Catching The Waves

Hit It Again, Sam

You know how sometimes you're walking along the street and you suddenly become Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, pondering how to merge jazz, hiphop, the Middle East and 20th century music into a pleasing, full-bodied cup of coffee? You get that too? See, I knew it wasn't just me. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You're strolling down the shadowy alleys of a souk when a gold-toothed chap stands in your way and tries to interest you in a double bass, some reverberating middle-easterny woodwind, a cheeky saxophone and his shop's finest hand-made dusty beat. You agree to his offer, providing he throws in a completely new riff right at the end of the track. You shake hands and walk off with La Mousse des Femmes.

Life is good. Looking up at the roofline, you Applaudir Les Oiseaux and the backing they give to the chime-laden drum beat that serenades you along the streets. However, one whiff of the uncompromising, rather monotonous next rhythm and you hurry past the hunched figure who offers to show you Sous Les Cotes. Brrr. Salvation awaits as you pop into a cool, calm bar, and listen to Eol et Leo tinkle the ivories, crush some drums and waft soothing strings over the clientele.

How much more of this do you need?

All too soon, the song is over and you must face the sultry streets once more. Ah, Etre Un Papillon, you think, and float away on a jazz piano and drum loop...

There, see, I knew you'd understand. Either we're crazed or we've been listening to Impressions, a five-track sampler EP by ThoTho, available from...

*busts a move*

...Dusted Wax Kingdom netlabel, Bulgarian purveyor of lo-fi, crackly, dusty hiphop to the gentry, and the rest of the world if it asks nicely. ThoTho, a lover of Stravinsky and DJ Krush (that's the kind of talk that CTW likes to hear) comes from Dijon (goodness, the French are so funky nowadays) and has released Impressions in the hope that it will encourage you out there to buy the full album. If you do, you'll find an iTunes link at ThoTho's MySpace. Failing that, send a donation to the very huggable and kissable Dusted Wax Kingdom, where you'll find a few pearls of lo-fi hiphop and triphop.

If you download ThoTho's EP, not only will you have a few head-nodders on your hard drive, you'll also be able to peruse the Lovecraftian album cover in all its sepulchral glory. Why not make a poster out of it and scare yourself silly?

ThoTho - Impressions EP (link to individual mp3s and zipped album)

ThoTho's MySpace

Dusted Wax Kingdom

P.S. Marvin of the marvellous Free Albums Galore took my little jest about his site's acronym in good heart. Phew.

By the way, the French weren't always quite so funky...

Eyedrops and cigarettes and absinthe are all a Tribble needs

It's the internet - you have to expect Star Trek jokes.

I dread to think how many man-hours BitBasic put into making the eighteen minutes of music that constitutes Grating Rainbows, but I'm glad they did: it shows.

The first track, Soap, is schizophrenic. Its first minute is soothing trip-hop; the second is jumpy, glitchy funk. It's followed by Left Here, a 60-second jazz-funk workout with lots of stretched vocal glitches and a chiptune-ish quality to the hip-hop beat, if that makes sense.

Emaze is more "traditional" breakbeat and drum 'n' bass with skittering beats, a hoovering bass, a seductive female vocal (no lyrics, just "aaahs") and mellow synths jazzing away quite happily.

Next up is Shroom. Yes, you're right: it's fungus-inspired hallucinogenic drum and bass that starts off tunefully and then descends into frenzied smash-cuts and edits.

Amen Break Steals The Show begins with a slow rock beat and a jittery sampled guitar but the pressure tells; eventually it has to give the world's most famous drum break a good seeing-to, but does so between juicy organ chords, which leavens the mangling and gives the drums something to bounce off.

Any track that can use creaking doors as an instrument gets my vote. Grating Rainbows, the funky and melodic title track, does all this and more before unearthing a wonderful organ riff that struts all over the accompanying glitches then departs the scene to allow breakbeat mayhem to commence.

Watch Less TV is good advice and is also the seventh track here. It's stuffed with countless cheesy audio snippets from British television that may or may not tell the story of a torrid affair. (These things lend themselves to adding your own narrative.) Is there anything more bathetic than snooker commentary? "Enter the king of the nineties" is my phrase of the week.

The album ends with Rest, which I am forced to call experimental electronica because it jumps from one style to another - breakbeat, nu-jazz, hip-hop, glitch, etc. - before settling for chill-out. A slowed-down and stretched vocal bids us goodbye and says "take care". Health and Safety would approve.

Perhaps the mix is slightly muddy here and there, but that may just be my cheap headphones and personal preferences. The sheer weight of effects, synths, samples, and the plethora of editing and arranging on Grating Rainbows is certainly impressive, but better still is the fact that the album is an enjoyable listen. Once the ear gets used to the melee of jump cuts and glitches, Grating Rainbows becomes a lot of fun.

BitBasic - Grating Rainbows (link to zipped album and individual mp3s)

BitBasic's website

BitBasic on MySpace

Monotonik netlabel

One and-a Two and-a Three and-a Seventeen

If you need something that will shorten the journey to work/school/college, and last just long enough for you to get dressed up for a night out or dance long enough to decide that you'd now quite like to sit down and sip a cold drink, here's something for you. It's hard to describe. It's something...something like...er...let me think...

It's Something Like Jazz by Foolk (formerly Foolcut), a Slovakian jazzy/glitchy wizard capable of dismantling a jazz tune and reassembling it into a chopped-up workout with hip-hop overtones. Listening to this three-track ep, you'll find yourself nodding your head and smiling, thus freaking out all your fellow commuters with the fear that you might be concealing some C4 explosive in your delighted mp3 player. Hey, at least one person on the dawn train to work will be happy. Progress, non?

By the way, the image at the start of today's article is the result of not having an album cover to post, and of taking the only suitable image on Foolk's website and enlarging it until it looks all pixelly and suddenly finding out that there actually were other images and eventually replacing my shoddy replica of Foolk's logo with a moody photo of the man himself and - ta-dah! - the pristine logo itself. As regular readers know, CTW is allergic to jpegs and electronic images in general. Sigh. My apologies to Foolk and Slovakians everywhere (for future reference only, because I have now redeemed the situation with the above photo. You never know when you might need a Slovakian get-out-out-of-jail-free card.) and the general public. And I love that buzzsaw/halo thing.

Still with me?

The title track is two minutes of saxophonic chopped-up jazz that bounces off a busy double bass, an organ and a piano. The drums are jazzy, edging towards funk and breakbeat. The whole tune has a terrific stop-start feel to it, which continues until the whole things slurs to a halt and you wonder how two minutes went by so quickly.

Glue Me features more double bass, funky drums, a staccato organ riff and a one-word lyric. It's strange how enjoyable it is to hear someone say "alright" between riffs and drum breaks. Foolk brandishes his electronica credentials mid-song by dropping a looped trumpet riff that pans from side to side and pitches up and down like a mad thing. Delicioso.

Push The Square pushes all the right buttons. It sounds as though a DJ invented a time machine and gatecrashed a 1950s trad jazz band's evening session at a club. The usual culprits appear - piano, double bass and wacky trumpet - but they get their groove on.

Foolk's style is subtle - his music is sort-of jazz, but with funky drums and a lovely chopped, jerky feel to it, with extraneous noises, a little light bit-crushing and mangled pitch and tempi to satisfy those of us who live in the early twenty-first century. The good news is that there are three other three-track albums on his website and they're all free to download. While you're there, follow the links and contemplate buying some of his stuff and/or going to one of his gigs. You'd be a foolk not to.

Oh, come on. I've been dying to say that.

Foolk - Something Like Jazz EP (link to individual mp3s at archive.org)

Foolk

Foolk on MySpace

Bring Out Your Dead

I've just had to chuck a load of festering, maggoty breves and semi-breves onto a horse-cart that's passing down the street; every note longer than a minim has died from lack of use. I blame Kampion and his Invisible EP, released on Mexico's Filtro netlabel. Kampion is the alter ego of Guillermo Guevára, who forms half of the two-man electronica outfit, Duopandamix. Invisible is what might be called "glitch-funk". Not sure about the genre name. How about funktronica? Nu-jazz? (Yuk. "Nu" should be thrown into a wood-chipper.) Microfunk? Never mind, I'll leave it to CTW's six billion* readers to decide.

Kampion eases us gently into his sonic universe with Pirata, a stately groove that seems hectic because of the plethora of glitches that dance around the speakers while snippets of vocals provide the minimalist tune. Next up is Primaveral and its brutally chopped melody; if its fragments were any shorter the melody would become incoherent - it's amazing how little information the ear requires before the brain fills in the gaps.

Routes is full of polyrhythms, record scratches, and spliced vocals: all ingredients that tickle CTW's fancy. A modest bass pops up and ushers in the appearance of some very mild reverb and delay to fill out the track. Two-thirds of the way in, the track gets even catchier when a lovely (if you like that sort of thing), high-passed stab of white-noise appears in an impeccably groovy riff that sounds like a pastiche of futuristic car horns. Anyone who likes glitch, funk, IDM, electronica, etc. will enjoy and learn from this track.

The start of the title (and final) track, Invisible, shows that Kampion is not adverse to creating a dreamy reverberating soundscape only to slap it away with a glitchy, funky beat. My only quibble is that a kick drum/bass element is rather forward in the mix, so forward that my speakers struggled with it somewhat, but as the rest of the EP is an exercise in sonic expertise this may well be intentional.

This danceable music is unusual - there's hardly a bass line worthy of the name; everything sounds "trebley" but not piercingly so. Invisible's sounds are clean and spare with little sign of reverb or delay, so tightly are the snaps and pops packed. The rhythms are tight, funky, and garnished with a South American special sauce that adds a delicious swing to proceedings. The panning is excellent, with glitch breaks coming at just the right speed - quick enough to stay funky and slow enough to retain intelligibility.

This is a surprisingly gentle, good-humoured album that displays a high level of skill and inventiveness. Ah, free Latin electronica, how I love thee.

Kampion - Invisible EP (link to individual mp3s and zipped album)

Kampion on MySpace

Duopandamix on MySpace

Filtro netlabel

*potentially...

Party On, Dudes

Recently, CTW has been on something of a hip-hop bent. No, that's not the right word. Jag? Spree?

*thinks*

Got it. Recently, CTW has been on something of a hip-hop drive-by. Hip-hop has always been a little shy about doing it for nothing, but now it seems that beatboys and spitters are starting to see the benefit of releasing stuff under a Creative Commons licence and/or as a teaser to attract fans who will eventually pay for the not-for-free stuff. There's always been a lot of IDM and electronica stuff available for free, but now it's party time. Here's something that CTW has smash-and-grabbed from the superbly named and worthy of worship Free Albums Galore. Your honour, I present exhibit A:

Strictly Leakage by Atmosphere on Rhymesayers netlabel.

In which thirteen tracks persuade you that, yes, it is possible to find great-sounding, funky, downhome and upbeat hip-hop for the price of an empty pocket. This album's brew of 60's soul, funk and Public Enemy-ish music will shake your money-maker; it has delectable record crackles (always a CTW fave), a constant undertow of party conversation, and enough sassy horns and slinky beats to make your mother embarrass herself after too many scoops from the New Year's Eve punch bowl.

In the interests of professionalism, CTW usually describes recommendations in great detail, cataloguing each track's techniques and influences so as to place the free sounds in the musical pantheon. There's no need in this case. You'll either love Strictly Leakage or hate it. But do me a favour - download it and listen to the last track, Road to Riches ft. Cuts by DJ Plain Ol' Bill (because starting at the end is a very good place to start), and then listen to the first track, YGM, and come back and complain if you think you're listening to bad free music.

Two men provide Atmosphere's raucous rapping and smooth grooves: Slug is the rap rajah and Ant the beat boss. It's a brave move to let such good music go for free. If you like Strictly Leakage, loosen your purse-strings and explore their other stuff.

I'm done. Apart from reminding you that Russ Abbot, a British comedian and variety artist who was big in the 80's, loved a party with an atmosphere and went so far as to release a single to emphasise the point. Don't google it - it'll hurt.

Atmosphere - Strictly Leakage (link to zipped album - I know, it's a pain for non-broadband people, but this one's worth it.)

Atmosphere at Rhymesayers netlabel

Atmosphere's MySpace

A superb music resource: Free Albums Galore

Lingers On The Palate

DJ Side is a Czech DJ who makes dubstep, grime and hip-hop. "All well and good, and we're very happy for him," I hear you say, "but what about those of CTW's enormous readership who don't want to nod their heads and consort with people of the opposite sex?" Fear not, O basement dwellers. With a surreptitious wink, DJ Side has sneaked an ambient hip-hop EP into CTW's coat pocket. You heard me: ambient hip-hop. Bittersweet Love is a five-track slice of hypnotic audio bliss, released on parole by those unstable people at Surreal Madrid netlabel.

Wikipedia defines dubstep as "distinguished by its dark mood, sparse rhythms, and emphasis on bass," which goes a long way to explain the soundscape you'll hear in Bittersweet Love. What's especially intriguing is the use of ambient sounds in hip-hop rhythms, though the glitches are set at such slow tempi that it's more trip-hop than hip-hop. Standing on the Olympic podium: 1. Lo-fi beats over lengthy delays and reverberations. 2. Deep bass drones. 3. Glitches.

The EP kicks off with Amb Part 2, wherein we discover an electric piano, a snare drum made of stretched white noise (sort of), and a distressed seagull strapped to a dub delay. Hey, it's how I roll. [/Americanese slang]

Clicks is just that, the sound of a dusty record with lots of panned clicks 'n' cuts. It sounds like a fireplace getting its groove on while an ominous, pulsing bass runs around the house and tries to find a way in. It's difficult to make such sparse elements engrossing, but don't worry - a Czech DJ is, er, in the house. Heh.

If the Cold War ever returns to Europe, D33P should be the soundtrack for its newly employed spies as they don mackintoshes, smoke far too many high-tar cigarettes and rendezvous in bombed-out buildings. Bell-like tones haunt the crackly, delayed clicks that run in and out of a lo-fi drum break. The bass sounds as though DJ Side parked a diesel engine in the corner of his studio, threw a thick tarpaulin over it and left it to run while he got on with making music. The track takes its time and thus gets under your skin. It broods. It's deep ind33d.

In Klear you'll hear giant filter sweeps, background thumps and a low, pulsing bass. It's rather like listening to distant warfare while the United Nations deploy a blue-helmeted click 'n' cut groove to keep things almost civilised. Like the rest of Bittersweet Love, it won't grab you on the first listen, but it's detail and rhythmical qualities might eventually win you over; it did me.

Metatron provides an optimistic-ish ending to our aural journey. A plain clap-and-kick beat overlays background noises and snatches of conversation before a muted guitar and lo-fi strings leaven the mix.

I'm not sure if there's much point listening to this fascinating EP on your/my standard crappy PC speakers because much of the intricate detail will be lost. It's definitely headphones territory; either that or play it late at night on a decent sound system. Your neighbours will love you. Trust me.

Perhaps someone will tell me where the album cover image comes from. Donning my deerstalker hat, I've deduced that it's from an Asian gangster film, and furthermore, my magnifying glass tells me that it might include the odd bout of fisticuffs or at least a sharply worded letter deploring misbehaviour in general.

DJ Side - Bittersweet Love EP (link to individual MP3s)

Surreal Madrid netlabel

DJ Side's website

DJ Side's MySpace

Confidence, Not Cockiness

Listening to rap, hip-hop, call it what you will, is like clearing out a wardrobe. Out go the holed socks, the braggadocio, the threadbare underpants, the violence, the once-fashionable shirts, the relentless swearing, the Christmas jumpers, the misogyny, the kipper ties, and the rampant capitalism. Just when you're about to tire of throwing all the crap out, there's the prize, sitting right at the back of the wardrobe and desperately looking for an entrance to Narnia: head-nodding beats and ingenious hooks.

Here's one such find. Classic Material Vol.1 by CM (the cheeky scamp) is a schizophrenic album. Half of it is creamy soul served in a hip-hop tub; the other half is a gentle reminder that music didn't begin in 1920, '55, '68 or '85 but may actually have existed before electricity became widespread.

If CM were better known, Who I Am would be a classic album track, the type of song that wouldn't get released as a single but would be acknowledged by fans as his best work. It's got that indefinable something that conveys emotion, whether it be the incisive strings and woodwinds, the heartfelt lyrics, the production, or the feeling that Who I Am, along with the companion piece All Or Nothing, sees CM shrugging off expectations and promoting a manifesto that there's more to life than seeing how many bullets a rapper can stop on the way to having a music career. That dread phrase, "taking it to a different level", applies here; I love the soul grooves but it's the album's orchestral/acoustic tracks that provide intimacy. True needs just a piano hook, a violin and a beat to kidnap my ears, though the enticement is provided by that delicious hip-hop tradition of introducing the hook and then letting you salivate for a bit before dropping the beat. Worse than crack, let me tell you.

But don't knock the grooves - Confidence slurs and slips deliciously before locking onto your hips and declaring, "This ain't cockiness, this is called confidence." Reintro is hypnotic. Doing The Damn Thing reveals a gorgeous piano intro and loop that slaps into a clap so well-timed that you can't get the Damn Thing out of your head. Grown and Sexy sees CM turn into Barry White - the music's fine but Ira Gershwin had nothing to do with the subtle-as-a-hammer lyrics.

Classic Material Vol. 1 is guilty of some of the sins I mentioned earlier, but it's still a pleasurable listen; some of the tracks are irresistible. My only quibble is that I'd like to see a few bridges and choruses for variety's sake and because I'm curious to see what CM can come up with. If CM's rapping continues to develop, becoming as open-minded and far-ranging as his musical taste, then the future looks bright for fans of well-crafted and likeable hip-hop.

CM aka Creative - Classic Material Vol. 1 (link to zipped album and separate mp3s)

What's this called again?

If you're a long-term free music enthusiast then you may yawn and move on; you'll already have this latest Catching the Waves recommendation. Otherwise...*dons top hat, grabs cane*...have I got something for you.

Comfort Fit is, I think, German so I'm going to call him a beatmeister. Boris Mezga = Beatmeister. His album, Forget and Remember, released by Tokyo Dawn in 2005, is so cool it's frigid. Track after track of superb instrumental hip hop (or I-hop if you prefer) just funks its way out of your speakers. This stuff is so good that big, nasty, planet-guzzling motor companies are already using his music to flog their wares. At least the road to Armageddon will be funky.

The album's mostly I-hop but there are some vocal tracks. Something to Do and Freeze the Cut both feature Blaktroniks on vocal duties, the first plunging you straight into a beautifully deep groove, the latter stapling you to an irresistible kick-snare rhythm. Planetary Picknick and The Hunt are like John Barry out-takes before he decided to take out the head-nodding beat. Planetary Picknick is also a good example of what makes Forget and Remember so much fun to listen to: the grooves are loose. Dance/electronica/hip-hop often sticks rigidly to a 4/4 beat so as to keep things solid; Comfort Fit skilfully drops beats that are slightly early or late and it makes all the difference. There are lots of little background noises and drifting pads filling out and drawing attention to different parts of the music. It feels jazzy.

There's humour too. Kurz Vor Danach 'Ganz 05 retells one of those horrible end-of-relationship arguments and manages to make me wince, smile and groove at the same time.

You're losing patience, aren't you? Ok, in summary, there are 20(!) tracks. You need to hear them. Thank me later. But thank Comfort Fit first.

The whole album is available from Comfort Fit's own website but only in one big zip file:

Comfort Fit - Forget and Remember (whole album) mp3 format 110MB

Comfort Fit - Forget and Remember (whole album) OGG format 100MB

...which is not so good for the great unwashed = non-broadband people. Fear not...

Comfort Fit - Forget and Remember (link to individual mp3s and artwork)

Enjoy. God, I'm good. But Comfort Fit is better. ;)

Helium-Hop

[Originally posted August '06.]

Q: What do Shakespeare's "Scottish play", Grandmaster Flash and Frank Sinatra (I think) have in common?

A: They're all used to great effect by The Broke Gringos on today's CTW recommendation, From Day to Day. The BGs (see what I did there?) are from Cologne, are rather fond of rap and are rather good at it. You'll find a lot of their stuff at the excellent Ideology, a netlabel doing sterling work in Germany.

Most of the Gringos' lyrics are lisped in German and some French, but as luck would have it the track I like the most (and they're all good) is in English. Some clever sampling and spot-on timing results in a unique version of a famous soliloquy. It's immediately funny yet ultimately touching, and I bet it's the most memorable song you'll hear today. So there. And the rest of the album is so hip it's hop. Ouch. Sorry.

Track: From Day To Day

Album: Junk EP by The Broke Gringos

Label: Ideology