Disclosure / Burial new stuff

Two giants of the London electronica scene, Burial and Disclosure, have been busy in recent weeks.  Firstly, Burial released a two-track called Truant which can be purchased for a piffling amount over at Hyperdub.  Both lengthy songs, they’re as fragile and humbling as pretty butterflies.  That diluted saxophone early on in Rough Sleeper particularly thrills me.  Anyway, here they both are:

More recently, Disclosure put out a typically choppy rework (mp3) of The Artful Dodger‘s 2000 two-step hit, Please Don’t Turn Me On:

I actually loved revisiting the original, which is listenable here.

Raffertie

I went to a sampling workshop at South Kilburn Studios a couple of weeks ago. It was an intimate affair (there were three of us) and it was run by Josh of the act Pirate Soundsystem. I learnt all about how you can record sounds with a simple microphone, and then distort and programme to create a  track with your own unique sounds (for example, he created a hi-hat beat from rattling keys). It was great. Well, it would have been if most of it hadn’t gone over my head – my fault for not having read up beforehand. I sat and smiled, nodded when everyone else nodded and asked inane questions at the end, revealing my nescience. What it made me realise is that electronic music producers speak a completely different language. Because I didn’t get it. But it’s almost better that I didn’t get it, because it now holds an ethereal, incomprehensible quality that I can admire and assume is an act of god.

Based in the same building is ‘composer’ Benjamin Stefanski, a.k.a Raffertie. Signed to Ninja Tune, his latest EP Mass Appeal goes that step beyond comfortable electronica to a far more explorative soundscape, of which I will never understand how its wired. It’s title track Mass Appeal is a touch on the alienating side, with very slow build-ups and expanses of unintelligible samples. It’s certainly no sing-along! But once it gets going, there’s some great ideas happening, and when it all comes together, you’re rewarded with some nourishing sound combinations. Courage Boy is phasic, dipping from dubstep to smooth soul samples, whilst One Track Mind is a minimalist, slow house track. If you like, you should see him headline Huw Stephens’ Presents night at The Social in Soho.

Alby Daniels

This city can be so damned busy, so frenetic and frustrated and packed and pulsing, and yet sometimes you can feel utterly, hideously lonely.  I had that today walking across Victoria; I realised, suddenly, almost painfully, how alone I felt.  It’s hard to know what to do – rather than talk to someone, my gut instinct is to hide, to burrow deeper and deeper into murky noise, like these woozy songs from rising London star Alby Daniels.  Both are a sort of bleary, bedroom-based dubstep; listening to them makes me feel safely distant and immune, a musical anaesthetic that wears off the moment the last note sounds. Alby’s This Dawn EP is due out on 7 March on Black Acre Records; pre-order here. (via Dazed)

Fantastic Mr Fox

Dubstep. Who doesn’t love dubstep? A lot of people. But akin to his namesake, this act has the cunning to make those all too boring and annoying genre boundaries a bit blurry, by fusing R&B, minimal house, disco and shoegazing into his dubby sound. The great thing about Fantastic Mr Fox is that when you click on a track at random, you have no idea what you’re going to get. And variety is the spice of life. Alongside cumin.

Deptford Goth – Time

Deptford Goth‘s track Time is stupendous – a druggy, fuzzed-up cry for health, a desperate injection of Benzedrine that fails to quieten the voices, a beautiful swim in a percussion sea that’s tinged with the knowledge of its impending end, a lov– yes, yes, you’re thinking, but where the duck is this song??  I want to listen to this hot sauce while you froth on about it!

Well you can’t.  Or rather, you can, but not here.  The only place that you can on the internet, as far as I know, is Tim Noakes’ October playlist for Dazed.  I heard it there, but can’t find it elsewhere – no Soundcloud, no YouTube, no diddly, no squat.

Why not, I wonder?  Presumably for reasons of economics.  The track is from Deptford Goth’s four-track debut EP, Youth II, available via Merok, and the other three tracks from that CD are all variously spread around the net, meaning they are listenable and even potentially rippable, without purchase - and if the entire album was so, sales might possibly dip.  So best to keep one track back.  I can respect that, as much as it’s a shame for this particular blog.

One more thing, though – that same four-track EP is £6.99.  Whoa!  I mean, okay, I get that a) musicians make little money from releases these days, so it’s wise to maximise profit; and b) Deptford Goth is fabulous – but still, whoa!  £7 for four tracks for a not-that-established artist is undeniably a lot.  Still, at least you can decide in advance, with Tim Noakes’ help, if you like each amd every track now…

UPDATE!  As per Deptford Goth’s comment below, the EP is available at an entirely-bargainalicious £2.49 on iTunes, here.  Why is it so much costlier on Merok?  Because that’s on vinyl.  I’m a dunce, basically.