Shape 14b

Rotating cube/room thing. Only lines up from one angle.
The Flippers know what I’m on about.

Rick Harmony on Big Hits Radio

Rick Harmony is a friend of ours who’s done us a remix of one of our forthcoming tracks, Leaving. He’s a dance music producer who’s had a US house #1, and is currently working on tunes for Ministry of Sound and a name DJ – who we can’t mention!

He’s also going to be hosting a brand new internet radio show on a station called Big Hits Radio on Friday’s 6pm-9pm, so if you’re at your computer and need a blast of electro / electrohouse, this is the place to be.

There may well be some guests on Rick’s show next Friday whose initials begin with ‘L’ and ‘O’, but it must remain a secret till then…

 

Gig: 13th July

Right, we’ve got this Proud Galleries gig re-arranged & it’s now for the 13th July. Pop it into your pocket diaries!

Details of venue here: www.atproud.net

More details of the event to follow when we ‘ave ’em.

—

Props to Looptron last night; nice gig at The Comedy in Leicester Square. Was very pleasant to pop in after after a hard day at the coal face, hang out with friends and then leave a couple of songs into the following set.  (Well, it was workaday rock and I was a little weary)

—

Starting to put some plans together for the 28 Days EP launch event for August. We’re thinking Industry in Shoreditch is a nice venue. We saw our friends A.Human there the other week and it was good. (I say ‘friends’, more we just have a vague acquaintance with their bassist, Ben. Hi Ben!)

No Gig Tuesday!

Newsflash: apologies to all planning on coming to this, but we’ve just heard that it’s been cancelled by the promoter.

Sorry for any hassles – we should be rescheduling a gig at the Proud Galleries for June, watch this space —-> o

in the meantime, please enjoy a Xmas mix of 28 Days, provided to us by The Cobra.

Actually – an even better thing to do in the meantime is to go to Looptron’s gig on Weds for your fix of fine Electronica this week! Details here: www.looptron.com

We’ve just accepted a booking for a last minute gig at the hip Proud Galleries in Camden this Tuesday (20th May.) It’s a bit of a shot in the dark as we’ve no idea who else is on, or even when we’re on, but heck, we thought, we’ve not done a gig for a while, so let’s do it on 3 days notice!

We’ll update this note when we have some actual info to update it with…!

http://www.atproud.net/

Shape 37

Video? Stage-set? Space-craft?

We are not currently at liberty to divulge. (We will for money, though.)

Rue Cassette

Our intrepid bassist Des is on a mission to visit every road in the world that has the word ‘Cassette’ in it.

Last weekend he was in Paris:

It is here:

View Larger Map

Next weekend: St Petersburg.

(All contributions from our international network of spies also welcome)

EP Mastered

Yey, we finally got the 28 Days EP mastered yesterday at Ideal Mastering.

It’s taken a while to get there, even though we’ve had the tracks 28 Days & New Life finished for a while back as we were waiting on some remixes and for me to get back from France. But now it’s done and this is the track listing:

1. 28 Days (Original mix) – our original mix. Preview at our myspace page.
2. 28 Days (TheLaterMix) – by Neil Smith of Smith’s Occasional Podcast. A very atmospheric take on the track.
3. 28 Days (CEO remix) – our upfront remix, as downloadable from here.
4. 28 Days (Hecq remix) – a friend introduced us to the German producer Hecq and he’s done us a rather special minimal techno remix.
5. New Life – our live favourite of the Depeche Mode classic, polished up and put on record. Preview at our myspace page.

It’s always interesting giving our music to other people to see what take they have on the track. I just hand over all the parts; the vocals, drums, basslines, fx, etc, and let the remixer get on with it, no rules. And I don’t think you could have two more contrasting versions than Neil Smith & Hecq’s.

Neil has pretty much kept the vocals intact and rebuilt the entire song around those. Instead of the energy of the pulsing bass and drums of the original, he’s gone for a really effective sparse arrangement of pads and percussion, building up quite a dark yet seductive atmosphere. We like it very much.

In comparison, Hecq is a minimal techno artist and has gone to the other extreme. Over a solid techno groove there are hints and slices of vocal sounds – in most cases not even identifiably from the original. Within that there are some awesome bits of vocal processing, twisting and turning the sounds through phasing and ring modulation and god knows what else. All very clean though – no punky disregard for sound quality and distortion here.

The crazy thing is that this EP won’t officially be released until August as we need to work with our PR company to get it reviewers/journo’s/blogs, etc, and because magazines have a ridiculously long lead time we need to send it out now for August publications. At least by the time it does come out we’ll have a whole new batch of stuff to play people…

In fact, Lucy’s coming round today to record 3 new songs she’s written, so I think it’s going to be a productive summer! Stay tooned!

Unlocking the Groove

Book Review: Unlocking the Groove, Mark J Butler

(Amazon Link)

I was given this book last week for my birthday, and a very interesting read it is too.

It’s published by the University of Indiana, and is the PHD of the author, and does something rather unusual: it takes Techno seriously as a style of music and subjects it to the sort of academic analysis that traditional western art music, such as Mozart and Boulez is subjected to.

There a good deal of talk of ‘metrical dissonance’ and ‘hypermetre’ and ‘mutimeasure patterning’, and all sorts of other wild theorising that I’m sure Jeff Mills didn’t think about when writing the track ‘Jerical’ – which is one of the tracks subjected to detailed analysis.

And at first I was thinking that the whole idea of analysing dance music in this way was ridiculous. After all, it’s not made to be ‘art music’, it’s made for people to dance their arses off to. Especially as all the producers care about is: will this make people dance?

But as I read more, I thought: why on earth shouldn’t techno be studied – which is to say, to be taken seriously as a musical art form. It’s been around for 20 years, it’s reached a high level of sophistication and the best of it is as good as any music can be.

So, on that basis it’s actually very interesting to read about how (in the author’s opinion) techno maintains musical interest despite an apparently limited range of beats and textures. One of the most convincing sections discusses how an instrumental part of 1 bar length is often broken into asymmetrically lengthed phrases: either 3+3+2 quavers or 3+3+3+3+4 semi-quavers. His contention is that the first set of 3’s set up the expectation of a continual series of 3 notes, but is confounded on the last set which is either shorter than expected (the 2 quavers) or longer (the 4 semi-quavers). And of course the stronger emphasis on the first of each group is going to be syncopated against a 4 to the floor pulse. Both these effects keep the interest in what initially might seem a straightforward loop.

That famous riff of Cubik by 808 State uses the 3+3+3+3+4 pattern exactly:

So, yeah, all very interesting -but whether acceptance into ‘the establishment’ is necessarily good for something that was once defiantly underground music is another whole interesting discussion to have…

Cassette Electrik: 28 days (CEO Remix)

Download: 28 Days (CEO Remix)

Cassette Electrik: 28 Days (CEO Remix)

The first in our monthly free tracks is an upfront remix of 28 Days, the original of which is to be the lead track in our next EP (and can be heard over on our myspace page).

This version rebuilds that song from the ground up, taking a driving acid-esque bassline, crunchy beats and sprinkles selected vocals over the resulting groove. From these deceptively simple elements, the track builds up a fair head of steam by the end…

We insist that if you dig the track and have a friend or two who you think might also dig it – send them a link to this page!

We hope you enjoy the track – let us know what you think of it in the comments section below.

[Click here for previous free track: ‘Matuesz’]                [click here for next free track: ‘Leaving (Electro Remix)’]