RECENT POSTS
The previous ten posts on the Blog
Archives
- Three Days In California With The Drums - Day 1
- Frankie And The Heartstrings - Making British Indie Special Again (Since 2009)
- Sharks - Royal Leamington Spa's Slickest Punks
- Platform's Fresh Meat - Interview with Ke$ha
- Billie's Life Lessons - Loverman / Hot front man, Blood Orange and yawn-inducing electro
- Small Black - The Least Irritating Hip Brooklyn Band In Ages (FREE MP3s)
- Pyramiddd - Goodbye To Bad Names (Free MP3)
- Hunx And His Punx - Gayrage Rock (Free MP3)
- Surfer Blood - Surf Pop Enters Murky Waters (FREE MP3)
- Samuel & The Dragon - Musicals, Barnados and Nudity - Free MP3
- Billie's Life Lessons - On The Road With The Virgins, So So Glos, Kap Bambino, Hello Sunshine and Princess Julia
- Platform's Fresh Blood - Hunx And His Punx, Walls, and Ancient Crux
- More...
CATEGORIES
Filter Blog posts by...
SEARCH
Use the form below to search the blog archives...
Posted on 29/10/09 at 01:38:45 am
Time to saddle up again, dick jibs. We’re on a MySpace Wander – know what one of those is yet? We pick a new artist. Someone making new music that makes old music look bad. We go to their MySpace page, then we find someone interesting looking in their top friends to drop in on. We do this eight times, in total, passing comment on all the joy, throb, piss, dare, thick-rims, love and plagiarism we find along the way.
This week’s excursion begins in the cold, caring grip of Jam City, which is the name for what happens when post-teenage Londoner Jack Latham meddles with motley dance styles – grime, house, techno, juke, kwaito – and emerges with the reigns to some anatomically superior mutant with which to stomp all your skulls in. This initial mix for Lower End Spasm and one subsequently recorded for FACT Magazine are as hyped as they are hyperactive, show reels for a sound that manages to be wildly kinetic and staccato at the same time. Tracks like ‘In The Park’ don’t roll, they jerk forwards, and he also seems to be obsessed with JG Ballard, so let’s talk about bodies jacking in brink-of-freezing water, ecstasy crystals shot skyward in fountains of icy lace.
From here, we stalk on to Girl Unit. Girl Unit is Philip, London SE5. The ‘only’ things currently residing at his page are a quartet of extended mixes, but in amongst the low-end roll-calls (G Unit’s bass will make your eyes the earth) are a couple of his own productions, ‘Bag Lady Juke’ and ‘Tender Touch’ glimpsing icy house plateaus and clipped bass yelps that don’t feel dissimilar to what you can hear in Jam City. It’s decent and proto though, and his blog Fantasy Rag’s well worth a visit if you’re as interested in weird futuro-ephemera shit as I am. Girl Unit’s also taken the time to refix an episode of Maury Povich. It’s pretty unrepresentative, but entertaining nonetheless.
How to follow that? We wind up with the party bass of Brooklynite Kingdom who the more vigilant may remember for his remix of Telepathe’s ‘Chrome’s On It’. Are you vigilant? No matter here – Kingdom throws out music for the intrigued clubber neutral, his jams – synth-led, beat-earned – fully party rather than anything too brain. A similar thing could be said of NGUZUNGUZU, whose name refers to this guy who used to get tied to the prows of predatory war canoes by people living in the Solomon Islands. Now that they’ve stopped doing it, he seems pretty keen to get his vibe on - 'Fantasma Riddim''s a low-slung clubland loomer and 'Caress' appeals 'cause I find it humorous to pretend it keeps whispering my surname.
In Los Angeles NA’s doing interesting things – first track ‘Chunguiton Libre’’s disturbing kinship with baile funk is soon forgotten in the alien, pared down flutter of ‘))))((((GOODIGOODI)))))((((‘ which hustles along all Teengirl-Fantasy-with-an-attitude-problem (Teengirl also cropping up on the last MySpace Wander of course) while ‘HATE2WAIT’ is what Salem might sound like bonging weed instead of meth. Sticking with the stupid drug analogies, NA’s Chicagoan mates Love Concept play a clubby kind of muscle-funk recorded on VHS and twisted on whatever Ariel Pink’s twisted on, to the extent that their ‘Event Horizons’ somehow makes date-rape seem like a breath of fresh air. There’s something oddly appealing here that begs for further inspection (more futuro-retroism?) but this isn’t the time or the place for that. We must amble on.
The only friends Love Concept have are themselves, so we click on this girl called Pilar who has videos on her page of somersaulting pigeons and Sting, Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart singing together, but not much else. So this Wander’s swansong goes to Actually Huizenga. She comes from LA too, her songs sound like Zola Jesus without the fuzz (i.e. Shakespeare’s Sister) and she covers David Bowie. There are some photos knocking around and by the looks of things she lives in that chapter of 'Rip It Up And Start Again' that’s set in San Francisco circa 1978. I think I’m love with her. Here she is chopped and screwed with Lil’ Wayne and Three 6 Mafia. Party music!
No Comments for this post yet...
Leave a comment:
<< Previous post: The Drums Back In The UK - Full Numerical Breakdown
Next post: Radar And Merok Get It On - Bumper Exclusive Download Giveaway >>







