Posted by: Matt

Several readers of my last post about the Wonky side of Dubstep expressed that they’d been expecting the tunes to be a little more…..wonky. The Rustie remix was probably the most off-kilter, and while the others did have a lot of the correct elements in (or out of) place, I did go back and listen and have to agree. I definitely pulled some punches in favor of tracks that I personally felt would be more palatable. That may make for a more pleasant listening experience, but it does a disservice to the educational value of this blog.

To correct that, this is my originally-unplanned follow-up. If the last batch of tracks were a few bumps in, these are head first down the hole, and far better examples of how the style got its name. It is worth noting however that while the genre tag is popular with music writers, it is less so amongst its actual practitioners:

“No one does ketamine right?,” [Zomby] asserted in a MySpace bulletin and blog post. “I thought it died in the late Eighties after that shitty Madonna tour ended…

Though I have seen a crusty white dude with dreadlocks rolling around in his own puke ‘going off on K’ in Brixton not long back,” he continues. “Dunno how inspirational an event for an artist that is however.” - Zomby (interview, The Quietus)

Untold - Stop What You’re Doing (James Blake remix)

Hudson Mohawke - ZOo00OOm

Mark Pritchard & Om’Mas Keith - Wind it Up

Starkey - OK Luv (Eprom remix)

If this kind of thing floats your boat, there is an excellent mixtape full of wonky dubstep and hip-hop goodness over at one of my favorite electronica blogs, Curb Crawlers by a Toronto DJ named Ultragamma. Great stuff. Check it out.

Posted by: Cor

The wonderful thing about finally being done with So You Think You Can Bump entries is that I can once again dish up some tracks to you wonderful readers without feeling like I have to write a Behind the Music episode to accompany them. I can return to the simple posts I love best; a few short impressions of the artist, then straight to the music. Oh, and this unrelated rambling I’m doing right now. Can’t leave that out.

So anyhow, the duo Felguk, comprised of Brazilian producers FELipe Lozinsky and GU(K)stavo Rozenthal*, has been catching my ear more and more recently. I can’t say their sound is exactly forging new trails, it’s pretty straightforward no-frills electrohouse, but they are remarkably solid. It’s even fair to say I like these tracks despite the fact that they bring almost nothing new to the table. It’s just fun, well-produced house music, and now that several songs of theirs have made it into my virtual record crate, it’s time to give Felguk their due propers. Have a taste…

All Night Long

Keep Keeping

Loopi Groopi

PLAY ALL

* Boy, they really flexed their creative muscles with that name, didn’t they? Why did we spend all that time thinking up a name like ‘The Beatery’ when we could just use a combination of our names? MaJaCo? CoMaJa? JaCoMa?  Hmmm… okay, I think I see why.

Posted by: Jay

Were doing this little contest here at TheBeatery counting down the top producers of the decade so I decide to do a podcast mixing them all together!  Enjoy and dont forget to come to the site and vote for you favs.  Merry Christmas!

Posted by: Jay

Super-awesome cover art by my new Bolivian gf Paola Lambertin (who I think will be personally offended if Daft Punk doesnt win this).

So I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not but we’re doing this little contest here at The Beatery trying to find the best producers of electronic dance music of the 2000s. Somewhere along the way (I think it was at Tiesto of all people…) it dawned on me that: fuck, I should really do a podcast with these Dons of Dance, these Behemoths of Beats, these Saints of Synths* all mixed together!

*Thank you, thank you, I’m here all night.

So I came up with some quick rules for this “So You Think You Can Bump” podcast:

1. Every contestant would get one, and only one song.
2. I would not be trying to include everyone’s “biggest” or “most memorable” or “definitive” track. Way too hard to put together anything with flow, and quite frankly, I’m sick to death of most of those*
3. I would not use a track (or the same mix of a track) that was ever on any of our sets. These guys are so prolific let’s hear some new stuff**
4. Any mix, re-mix, cover or mashup was fair game as long as the SYTYCB artist was somehow associated

* This is not to say I COULDN’T use one of these, it just wasn’t the priority.

** Like every good set of rules one of them needs to get broken, and for me it was number three. I used one track that appears elsewhere in a mix on this site. Can you catch it? It’s pretty obvious…

So with these rules in hand and 15 holes to fill I felt like the manager of and All Star game. Who do I start? When do I use the heavy hitters? With so many of these guys being multi-dynamic producers, what style should I have them represent? With so many different styles how do I get them to gel together?

Well, the need for flow made most of these decisions pretty easy. And now that the dust has settled I have to say I’m pretty excited about this mix! It’s not often that you have an excuse to only use the best producers in you set, and wow, what a result.

I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I did making it! It’ll be a nice way to look back at an incredible period of dance music:

DJ Jay – “Barons Of Bump”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by: Matt

As far as I understand it, ‘Wonky’ is a term coined by someone but adopted by the UK music press to describe a recent offshoot of dubstep which they felt aurally approximated one’s feeling while high on Ketamine - separate, distinct parts loosely associated into a stumbling, hallucinatory whole. Whether or not the music has any direction relation to the drug comes down to pure speculation, but the parallels are pretty clear, as you can hear from the tracks below.

Initially this style completely rubbed me the wrong way. I’d come to understand electronic music production as a very precise, controlled process where loose elements are indicators of unprofessionalism. Yet here we have entire tracks that are barely quantized, and somehow it not only works, it works well.

This music tends to hold up well to repeated listens due to its unpredictable nature. The beats and notes never land quite in the same place twice, and trying to keep up with it is pretty stimulating as a result. Which, of course, is counter-intuitive for a style so closely linked to anesthesia.

Hudson Mohawke - Fuse

Fool - Drama (Rustie remix)

Lukid - Time Doing So Mean

Would You Like to Know Moar?
Hudson Mohawke myspace
Rustie myspace
Lukid myspace