Yes the much-neglected Earz-mag podcast is back turning tricks every second Wednesday. We’ll be showcasing exciting new (and occasionally older) sounds from the worldwide music scene. Whatever’s been rocking the HQ here for the last couple of weeks will be posted. If you hear something good please support the flagging industry and cop them on MP3 or CD.
Update: I’m trying make this iTunes compatible, hold tight for now apple-geeks.
Disclaimer: Our podcasts are encoded at 112kbps quality, which is fine for listening but lower than you’ll get by purchasing the music from iTunes or AmazonMP3. If you want to send us music for use in the podcast go here.
The Outcrowd Collective are putting on “The Joyful Bewilderment“, an exhibition featuring over fifty international artists, or “image makers” as they describe them, at Rough Trade East in London this October. The first few days feature live music from the awesome Einstellung and the whole thing runs from 2nd to 27th of October. If I lived in London I would so be there! Should any London-based readers want to take photos / review this event for us just drop a line in the comments or contact page and I’ll sort it out.
Glasgow scuzz-troubadours Weenliz’ music has been described as “glitched up super fuzzy plinky plonks… as if rapeman had gone out and bought some stuff from maplins.” After checking their self-titled debut EP on independent blog/label Winning Sperm Party, I have to completely concur. Weenliz is eight tracks of sheer meat– a sporadic pile-up of raw distortion– composed with little-or-no attention to such musical conforms as structure, melody, harmony or rhythm. Rather it is the stuff of circuit-bending noiseniks and anarcho-geeks having a mindfuck with their “instruments”, which reputedly includes hammering guitars with drills and knives. Perhaps this release was the ensuing electric shock that killed the entire band, captured unintentionally as the studio-tape went on running? Standout track titles include Fur/Bramble and Chinese Barbie.
October’s The WIRE magazine (#296) has as the subject of its Invisible Jukebox feature, Makoto Kawabata, the Japanese guitarist responsible for Acid Mothers Temple, its associated label and numerous offshoot bands. I like in the last paragraph where he describes how some innocent misconceptions about Western Rock and Psychedelic music helped to shape his progressive style of guitar-playing and songwriting.
“We had so little information that we had to use our own imagination. I’d see photos of a stack of Marshall amps and imagine that they were all turned up to ten. I never realised that most of them were just spares. I imagined that they played at crushing volume and I’d try to do the same. Or I’d see some guitarist whirling their guitar around and imagine that they played their guitar like that through their whole set. When I picked up a guitar I thought that was how you had to play it. Our whole rock culture began from those kind of misconceptions. But those misconceptions and the fantasies they allowed to exist have almost all gone now. Kids today grow up on J-Pop and hardly listen to any Western music at all. In a good or bad way, they’ve lost that yearning for something other.”
In this month's Joining the Dots, Nat Illumine explores the super-charged beats of Breakbeat music and its numerous offshoots such as Breakbeat Hardcore, Acid Breaks and Big Beat; all the way from their beat-looping Bronx forefathers, to the raves and parties of the UK's 'summer of love' in the early 1990s. Nat Illumine is a London-based journalist and aspiring ethnomusicologist, she is the former editor of Undercover Magazine and DJ on Itch FM London. She is now representing her bad self, Size Doesn't Matter, Poets Lounge & Universal Zulu Nation UK- Ed. Photo: Breakbeat producers The Freestylers, courtesy of Trailer Media.
This second instalment in my attempt to map out the musicology of current popular genres will focus on that big, bouncin’, block-rockin’ thing they call Breakbeat, or as some like to call it, simply Breaks. Originating from early Rave into Hardcore before fragmenting into numerous styles, the dance music genre known as Breakbeat is huge in the UK and Australia, and is well appreciated the world over as an alternative to the sometimes dark and edgy sound of Drum & Bass, the overly psychedelic blips and beeps of Trance or the rigidity of Techno or House. Owing its life-force to a couple of creative NYC DJs, Breakbeat as we know it now is a distinctly British form of music, created in response to the raving needs of the early 90s.
But lets first answer that fundamental question, what exactly is a breakbeat?
Kool DJ Herc - Bronx DJ who pioneered the looping of disco and funk breakbeats
In this context of contemporary music the concept of a musical ‘break’ is the section of the record where everything else stops and a solo instrumentalist, often the drummer, lets forth a bar or two alone. This is considered the ‘break’ in the record before the rest of the song continues. These breaks date back as far as the 1800s: according to ethnomusicologist and sound curator David Toop, an old piano ditty called ‘Buck Dancer’s Lament’ actually incorporated a two-bar silence every 8 bars to allow some fancy footwork, perhaps of the Tap variety, by the performer, but the ‘break’ as we’ve come to know it was first utilised by a few key people.
The first of these is New York-based Disco pioneer Tim Moulton, who, back in the early 70s, added a drum segment to a tune he was remixing, as parts of the record were slightly different in pitch. This drum break was extremely popular with the Disco kids, but also found favour with kids on another side of town, namely the black kids in the Bronx. Kool DJ Herc, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, was a young soundman and DJ putting on parties in his hood. At some point circa 1973 he began mixing the breaks from two copies of the same tune back to back to elongate the break, as it sent the b-boys wild.
This created the ubiquitous ‘breakbeat’: creating a loop from a break so that it evolved into a beat. It is unlikely that Kool Herc and Tim Moulton were aware that their sonic experimentation would create the most popular modern genre in American history, i.e. Hip Hop, but thanks to computer editing software that allowed these loops to be digitally spliced together, this ‘looping’ became the basis for Hip Hop and Breakbeat alike.
Glasgow’s Oran Mor venue is bustling tonight, with a mixed breed of metal-hipsters turned out to witness mutli-polar Chicago riffsters Pelican on the UK leg of a European tour. Call it what you like: post-metal, stoner rock, they sure ‘aint easy to classify, and with no vocalist amongst the four-piece it’s a sound that doesn’t translate easily to a live setting. As such there’s little movement in the crowd as the band pound and writhe their way through a dazzling set of progressive metal, which is both calm and crushing in equal parts. Slipped between the fuzz of favourites like City of Echoes, March to the Sea, and the epic, The Woods, are two as-yet-untitled new pieces, (which, needless to say, are heavy as fuck) before the event is curtailed by an absurd 10 o’clock curfew. If there is a bad thing to say about Pelican’s live show it’s that it’s not hugely suited to the club scene, and their vast plains of noise might achieve maximum effect if applied to a similar outdoor setting.
Brooklynite Pursuit Grooves’ Wild Art Forestry LP is a mixed bag of askew grooves, spacey synths and squelchy basslines, fused over fifteen instrumental tracks of MPC-driven electro hip-hop. The syncopated beats and tempered bass of cuts like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Too Much Time’ might not be out of place in Dilla’s musical kitchen, but the depth and experimentation present throughout tell us this lady isn’t here simply to emulate. More tracks are sparse and ambient, reminiscent at times of a Japanese video-game score, as on ‘I Can C Y’ and ‘Meets the Eye’. The unlikely nu-soul of closing track ‘Pressure’ is the surprise hit of the album. An emotive piano motif is diced and re-created over a crushing groove, on which Pursuit unleashes a startling vocal dexterity, delivering sweet moaning melodies and conscious rapped poetry. Genuinely gifted female producers are rare in hip-hop, but Pursuit Grooves might be about to change that. Fans of Flying Lotus and Mike Slott will be instantly converted.
The last time we saw Roots “Rodney Smith” Manuva he was on a lyrical cliff edge, questioning his sanity and lingering on topics of depression, excess and artistic burnout. That was on 2006’s Awfully Deep, and now Mr. Manuva is back with his fourth full-length on London’s Big Dada label, to make things right.
Slime and Reason is immediately lighter than its predecessor, a point signaled by the off-dancehall riddim of bouncy opener Again and Again, where he rhymes: “A lot of people don’t know bout Smith; how I came the scene, and came to uplift.” The album continues with Smith as ever articulating his wry English sense of humour and borderline-genius turn of phrase, over a spicy mix of dub infused beats that range from dancehall (Do Nah Bodda Mi), reggae (Well Alright) and garage (lead single Buff Nuff).
Standouts include Let the Sprit, an infectious and uplifting slice of synth led electro-hop that just screams “second single!”, and Well Alright, which sees Manuva get grizzly about his past career, including “fickle DJs”, journalists and talentless rappers, over a tense piano riddim. The album returns to territory similar to Awfully Deep on It’s Me Oh Lord, with its apocalyptic feel and scuzzy ascending bassline, and 2 Much 2 Soon with its stabbing strings and angsty-lyrics: “Now bourgeois hippies wanna fight my flow; I wish that I was a trustafarian, I wouldn’t have to hustle and I wouldn’t have to swear at them; I came from this, I’ve got to do better; My pen is my sword, my pen is my beretta;“.
Slime & Reason is yet another solid addition to the Roots Manuva catalogue, which bolsters his claim to both column-inches and street-level credibility. Diverse, relevant and fun to get down with. Bump it at home, in the club or on the streets.
The winners of our competition with Californian streetwear brand Kings Only have been announced– Kings Only t-shirts will be winging their way to eliel gonzalez, Robb Perez, Blanca and Gordo. Thanks to all who entered– keep your ears peeled for more giveaways coming up.
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Glasgow scuzz-troubadours Weenliz’ music has been described as “glitched up super fuzzy plinky plonks… as if rapeman had gone out and bought some stuff from maplins.” After checking their self-titled debut EP on independent blog/label Winning Sperm Party, I have to completely concur. Weenliz is eight tracks of sheer meat– a sporadic pile-up of raw distortion– composed with little-or-no attention to such musical conforms as structure, melody, harmony or rhythm. Rather it is the stuff of circuit-bending noiseniks and anarcho-geeks having a mindfuck with their “instruments”, which reputedly includes hammering guitars with drills and knives. Perhaps this release was the ensuing electric shock that killed the entire band, captured unintentionally as the studio-tape went on running? Standout track titles include Fur/Bramble and Chinese Barbie.
Artist: Roots Manuva
The winners of 
