Posted by: Matt
I don’t know about you all, but I find this both totally awesome and incredibly reassuring that getting old doesn’t have to mean getting boring.
Courtesy of CBS News, March 4th, 2010:
“DJ Ruth Flowers just wants the kids to have fun. Flowers is a 69-year-old Disk Jockey who spins at the most prestigious nightclubs in Paris”.
Check out her myspace and personal site for tons more videos and some samples of her forthcoming original single:
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)
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: 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.
Would You Like to Know Moar?
Hudson Mohawke myspace
Rustie myspace
Lukid myspace
