy loops. One of the few artists that I truly believe knows how to correctly use a vocal in a tune. Just about everything on Signature Records is worth listening to and will reap the benefits upon repeat listens. But just so you know, Signature is Calibre’s main creative outlet, no outsiders and very few collabs. When he releases on other labels it’s a bit more dance floor ready. Meaning everyone pumping their fists instead of nodding their head. Check releases on V and 31 Records for more bouncy stuff. But for that head nod shit that make you break yo nek…
So it goes.
In a world where experimental electronic music exponentially splinters into a multitude of rogue genres that slowly shuffle the globe from demilitarized dance floors to sleeper cell bedroom studios and back, a team of disparate scientists tracks this solanum-like pandemic while desperately trying to interpret cryptic field recordings of Samhain’s past, not one day at a time, but from Amen to Zombie…
Zombie
This week we see the reboot of a franchise that has a special place in my heart. Bring it, back come rewind to the year 1988. A watershed year for culture, for me at least. I was entering the fourth grade, had recently discovered hip hop (don’t hate just cause the first tape you bought was Slippery When Wet and mine was 3 Feet High and Rising) and skateboarding. Toys were amazing (see: Transformers G1 and Neon Leon) and all was right with my tree fort. Summer was spent in a haze of Skyscraper candy bars from the snack shak at the community pool and running across scorching tennis courts to steal tennis balls to go play run-down with.
Just as August was cooling off East Pittsburgh, there appeared a new commercial on TV. One with a familiar face and title that I had heard before, but really wasn’t sure to believe was true or not. Did someone really make a movie about a guy in a red/black sweater that could kill you in your sleep? This was the sort of thing that seemed to be designed to scare the crap out of me. But naw, that was all bunk, it was just my friends trying to trick me But sure enough:
BOOM! As the summer blockbuster season steamrolled on, and there was nothing to do some days before YO! came on at 5:00, there is was on my TV screen. The trailer for the new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie. It was then that I learned that yes, someone had indeed made a movie about killing girls that were my babysitter’s age in their sleep. And it scared the crap out of me. I couldn’t even watch the commercial. It seemed like the worst possible scenario: someone could kill you in your sleep while you were dreaming. End of story.
In some of the other horror movies I had sneaked peeks at when I was a kid, there seemed to be simple solutions. Poltergeist: just move. Halloween: just move, quickly and during the day. The Wraith: stop drag racing. Simple solutions. Dealing with Freddy Krueger? My 9-year-old mind couldn’t even fathom it.
It would be years and years before I ever watched a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Partially due to my flashbulb memory of the commercial and partially due to the very nature of horror being evoked. A terror that no one could hide from, it affected everyone the same. If you pissed Freddy off, you were done. Everyone has to sleep, and now that some scientists have expanded the definition of dream to dream mentation — meaning any mental activity during sleep — we are doubly screwed this time around as the reboot occurs. (For a lengthy discussion on the dream part of ANoES, page me. I’m a sleep researcher.)
So calling a timely audible, I thought it might be cool to check out some of the music of the ANoES oeuvre. Not necessarily related to Halloween music, but still within the same ballpark. I could easily write a blog on exploring the soundtracks and BGM of horror/sci-fi/action movies. And I’m sure they exist elsewhere. Page me if you find any good ones.
The Dream Master (ANoES 4) features this video. Yeah, The Fat Boys and Freddy. Rapping. Together. To my 9-year-old mind this was evidence that Freddy was coming to get me. He would slowly invade the things that I liked, then my dreams, then kill me. I wasn’t really into The Fat Boys, but it seemed that that would be Freddy’s game plan. Get into rap on the edges and then do battle with EPMD before he got to me.
Actually, that Fat Boys track was a marketing promotion to try and drive ticket sales. The track isn’t on the soundtrack, but Blondie is. Go figure. Along with a bunch of other crap that’s not worth mentioning. A “Film Score” was released on Varèse Sarabande which we’ll get to later. Let’s take a look at the next in the series.
Here we have both the cover of the Original Soundtrack and the movie poster for The Dream Child. That sweet artwork is by Matthew Joseph Peak. I think that it has just as much to do with my terror of this series as the contents of the movie. By the time Freddy’s Dead came out I was old enough to actually sneak into one of the ANoES movies, but the poster sucked. Nothing like Peak’s fantasy-scapes, always containing Freddy’s eye peering at you from the beyond. Although if you check out Freddy’s Favorites released by Varese Sarabande you can see a sixth Peak image that follows the artwork from the original and it’s not the lame-o 90′s style artwork that was on the U.S. theatrical poster.
The film score also has the cool Peak artwork, but we’ll stay in the 80′s. The first 5 ANoES movies came between ’84 and ’89 and I think are the aweseomest. And for two reasons: 1) the Freddy’s Dead movie strays from the “dream” theme for the subtitle and does away with the ANoES title (technically the movies are part of the ANoES saga, and are thematically and chronologically linked). 2) The Goo Goo Dolls are on the soundtrack. Three times. The Dream Master at least had Kool Moe Dee and Schooly D. The Dream Child had Freddy skateboarding in the flick, thus claiming another of my favorite 4th grade pastimes.
Let’s move forward, by moving back:
The Dream Warriors (ANoES 3) is probably where I first heard about Freddy, but I don’t have much memory of watching the commercial or seeing it on USA in middle school. Although I do vaguely remember the poster. The plot finds Freddy’s victims going to sleep on purpose to do battle with him. Not a smart move. But now that I myself am a sleep researcher, this is the one I want to go back and re-visit the most.
As far as soundtracks, here is where the huge rift between the “good” (read: film score) soundtracks and the “bad” (read: soundtrack with crappy pop music meant to drive ticket sales) begins. And you have Dokken to blame. Due to the nice little 45 Dokken put out for The Dream Warriors, every subsequent ANoES movie HAD to have a pop music component. Thus making the film score recordings even harder to find. Who wants a record with some ’80′s electro-Vangelis-meets-horror-movie-pastiche on it? Me, that’s who.
Freddy’s Revenge (ANoES 2) I have not seen or heard any of the soundtrack. However, it is talked about as the worst of the series not only by Freddy himself (Robert England A.K.A Freddy Krueger has been quoted saying that ANoES 2 & 5 were his least favorites), but by fans as well. It is also talked about for being homoerotic in it’s characterization of one of the leads. This could be a very lengthy post about how a horror film based in both the dream world and the real is such fertile ground for not only the authors and creators, but interpretation that your head might explode, but let’s stick to the music. Which I think reflects its subject matter as all good scores/BGM should.
Tracks:
01. Prologue
02. Main Title
03. Laying the Traps
04. Dream Attack
05. Rod Hanged – Night Stalking
06. Jail Cell
07. Confrontation
08. Sleep Clinic
09. Terror in the Tub
10. No Escape
11. School Horror – Stay Awake
12. Lurking
13. Telephone Terror
14. Fountain of Blood
15. Evil Freddy
16. Final Search
17. Run Nancy
As I said before, we’ll get to Varese Sarabande. The label started out in ’72 as a avant garde classical label. Now they’re one of the largest back catalogs of original film scores. Possibly the biggest in the world. Here’s some of the film titles they’ve released original motion picture soundtracks for: Mad Max, Escape from New York, Videodrome, The Evil Dead, Spies Like Us, Blue Velvet, and of course A Nightmare on Elm Street. The back catalog is insane when you look at it. I would imagine that every time you said something like “that’s (insert adjective) BGM in that movie” it was probably issued as an original motion picture soundtrack on Varese Sarabande. Here we have Charles Bernstein doing his best to creep the audience out with his electro-acoustic score.
Once you hear the opening eight-note leitmotif that makes up the movie’s main theme in “Prologue” and “Main Theme” you’ll be transported to that world. The instrumentation stays pretty close to the piano/synth/drum machine power trio that is characteristic of these types of scores. With the occasional human voice thrown in, and in some cases heavily effected. There is a low ebb of bass notes gently effected by an LFO that provide the audio fog at your feet. Ethereal voices from the synth yawn like ghosts trapped in those machines. Evil dub drums echo though damp night streets. More synths twinkle like halogen lights at 4 am parking lots. Rogue synths squelch and blurp out organic alien sounds. Corrugated steel siding is the voice of a rapid, but not too rapid, drum machine roll. Perfect atmospherics for a horror movie in my opinion.
Two synth notes, slightly out of tune, screech at one another back and forth, reminding us of our constant path back and forth from the dream world to the waking. In “Layering the Traps” we get the getting-prepped-for-the-shit-to-go-down montage swagger of a guitar riffing. And in “Dream Attack” we get the 8-bit pitch of boss music. There are other frantic pieces of music on the soundtrack, but slow tension is what most of the music tries to convey.
Most noteworthy of this slow tension, is the absence, or almost complete absence of “the sting.” “The sting” is the term John Carpenter used to describe that kind of orchestra hit that occurs just as the killer jumps out at you. There are not a lot of those cheap thrills in this soundtrack. That’s not to say that there isn’t any musical punctuation. “No Escape” is full of weird synth sounds bubbling and blasting around a 4/4 kick/kick/snare/snare groove. But there is no full stop, no “sting.” The closest Bernstein comes is at the end of “Main Title” and it’s kind of weak as far as stings go. And you can imagine that after the opening credits, we’d be privy to some inside dialog as the story starts to unfold. So a flourish would be a more apt description.
This slow synth tension is what I absolutely love about the soundtrack. It’s also what makes these types of movie soundtracks predictable to some people. I have to admit this piece actually started out as a book review on a scientific book that I came across in my professional career. The book was from the early ’70s and was really bugging me out when I started to read it. There were cool theoretical things in it, like if growing scientific evidence on dreams and their meaning would mean that we could somehow control people by understanding their dreams. There’s also a chapter devoted to the nightmare. In it the authors state that most “night terrors” occur in the deepest sleep.
Now, for those who don’t know, delta sleep, Stage 3 (no more Stage 4, it’s the same as Stage 3 and mostly a sleep scoring issue), or deep sleep is where these dreams that we are not conscious of can occur. Kids sleep walk in deep sleep. If you’ve ever looked at an EEG tracing of your brain while you were in deep sleep (check out ANoES sleep lab scenes; all that shit is legit) it would look like slow synchronous sine waves.
Maybe the way you might expect one of those creepy synth lines to be displayed by an oscilloscope to look like? That is if you could print out what the oscilloscope was doing on a piece of paper. It’s interesting that Berenstein chooses this very controlled back-and-forth in his score. The end of “Sleep Clinic” rushes us out of the piece, as the beginning lulls us into the piece. Some tracks are even split in half, “School Horror/Stay Awake” for example, yet there is no real clear-cut distinction where one track ends and the other begins.
“Terror in the Tub” starts off as somber synth tones that are almost sci-fi in their feel, then “Sleep Attack” is pitched down and reprised. The track is exactly one minute long and has somber synth and chase in equal parts, 30 seconds apiece. I think a very controlled and masterful use of the idea that sleep is our other reality, our other half. However, we are of sleep. And its reality. We are not beyond the sleep world and there is no substantial evidence that this world is indeed real. Nor is there substantial evidence that our waking world is real. So our days are a slow controlled ebb and flow from sleep to wake to sleep. And maybe that’s why those slow rise and fade synth tones fit this movie so well.
The other idea I had for this post concerned hypnogogic pop. I don’t want to go into a description of it — Google is your friend — but I want to make it clear, if I haven’t already, by my thoughts on the soundtrack, that I wholeheartedly and head-idly enjoy this music as well as all the other Halloween music I’ve written about here. As I understand it, hypnogogic pop is music that is trying to relive the 80′s in the most ironic, cynical way possible. Under the adjective of hypnogogic, which means “around sleep,” people are taking things like “Lady in Red,” slowing it down into this dreamy sludge of nostalgia that seems to ride the line between lazy pastiche and the fascination that slowing things down makes them “dreamy” or “forlorn.”
My intent is not to discus hypnogogic pop or define its terms. I do want to address the issue of looking back at something like the ANoES soundtrack and saying “Remember… that was so stupid, its great.” Which is a bit of where I think we are at in terms of music culture nowadays. There seems to be no sampling from the past to perform some sort of magic alchemy or trying to unlock the magic in a piece of music or sound with so much of the music nowadays. Yet everyone one is obsessed with reconfiguring the past in music. Maybe we’re entering an age of the end of new culture.
I am as serious about listening to Halloween as I am if I were listening to musique concrete. And I love both, no irony involved. And I invite you to pick up the ANoES soundtrack and have a listen with open ears. Take it out on a long midnight walk and see what it does to your psyche. Whatever your landscape I’m sure that it will haunt it. And there’s the magic in pieces of spooky music. It can still do its job regardless of what machines are designing the sound of it. I can’t wait to see the remake of ANoES this weekend and hear what they’ve done to update sound of slow terror. It’s a dream come true.
Goodnight out there, whatever you are.
Chuck D has been at the forefront of politics in music ever since Public Enemy first hit the stage way back in the day. In the 90s, he recorded a song called “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” speaking out against Arizona’s lack of support for localizing the honoring of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Now it’s 2010 and the song has gained new relevance with Arizona’s anti-immigration law getting a lot of attention the past couple weeks.
To address the situation, Chuck’s fellow hip-hop cohort DJ Spooky put together remix the song to stir up more awareness of the issue. You can download that track for free here.
Enjoy some good music and make sure to do everything in your power to promote freedom and equality in America. Rock on, party people.
In a world where experimental electronic music exponentially splinters into a multitude of rogue genres that slowly shuffle the globe from demilitarized dance floors to sleeper cell bedroom studios and back, a team of disparate scientists tracks this solanum-like pandemic while desperately trying to interpret cryptic field recordings of Samhain’s past, not one day at a time, but from Amen to Zombie…
AMEN
What’s this look like to you? What country? What year? What style of music is blaring in the background? How old are these kids? Is that girl wearing any panties? No, the one with the Air Max shirt on.
Questions, questions, questions. This week we start off the Cs in the Juno back catalog with 20 records by Cabbie. So my first question is: why is this entire page of releases dedicated to just one artist? In all the AMEN entries up until this point that has never happened. Questions of the prolific nature of this artist named Cabbie, his popularity in general, and others start splintering off as well. But a more pressing question comes to the fore:
Why does Jump-Up suck?
Before we dig into this question, let’s define our terms and reiterate that this blog is opinion. You may feel offended by the above question, but I hope to show you that, should you choose to dig on Jump-Up, you’re enjoying an inferior product. Everyone is guilty of this though; it’s what makes art so fun to consume, produce, and talk about. Everyone can produce a line of logic about why they like something. Sometimes this line is only two points: you and the thing e.g. “I like it just because I like it.” And this can again be lumped into two very general camps. ”This speaks to me in such a specific way that it no longer has any reference to its original form, and so I like it because I like it and it’s the way I feel that I like.” versus “I don’t care that this is cheesy or that it’s pop, or that it’s very clear that the intent of this thing is to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, to the point of making it soulless and an empty shell for advertising to stick their names on, I like it because I like it.” The first one would be something like GEM cream soda (The drink of taste!), the second would be Coke. Now I enjoy both, got somewhat of a Coke addiction in fact (nothing better than Coke and grenadine) but I think everyone recognizes that as a soft drink, Coke is not the best thing for you. Something that uses cane sugar and natural flavoring is better for you health wise. And a company that puts advertising where it belongs (in super markets, on TV, etc.) is better than plastering cities and country sides alike with advertising that you can see a half a mile away, and therefore can’t get away from. But then again that’s just me, which leads us back to the fact that this blog is my opinion that I’m trying to support with logic and examples.
A good example of Jump-Up would be Pink Socks. The above link should give you some info on the nuts and bolts of a Jump-Up tune, but the basics are: repetition and LFO baselines. Repetition meaning that an 8 bar loop (a break) is shuffled to compose a “song.” Maybe dropping the b-line or a quick buildup of rolling snares is about the extent of composition that you’re going to get in a Jump-Up tune. A quick run down of the b-line is take a 3 tone, 8 bar sine wave and throw an envelope filter on it. Lots of tunes employ call and response as well. This design serves two purposes I think, one is to be easy to mix. All the tunes have this template so that you can very easily manipulate anything labeled “Jump-Up” when mixing records. Two would be that it puts the DJ in more of the driver’s seat. DJ’s love beatmatching records, to the point where some people think that being a DJ is all about finding a “sound” or record label, collecting those records that sound similar, then mix them together in (un)creative ways.
This is where I find that Jump-Up falls down. If your source material all sounds similar, you are going to essentially be making “minimal” music when you mix it as a DJ or you try to build a Jump-Up track, meaning music that is mainly concerned with simple changes. It’s unfortunate that “Minimal” means techno most of the time, but that’s minimal with a capital M. In my sense “minimal” could also stand in for “lazy” or “minimal effort.” The dropping the b-line or whatever tends to get abused by both DJs and producers of Jump-Up. What you also get is a DJ set that has no signs of slowing down. If you were to look at it visually it would look like a hot dog. Every tune has an intro, so by default a DJ is going to have to play that to introduce their sound and prepare people for what’s about to come next. Then it’s just mix the shit out of some tracks (about 34) for an hour. Let the last record play out and the next DJ can come on. It’s just fast mixing, slamming down tunes as fast as you can. They all have similar sounds, so there’s really no reason to let a tune play for more than two minutes, which again gives the DJ more power, or I should say it makes his presence more know by constantly introducing a new tune to the audience. But at the same time, it consolidates the DJ’s job to just beatmatching a bunch of tunes that are already designed to sound similar. You might be saying, “That’s still an important part of DJing, you can’t play House then Breakcore for a bunch of people who want to just dance and drink.” Good point, and yes DJs should be conscious of genre, but not at the expense of programming or the flow of a DJ set. Even people rolling on 3 E’s and Grey Goose need a break. And good DJs don’t wear all your dancers out or the next DJ might suffer from a 20 minute bathroom break at the beginning of her set because a Jump-Up DJ wore everyone out with a solid 50 minutes of energy. DJs should lead, but also be courteous to those on the dance, as well as other DJs.
And on the production side of Jump-Up I think I have an answer to the question of why an entire page of Juno’s back catalog is dedicated to one producer. There seems to be some cool cache with certain producers and genres with how quick you can crank out a tune. I was listening to Skream do a lecture at the Red Bull Music academy, and he seemed to be bragging that he had made something like 5000 tunes and only takes 5 minutes to complete a tune. That’s a little obtuse, but it’s not far from what he actually said. I really can’t understand why it’s that cool to crank out a tune that fast. Basically what you’re going to have time to do is quickly get together a 16-bar loop and then shuffle its parts. That’s about it. And then you call that a tune. What it really is is a sketch. A very quick chunk of musical information that is being specifically designed to be mixed by a DJ. That being said, the obvious exception to the rule is that sometimes inspiration comes to you and you can very quickly put something together that will stand the test of a few months and people will still want to hear it. So there’s nothing wrong with working fast, unless that is the one thing you are trying to achieve. Working on something to work on something fast is a strange thing to wrap around your head. If the only reason you are doing something (building a track) is to get it done in the fastest time possible, then there is no reason for you to do it in the first place, because the fastest time possible is no time. But some people DO decide to make Jump-Up tunes in the quickest way possible, using the rhythms and structures as defined by the genre in the easiest way possible. This is why there’s 30+ tracks on a single page of the Juno back catalog by the same artist that all sound similar (and not similar because they are coming from the same producer, Cabbie, who is substituting a genre and a set of rules for his “sound”) This is what makes Jump-Up an inferior product. This is why Jump-Up sucks.
Whew! I need a GEM cream soda, let’s get back to our club kids.
You might be asking “Who’s this douche?” But hold on, you lady pants wearing motherfucker, this guy deserves to be heard just as much as you. The two photos in this post are from Don’t Stay In.com. Specifically they’re a bunch of people having fun at a Jump-Up gig. Don’t Stay In is 100 times more vapid than Myspace and is a place for club kids to put up photos of themselves, share info about gigs on a more global level, and chat about how “Fat gurls should get their bellybuttons pierced.” Harmless really. I’ll grant you that it’s a bit annoying, but really, harmless. As is my critique of Jump-Up. But, just look at the kids. Who doesn’t want to kick it with their best friends and chat to the opposite sex? Or the same, whatever. I’m showing these photos for a couple of reasons. Partly to have a little laugh at club kids. Can anyone else tell that the first picture is from the UK and the second is from the US? But mostly to put a face to the Jump-Up sound. These kids are having a blast listening to what I consider inferior music. The incorrect assumption is to say that they’re idiots for going to a Jump-Up gig, because Jump-Up sucks. For obvious reasons, right? Not everyone is there for the music, and as long as it’s got some repetitiveness in the 110-160 BPM range everyone can get down and have fun. However they’re not innocent either. I think they suffer from the same laziness that Jump-Up producers suffer from. But, here’s where you’re allowed to get a little high and mighty I think. These kids just wanna get down. Who makes the decisions on the dance? The DJ. Where does a DJ get his cues? Producers.
Which brings us to: Why not drink JEM cream soda instead of Coke? Why do DJs choose crap to feed their dancers? I honestly don’t know, but I’ll bet donuts to dollars that it’s a bunch of answers instead of something simple like “some DJs are stupid and don’t want to try anything new.” If I had to guess it would be that more complex music has the stigma of being for serious listening. Which blows my mind. Even as simple as Jump-Up is, it still has syncopation and, lest we forget, is still a sub-genre of d&b. Which is pretty advanced when you look at Trance, which also sucks. As a genre that is. Of course there are some classic Jump-Up tunes. “Fugees or Not” is a classic and a good tune. Hell, I love the Art of Trance track “Panorama,” which will bring us to the struggle with music and genres not making complete sense in terms of the other. But let’s sidestep the “good music is good music” argument and get back to those kids on the dance.
How amazing would it be if the kids in the photos above could be seen brocking out to “Come on my Selecta” instead of some bullshit Cabbie tracks? Oh yeah, there was nothing on the first page of C in the Juno back catalog that was worth recommending. There’s so much more to be offered by not only d&b, but other Jump-Up producers. Don’t bother with Cabbie. But how easy would it be to slip in some truly next-level bass music to a group of clubbers without getting some chin strokers? Can you imagine people drinking PBRs and inventing new dance moves to something like “In C” or “Music for Airports?” On a Tuesday? And that being the “normal” thing to do? Why not? It can’t all be Beer & Pussy.
So it goes.
