Tonight!
Posted by: Kid Kameleon in Uncategorized, tags: 103Harriet, announcements, gigs, MaryAnneHobbs
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29
01
2009
Tonight!Posted by: Kid Kameleon in Uncategorized, tags: 103Harriet, announcements, gigs, MaryAnneHobbs
I’m currently messing about with themes, widgets, and plugins. Like Doctor Who metamophosing (is that a word?) this blog my change chameleon-like for a couple days, and look less than stellar. “Do it live” as Tones might say. In the meantime, please enjoy this, if you can: UPDATE: WTF?!?!?!? You might be saying… Yup, things are changing round these parts. Kidkameleon.com is getting reborn, sort of … still be a blog, but hopefully a more active one. The change is prompted by a lot of things, but the official (and very real reason) is that I’m sick of Blogger for two major reasons - 1) They suck. 2) They suck. Technically. With the final straw being that despite all my efforts, I may have lost my archive of posts. Or rather, I have the XML file but damned if I’m goint to go back through and copy/paste and recreate the whole thing post for post. There’s still some possibility that it might be salvage-ableĀ … I’ll try some stuff tomorrow to get it to work (I’ll definitely find a way to get some of the mix posts back up)… but I went into the WP-install process fully prepared to lose everything and really being OK with that. And it seems to have come to pass. Right now though, despite everything, I’m feeling pretty happy, am safely installed at my new digs, have my kitty and my record collection with me, and am blasting Stacy’s Mom at 3:30AM. So things could be worse. I leave you with this thought, and I’ll spruce up the site over the weekend.
UPDATE – Well I’ll be danged. A little perseverance seems to have paid off. See below for the last 5 years. I’ll tinker with the photos/sounds/links tomorrow. gnight!
You only get to do this once every couple years. Don’t miss it. And if you don’t live in SF, catch ‘em in LA, SEA, PDX, CHI, MTL, NYC, and BOS.
This blog will soon be melted down and recast as a WordPress Blog. It’ll be my final attempt to kick-start it again as a more 2.0-type venture, complete with content. We’ll see how we go this time, but look for that some time in the next month. Until then, check it!!!!!!
Ha! You like that!
Flying Lotus makes some of the best music on earth right now. It’s like a soul soldier slipped on a coat of circuits and then played hide and seek with all five of your senses at once. 1983 laid out the blueprint, the Reset EP upped the anti, and I’m here to tell you that “Los Angeles”, coming in June from Warp Records, will be on so many year end lists it’ll seem like it came outta 7 dimensions all at once. We’re proud to have him back to SF for the first time in more than a year. Check him out this Saturday at Surya Dub. All the Tea Leaf Dancers will be there.
The world is crazy. The world of law and technology is especially crazy at the moment. What with the RIAA having pressured lawmakers into including absurd provisions in bills that link financial aid to a university’s willingness to police copyright. (link here and here – this is a must read thanks to ripley!) Or the fact that you can effectively get out of it by going to Harvard? Or the fact that you can pay your ridiculous $3000 extortio- I mean pre-legal settlement online (in what has to be one of the crappiest designed sites ever) WITH A CREDIT CARD? Makes you want to go out there and press tofu with your law books, eh?
I was fortunate to musically organize and play at a totally awesome party last night for the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s 17th birthday. It was at the “venerable” 111 Minna and the place was packed. (300-400 people I’d guess? Don’t really know). 6 artists that all were adventurous but kept in mind the crowd and the early hour. But the most impressive thing? 5 technology systems on a pretty crappy 2 channel / 4 input mixer…. Ableton, Torq, IDJ2, Serato and vinyl. All with about 30 seconds of silence once over 5.5 hours. w00t! Thanks to Ripley, Qubitsu, Jimmy Tones, and most especially our special guests Adrian and Mysterious D of Bootie! Favorite pictures below. Been meaning to do a “best of” for January, a “currently feeling” as I work on my Baltimore Club mix (although I have to admit that I’m once again revisiting The Coral Sea since I’m in a thoughtful mood… when’s the next album coming doods?) I just keep finding good stuff, or luckily people just keep passing it along, and since I don’t do a radio show I might as well write about it. So 16 things I’m feeling, with links where I can get them. * DJ C and Zulu – Dear John * Kuma – Dawn Stepped Outside / Dawn Stepped Outside (HORSEPOWER REMIX) / Lost in Translation (Immerse 006) * Flying Lotus - Golden Diva *Ghislain Poirier and Zulu – Go Balistic *Dubmood – Everything! Dubmood is a Swede living in France, and has a blog here. He’s got some tremendous art, and has recently collected a bunch of his best tunes from the last 4 years. It’s all really rich stuff, full of crazy swooping synths and lots of noodling that if you ever spent time working your way through Mega Man or 1000 other games from that era will sound totally familiar to you. But then he musically quotes other stuff while he’s doing it, almost as though it’s an after thought. I pulled a little clip from “Razor Comeback” to demonstrate. It’s like, why did 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” show up there? The answer is probably “because it could”. Anyway, check him out, he’s one of the most accomplished chip tunes artists I’ve heard, up there with Bit Shifter for meeting other music styles head on and taking the chiptune aesthetic to ‘em, right in the face! *Secret Agent Gel w/ Warrior Queen – Body *Ikonika – Please / Simulacrum (Hyperdub 008) *Pacheko & Cardopusher – Harp Shaped Box *Cloaks – Rust on Metal / Against *Tittsworth – Thunderstruck Remix *Leaglize It (East Coast and West Coast Versions) *MachineDrum feat. Yo Majesty – Oohee *German Wasteman – Short Dick Man Rmx and Neva Eva Rmx *Fracture – Phone Call DJ Amazing Clay – Baile Funk Masters #4 *Digital Woods – Mogadishu series ————-
Top 10/End of Year lists are weird. That’s all there is to it. As I now spend most of my non-music life thinking about how information is organized, these lists seem more and more arbitrary. Why January 1st? (Although Billboard and such use different dates) Why a ranked list? (or not) Why 10? (or not) Etc. And increasingly, what are you ranking? An album? A single? An EP? A Mix? A remix? If it’s an album, what’s an album? Did it have to come out in physical form? Did the tracks have to be recorded this year? What about remix albums? What about an unauthorized remix album with a whole bunch of producers remixing tracks by artists they’ve never even met, perhaps released by someone else they’ve never met, possibly recorded before this year? These questions aren’t new, they’re as old as music itself, questions of organization, ownership, categorization, etc. But the internet has certainly both broadened the ways in which these questions come up and increased the number of people bringing them up. And anyone who tries to take a broad overview of music, ESPECIALLY dance music, in 2007 may increasingly come up short when trying to wrestle with them. AND YET! We humans have NO problem with creating categories, even in the face of monumental change. That’s because we’re so darn good at adapting to circumstances, especially when we care deeply about the subject matter we’re trying to categorize. Take mixes for example. We didn’t have the concept of a mix 40 years ago. Yes, there was the concept of compilation, of putting like musical objects in proximity, and law and common sense even recognizes the creative process involved in doing that compiling. But think of all the things that a DJ mix represents today, things that we DJs especially still argue about endlessly. Is a mix merely selection? Is it exclusivity of the tracks to the DJ, or how well the mix moves (or theoretically MIGHT move) the crowd? Is it how the beats are fit together (and if so does it matter if each track is seemlessly mixed over a long period of time or if we just crash from one song to another)? Is a mix purely a recreation, frozen in time, of what a DJ could do live? Or does it fundamentally go beyond that? Or does it even do both at the same time? Does it matter if you make the whole thing at once? Or weave it together in multiple takes? What if you just EQ it? … And on and on. Hopefully it’s clear that I think it can be all these things and more, possibly at the same time. The same applies outwards to remixes, samples, original tracks, singles, web releases, albums, ad infinitum. And so I’ve taken a page from Eleanor Rosch and selected “Natural” categories for my top sounds of the year. I tried not to push it too much and came up with 8 categories, and even then intra-category comparison reveals comparison of M.I.A. to Elliot Smith, which just seems weird. But there you go, Billboard would say both those albums came out “This Year”, even though Smith has been dead for 4 years. As you read this, some things might seem out of place, but there’s a method to the madness. So without further ado: KID KAMELEON’S 72 MUSICAL THINGS THAT ARE IN SOME WAY CONNECTED TO 2007 Albums and Compilations
Honorable Mention Notes: I thought I wasn’t going to come up with too many albums for this year, but it seems otherwise. Dev79 and Starkey’s Street Bass Anthems are solid gold, they exemplify what a remix album AND what a web release should be. And they did it TWICE in 6 months! Lost Tracks: Best album to chill to in a long time. Radiohead: Hey, technology press, it’s a good freakin’ album!!!! M.I.A.: Dope and diverse – she got weirder, not safer, and that’s to be applauded. Goodbye: Epic!!! Dark moments in there too, which are great in Schnauss’s hands. Underwater Dancehall: Pinch is the best overall dubstep producer out there. Thom Yorke Remix LP (3 EPs together makes an LP in my book): Why is no one talking about this, this is a touchstone collection of artists remixing. Go check it out! EPs and Singles
Honorable Mention Notes: The Bug!: He just gets better and better, and Kode 9, Warrior Queen, Flow Dan, and a cast of others make the two singles/EPs stellar. Emynd & Bo Bliz / Dave Nada: Two awesome new faces (new to me that is), both putting out EPs with 100% grade A material. Benga/Coki/DZ/2562: The best full dubstep releases of the year outside of Pinch and Hyperdub, and I think that’s because all of them are concentrating on the uptempo stuff (the half tempo tunes are wearing thin on me, although there are still some great ones out there). Fly Lo: In a way it’s very reminiscent of stuff from a decade ago, but radically updated. Seriously captivating. Aaron/El Carnicero/DTL/Ghislain: Cheers to all of them for pushing the hard hard end of dance music while still making it fun. Illyah & Ltd. Candy: Beguiling beautifulness from Jahtari … put out more stuff! Miscellaneous
Notes: Whole mishmash here. Alchemyst and Saviour did two of the best unreleased dubstep tracks ever. Low Bee, Diplo, Tittsworth, Zebo and whoever DJ Dub is all pushed Bmore in new directions. R. Kelly is a loon (and not worth album of the year AT ALL but “Real Talk” is a priceless moment), Last Zulu’s collab needs to see the light of day, San Quinn kept the hyphy fire burning, and Tinhead gave me two of the best mashups ever executed. And the Passions track, more than any other, turned me on to the possibility of whatever genre it is that it’s in, which I don’t think I would have listened to before this year. Awesome work, Ben! Mixes
Notes: Putting N-Ron in is a bit unfair because as far as I know I’m one of the only people to have heard it, but a lot of his tracks are around and I’m sure this will gain a lot of attention when it gets its full release in a bit. Firehouse introduced me to the wonders of dancehall from the 80s and I listened to it all summer. Kode 9′s mix for Sonar came as close as I got to recreating his set with Spaceape at Mutek, my favorite set of the year. Bo’s long awaited and brilliant Confusion of Tongues flipped the script on world music, and Ripley killed it as usual with her mix for Spannered. Artists
Bird Peterson: The dude is golden. I hadn’t really heard his stuff till about 3 months ago, and then every single remix or original track was golden. He remixes folks no one else would dare to and does them all one better. Club tunes that sound good on headphones. If there were any justice this stuff would be on commercial radio and millions of people would be listening to it. Clouds: My favorite Finish dubstep outfit. As far as I know they only have a single track out, but the 8 or 10 tracks that I’ve heard from them are all amazing. Totally rides the line between 1/2 tempo and full tempo, and they seem totally aware of the endless possibilities of grounding dubstep in dub and roots music while taking it forward with new ideas. They could be a major force in 08. Rustie: Again, only a few releases to his name (3 EPs I think), but one of them landed near the top of Boomkat’s favorites, and for good reason. When I first heard Rustie last year I thought it was like techno-tweaked, twinkling dubstep. But then very quickly it was super glitched out party music a la Passions. And then in no time he was a hip-hop producer in the loping style of Sa-Ra or Flying Lotus or even Dabrye, but with way more layers of sound. Truth is, whatever it is it’s almost universally good, and he is so prolific it’s almost unbelievable. Starkey: To me, Starkey is Producer of the Year. Like Rustie and Bird he just has a slew of stuff that keeps coming, and it runs from the super-heavy, almost breakcore take on instrumental hip-hop, to party hip-hop jams, to his MOVES!!! stuff, the more club based tracks. On top of that, he and Dev79 put out the two Street Bass Anthems volumes, showing their impeccable tastes and curatorial gusto, and then he does all sorts of other stuff that I only vaguely know about (engineering, electronic composition, artwork)… He’s dance music’s renaissance man, and watching his beats flourish over the last 18 months has be an awesome ride. Plus to top all of it off, he remixed Real Talk on request from yours truly, so you can’t front on that! Labels Argon: Argon had such an impressive output this year. Great original tracks from Matty G, Babylon System (“Dancin Shoes” kills me every time) and Skynet, and four of the best tracks of the year, all remixes, were Argon’s as well (Pinch’s remix of “Swamp”, Tes La Rok’s remix of “Round the Way Girls”, Loefah’s remix of “50,000 Watts”, and Caspa’s Remix of “West Coast Rocks”). Reppin’ the bay area like no others. All this from the mind of the man who made one of my favorite DnB tracks when I was starting out DJing, so cheers to you, Nick! Jahtari: More than anything else, to me this was Jan Disrupt’s year. Ripley and I met him in 06, and were overwhelmed by his generosity, by his love of dub, by his knowledge of its history, and by his supreme dedication to making a net label work and work well. I’m so happy that so many have found Foundation Bit and that it might have opened them up to Disrupt’s music. Hopefully they went on to explore jahtari.org and learned not only how a net label is done right, but also saw how dub lives on in open-minded individuals, who can use it as a framework to explore new possibilities. Ras Amerlock, Maffi, Clouds, Illya and Ltd. Candy, John Frum, Rootah, Roots Ista Posse, Volfoniq, Normaa, African Simba, Mikey Murka, Bo Marley, and others I’ve come to know through Jan’s impeccable ear, and in that way he fulfills the classic dual split of Selector and Producer that is so difficult to pull off. So cheers to him, and if you don’t know the sound, it’s all there for free at http://jahtari.org. Released before 2007 but important to me this year anyway
Notes: Just a few personal noises. Coral Sea and Trentmoller got me through some sad times this summer. The Knife and Ratatat I totally missed before this year but now am glad I’ve found. Phillip Roebuck is THE MAN! This is the problem with top 10s based on music released in the last year, because so much of what we come to at a certain time comes out of the past. Why didn’t anyone tell me when this stuff came out originally! A Final Thought
I’ve got two new mixes going on, released jointly by Mashit and Spannered! I did ‘em both withing a couple days of each other, and they represent what I consider to be some of the best dubstep tracks of 07, with several extra bits thrown in here and there. It’s been an interesting time this year for Dubstep, as a genre, as a scene in San Francisco, for me as a journalist, and for me as a DJ. I think these mixes are both really influenced by my writing for XLR8R, in terms of what tracks are represented here. Even though there’s quite a bit of unreleased material on them, these aren’t the huge tunes that a Skream or a Mala or even a Joe Nice or a Monkey Tek would have. Since I follow a lot of music genres pretty closely, I can never put in all the work it takes to really present yourself as a viable part of a scene, at least to the level where you’re slinging the big dubs. Now, I heard plenty of great sets like that this year, Kode 9′s at Mutek and Benga and Hatcha’s in San Francisco come to mind, plus every time Subtek spins it’s always genius, he’s just a really good DJ. But I didn’t think that’s where I could contribute to the scene, so I tried a different approach instead. I certainly don’t say that to diminish the tunes here. A lot of these great artists only get selective play, and while Hot Flush, Skull Disco and labels like it seem to be the darlings of the media, I don’t really hear those tracks out a lot, at least in San Francisco. So I set out to sort of gather some of the “outsider” tracks, loosely defined of course, together in one place. As usual I had too much for one mix, so I broke it apart into two. Have to give a big shout out to Inkcore who did the artwork for them on VERY short notice. But I love it and think the images work together perfectly. Hope to be doing more collaboration with him in the future. Notes on each are below, with links to the respective pages where you can download ‘em, as well as artist links where I could. And don’t worry, there’s a lot more mixes to come, classic Jump Up, a Bmore one, a couple dub/dancehall ones, and attempts at the follow ups to the Shocking mixes and The End of Dub. So enjoy! KID KAMELEON – AIM HIGH (MASHIT) Also, I think that this is the first mix I’ve ever released that I did through in one take where there was no setlist at all, I just made it up on the fly. I’m usually too critical, but thanks to some encouragement I felt it was good enough. So thanks to Jake and Mashit for hosting it, I’m happy to be a part of what’s become a truly poppin’ blog. Kid Kameleon – Aim High (link to the download page at Mashit) 01. DJ Panzah Zandahz – Planet Telex Loop (Token Recluse) KID KAMELEON – AIM LOW (SPANNERED)
Really happy that this mix is on Spannered, I’ve been wanting to do something for them for a year, so it just worked out that they happened to be relaunching their site with some design tweaks, and I got to be the kick off. So cheers to Tom and everyone else there, and click below for the link to the page with the download on it. Kid Kameleon – Aim Low (link to the download page at Spannered) 01. Boxcutter – Windfall (Planet Mu) |