TOTW: Mr Scruff_DJ Sets

Posted on September 11, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

I have cheated this week and not picked a single track for the week instead going for a full DJ Set.

A few weeks ago I went to soundwave Festival in Croatia, a small festival focused around dance music in a lovely holiday atmosphere. The highlight was the saturday evening DJ set My Mr.Scruff.

DJ as a terminology has broadened over the past ten years as the rise of the Home/Bedroom Producer has become more prevalent. Modern advancements in CDJ technology and MIDI control of DJ software have enabled artists to take their work from the home computer/laptop to a club with ease and have enough control over said music to provide a live feel to pre-recorded tracks.

This widening of the terminology has had one negative value in that its watered down the original meaning of the term DJ. Club goers will now go to see an artist who will DJ their own music on a large club sound system. Crowds have come to the event knowing full well what will be on that artists set list and will feel cheated if they don’t play their hit songs in the same way that we would if going to see a more traditional live musician/band. This is completely different from the original art form of DJ performance where a DJ would bring a collection of music and play to the crowd. Taking the Audience through a Journey of a genre, adjusting the tempo and styles throughout the night to match the mood of the dance floor with a creative vision and curation of music that isn’t just their own.

When it comes to these types of DJ I would put Mr. Scruff in the highest echelons of the medium. Throughout his 5 hour set with the help of Alexander Nut he played a collection of genre that not only blended perfectly together but was also perfectly in sync with the audience. Although I hadn’t heard many of the cuts that he dug out of his crate of vinyl every track seemed to fit perfectly into place in this one context of that evening. He also adjusted his set to give room for other contributors to do their thing.

This amount of skill is rare today. It comes from years of preparation and being immersed in music with a particular ear for what will sound good in a club scenario. It comes from crate digging and finding the rare tracks that will work and then knowing your collection so well that you can make connections between them whilst playing them live. With Mr. Scuff you feel that he not only knows what he’s going to play next, but what he will play for the next 30 minutes whilst at any point having different options to change to suit the mood of the crowd. That is a rare thing indeed and something that needs to be seen live to be truly appreciated.

Below you will find a link to his soundcloud page which he puts up many of his Live DJ sets including the full sent from Soundwave 2015 and they’re great to listen to. But they don’t do justice to being at his shows, something I would highly recommend to any one who gets a chance to:

SoundCloud Page:

TOTW: Yusef Lateef_ Love Theme From The Robe

Posted on September 4, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

I’ve been listening to quite a bit of jazz recently and got into Yusef Lateef due to his work being sampled by several HipHop Artists. On the album Eastern Sounds we get some lovely jazz renditions of music from other genre and film soundtrack.

The blend of piano, drums, flute and Double Bass manage to complement each other perfectly creating a track that’s musically complex without loosing its smooth sound:

TOTW: Less Than Jake_Shugar In Your Gas Tank

Posted on August 28, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

Listening back to Less Than Jake for me is like stepping back in time to my early teenage years and i have been enjoying it allot recently. Although at the time Loosing Streak didn’t really hit home (being packaged in with their more well-known Hello Rockview In the UK) It now stands out as the album that seems to exemplify Less than Jake at their greatest point. Ska-Punk in its purest thrashy form before the influences of more modern punk sunk its nails into their sound.

Were greeted with fast paced tracks that manage to provide raw anarchic engergy which is beautifully acombanied with great moldys from the sax/trombone section.

Sugar In Your Gass Tank manages to be a highlight for me. It provides a great concentrated example of Less Than Jake at their creative peak. As an arrangment the track goes through several changes. It manages to have an ebb and flow building to the gutiars which then crash down to simpler arangments and building back up multiple times throughlout the tracks duration. It’s the perfect starting point to this era of the band and a great example of Ska-Punk In its Heyday.

Oneohtrix Point Never Magnetic Rose At Edinburgh Fringe

Posted on August 24, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to see a live performance by Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I first heard OPN through his album replica and since then I have gone back and listened to most of his work. The main reason I’m so intrigued by his music is I find it very hard to work out where he gets his influences. It seems to come out of experiences and interests that are so foreign to me I struggle to comprehend how they are created.

Watching him perform Magnetic Rose and Bullet Hell Abstraction IV gave me a bit more of an understanding of his thought process. Over 90 minutes I was treated to some beautiful lush soundscapes that encapsulated the accompanying video in thought provoking and haunting ways. This was especially the case for Magnetic Rose where Daniel Lopatin creates an alternate soundtrack to the anime of the same name by director Koji Morimoto.

This Soundtrack mixed with some of the films own audio managed to portray a vision that was somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. Moments of Beauty and Horror were blended together in a way that both shocked and comforted the system. It was a staggering barrage on the senses and has left my mind with even more questions to process about his work than I had before this weekend.

The Music of OPN may be a puzzle I will never solve but I will enjoy attempting to for as long as he makes it.

TOTW: Slowdive_ Crazy For You

Posted on August 21, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

Over the past few months I have been catching up on the Band Slowdive, after the fantastic Pitchfork documentary on their album Souvlaki

The Shoegaze genre has a lot of influence on modern music, but through listening to Slowdive I notice just how much this band influenced some of my favourite artists today.

They have a more dreamy, woozy feel that we associate with the Dream Pop and Chillwave genres but instead of just being the seeds of this music you notice how the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. In fact releasing one of their albums today with modern mix and mastering equipment and Slowdive would sit alongside the Beach Houses and Best Coasts of this world.

Crazy For You is drenched in reverb and the guitar lines are covered in effects. It all merges into this beautiful pool of harmony. It could have come out yesterday and it would sound current. The fact it came out 20 years ago indicates how effective this type of sound can be when done well.

TOTW: Clark_ Winter Linn

Posted on August 14, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

I have been listening to the eponymous album by Clark allot more than I originally thought I would on first listen. With its blend of floor filling dance with complex and creative sound design Clark manages to cover all bases and Winter Linn is a perfect example and one of my favourites.

This track gets the album running after an intro that feels like the album stretching its muscles. Large synth lines with big reverbs and heavy side chain compression is the name of the game on this piece and it sounds epic. Then somehow at the 45 second mark you get hit over the head with a synth line that is close to filtered noise and it just keeps getting bigger from there.

This is Chris Clarks seventh album and you can tell as the experience shines through, If you want to hear some top shelf modern dance music listen to this and then do yourself a favour and pick up the album:

TOTW: The Field_ Is This Power

Posted on August 7, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

Loops by definition are repetitive. Short samples of audio playing over and over again with little change. They can be annoying at their worst but when done well can have an almost hypnotic effect on you. It’s this strange polarity that has fascinated many musicians about loops since we have been able to create them.

The Field is one such musician and has focused heavily on loops throughout his career but most prominently on the album Looping State of Mind which opens with my track of the week.

Is This Power has a detuning synth line that repeats every 4 bars throughout the majority of the song and yet with time it just blends into the background allowing you to focus on the driving drums and bass line that arrive around the 1 minute mark.

It’s this driving force that keeps me hooked throughout the tracks nearly 9 minutes and by being very repetitive you are more open to noticing the subtle changes going on throughout the track:

TOTW: Beach House_Sparks

Posted on July 31, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

Bloom by Beach House Was a fantastic album from 2012 and I have been looking forward to what Beach House would do next. Sparks seems to be the beginning of what’s to come.

Sparks is the first track announced from their upcoming album Depression Cherry, it starts with a looping vocal sample that provides a bed for the iconic Beach House sound of Female Vocals, Organ and Guitar.

TOTW: Sun Kil Moon_Birds of Films

Posted on July 24, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

This week I got to see Sun Kil Moon live at the RNCM in Manchester. Mark Kozeleck may get more press now for his outspoken attitude then his music but what can’t be denied is his talents as a lyricist and persona onstage. He oozed a confidence that only comes from years of live performance and over 2 hours took the audience through a history of his work in ways that were fresh and captivating. Keeping me on edge with a constant element of uncertainty and anarchism.

His previous album Benji was my album of the year and I have waxed lyrical about it on this blog before. With his newest album Universal Themes, Mark Kozeleck has taken his unique lyrical style of stripping away metaphor and simile from his songs and applied it to modern, almost immediate experiences. This Diary like style is applied across all elements of the album from its composition to its arrangement. It is hit and miss but when it does hit it packs a punch of brutal honesty that manages to summarise the experience of human existence unparalleled in any music I have heard before.

When I first heard Birds of films I was shocked by one verse. The song tracks his experience on the set of a film in switzerland and manges to cover both the mundane and the remarkable. But when he talks about his experiences of taking a woman out to a bar one evening, and flirting with the idea of cheating on his girlfriend before deciding against it. I felt like I was intruding on something too personal to be out there for public consumption.

Yet It’s these moments in all his work that show a mirror up to our existence. They show the fragility of our emotions and the randomness of our experiences. This isn’t an exaggeration of what it is to be a human like most music, It’s the truth and I find that captivating.

The fact that I can write so much about Mark Kozeleck’s work is a clear indication of what I think about him. He’s a true artist, someone who has found their own niche in folk and rock music, and over his career has developed it in new and varied directions. He’s flawed and has his weaknesses that may come across badly in some articles about him but these are the imperfections of being human. They are part of who he is and how he expresses himself and when he does that through music it can lead to the most personal musical experiences I have ever heard:

TOTW: Soil & “Pimp” Sessions_ Spartacus Love Theme

Posted on July 17, 2015 by ArtistConfettiTsunami

I watched Soil & “Pimp” Sessions last week at Manchester venue Band on the Wall. Their energetic performances and exiting take on Jazz has always made me a big fan and I wasn’t disappointed.

The night was wrapped up with their cover of the Love theme from Spartacus which was originally popularised for jazz on Yusef Lateefs album Eastern Sounds and used as a sample on the Nujabes song The Final View found on his album Metaphorical Music.

There’s something fundamentally fantastic about the melody of this piece, its simple yet manages to portray so much, being both joyous and mournful at the same time. Soil & “Pimp” Sessions have their own take on it diverging from the original source material in the same creative way that they became famous for when they covered wheel within a wheel years ago.

ConfettiTsunami

Music and blog from musician and composer ConfettiTsunami.

Category Archives: Blog