What up my Beatery faithful, I’ve got a very special set to share with ya’ll today! This mix has been in the works for at least six years, ever since I first started that “World House” folder on my hard drive back in 2006. I’ve always been fascinated with different cultures, different languages, and as I love music with all my soul, I’ve also always been particularly fascinated with all the different instruments, grooves, rhythms, dances and melodies that make each culture unique.
As you may or may not know, I’m starting this series of happy hour parties and one of them has a World House theme! Finally the perfect excuse to get this pile of global grooves off my hard drive and into your ears. I don’t think its any surprise this set is particularly influenced by Latin and Brazilian sounds from my year plus in South America.
Happy 11/11/11! Today instead of bringing you a Beatery Podcast I’m actually being featured on someone ELSE’S internet radio show. Good friend and fellow Weekend Warmup resident Natheus has been banging out the “Electrus Podcast” for a while now to a rather large audience, so I jumped at the chance share an episode with him.
The format is 30 minutes him, 30 minutes me, which just happened to perfectly fit the second part of my KZSU set form Halloween day: the spooky house! I called my part “Dark Rooms”, for reasons that will be obvious when you listen. Eventually I’ll post the mix here, but until then go on over and check it out! Natheus has banging 30 minute house set to kick it off to boot:
Not to be outdone by Cor and Flicker’s recent Electro Swing posts, I’d like to bring my own bouncy house sub-genre to this party: Carnival House!
Like many EDM sub-genres it’s a bit hard to describe what makes a House track Carnival, but you definitely know it when you hear it. Does it call up images of carnival rides whirling around, lights blazing against the darkened sky? Probably Carnival House. Does it make you think of clowns on acid dancing?? Definitely Carnival House.
In reality a lot of the tracks have Balkan, Latin, and Swing influences, rely heavily on the up beat and often feature horns of some kind… but I just like to think of them as cotton candy and Ferris Wheel influenced. Check it:
A: A simultaneously visceral and cerebral experience induced only by the seductive, deep, groove heavy, underground techno inspired music that you hear the kids listening to .. - Common side effects include: unrelenting head bobbing giving way to complete surrender to physical movement commonly referred to as ‘dancing’.
American producers Kaveh Soroush & Charles Gudagafva (yeah I can’t pronounce them either, they needed a name change even more than this guy did) gave that little definition of their tag-team group that goes a long way in describing what Pleasurekraft is: interesting, catchy, well produced tech house. They go on to explain in another interview for House Music Essentials:
We both feel that when you go to a club and you hear 3-5 hours of tech house or housey techno – whatever you want to call it – you walk out of a club and MIGHT be able to sing back 5 tracks (assuming you are sober enough). And to us that isn’t what we wanted to do. We wanted to make instantly recognizable tracks. And because we have such diverse musical influences – we wanted to make tech house that was fun and approachable while still maintaining artistic merit and not being too commercial.
Hells yeah! My thoughts exactly. Let’s see what they got:
Introducing Pleasurekraft
In late 2009 we were treated with the “Kaveh Soroush & Charles Gudagafva Present: Pleasurekraft” EP, the kind of landmark debut most EDM artists dream about. Along with the first track on my mix “Love Lost” the EP features this gem:
In a flurry of work in 2010 Pleasurekraft reached #1 on the Beatport charts with “Tarantula”, realized their dark proggy manifest destiny by doing a track with Green Velvet, and solidified their progressive carnival house sound. I was thiiiiiis close to throwing them in SYTYCB 2010, if their “Present: Pleasurekraft” EP woulda been in 2010 I would have.
You can hear this track in the mix on my podcast “A Winter Chill”, but to fully appreciate its genius I really think you must listen to it next to the original. “R.Y.A.N.L” is nice little electro house banger from long time EDM producer Sander Kleinenberg. Fit for the clubs but not necessarily anything to write home about. The Pleasurekraft remix though, now that is inspired. The original is hardly recognizable, but still present.
Great stuff right? They don’t even have a Wikipedia page yet but I’m expecting more inspired, unique, catchy tech house bangers from this duo who named themselves after Dexter’s boat: “Pleasure Craft”.
PS - If any of you producers out there are wondering what they use to tweak out their voice samples, it’s Steinberg Voicemachine, finally available on Mac!
This week we’ve got a guest mix from multitalented SF local Reza Ebrahimi, better known to the musical world as DIRTYHERTZ. In addition to his crazy rad production and engineering skills, he’s also a killer DJ, so we’re stoked to have a mix from him!. Here’s what he has to say:
This mix is more on my POP side. I love vocals as long as it doesn’t sound cheesy. It brings the human element into the track and it communicates in a different way since its a language we all speak and undrestand.
The selection here are tracks that I have been playing for the last few years and don’t seem to be getting tiered of them. I would like to share many more with you but POP2 on its way.
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