Anyway, this is a belated audio companion to my earlier post on the recent series of excellent compilations on Soundway showcasing the afro scene in 1970s Nigeria. While Nigeria had the biggest modern music scene in the region at the time and also had the best recording studios, it was far from unique as many of the neighbouring countries also had incredibly vibrant scenes, fusing their own musical traditions with the music coming from America, Latin America (especially Cuba), Europe and, of course their various neighbours. In fact, Highlife music, which was one of the first modern West African musics originated in Ghana and they also had a vibrant and diverse afro music scene in the 70s.

Sandwiched between the 2 giants of Nigeria and Ghana are Benin and Togo. Benin is the land where Voodoo comes from. Drums are central to the Voodoo religion, and the contemporary influences of soul, funk, rock, afro-cuban, afrobeat, etc., were fused with the Voodoo traditions to create a unique Beninese sound. It’s a small country but there was a huge amount of quality music being produced there during the 70s, which is really only coming to light now thanks to some great compilations; Soundway released a compilation of Benin’s most famous band T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo in 2004, and this year Analog Africa put out African Scream Contest.

Now, the music! This mix mostly contains music from Nigeria, Ghana and Benin, but also includes tracks from Mali, Senegal, Togo and Guinea. It starts with some highlife and afro-cuban before moving onto heavier funk, afrobeat and afro-rock. The intention was to showcase the diversity of music in the region but to keep a reasonable flow to the mix too. For your interest, I’ve included the countries of origin for each track. And, once again, I want to emphasise that almost all the tracks I’ve featured are readily available on recent compilations, so if you like the music, please support, and go out and buy them!

1. Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National - Okwukwe Na Nchekwube (Nigeria)
2. Orchestra Baobab - Jin Ma Jin Ma (Senegal)
3. Godwin Ezike & The Ambassadors - Torri Wowo (Nigeria)
4. Orchestre Super Jheevs des Paillotes - Ye Nan Lon An (Benin/Togo)
5. Le Simandou de Beyla - Festival (Guinea)
6. K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas - Hwehwe Mu Na Yi Wo Mpena (Ghana)
7. The Funkees - Akula Owu Onyeara (Nigeria)
8. Hygrades - In The Jungle (Instrumental) (Nigeria)
9. Moussa Doumbia - Keleya (Mali)
10. Gabo Brown & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - It’s A Vanity (Benin/Togo)
11. S-Job Movement - Love Affair (Nigeria)
12. Bala Miller & The Great Music Pyrameeds Of Afrika - Ikon Allah (Nigeria)
13. T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo - Hwe Towe Hun (Benin)
14. African Brothers - Self Reliance (Ghana)

West African Heat

It’s about 77 mins long, enjoy!

Mr. Carnage (that sounds like a good name for a super-villain!) from ye olde TAPE blog has blessed us here at ISM with yet another sweet guest mix. This one kicks off with a remix of a song that I love very much and continues through slow, hazy, melodic techno and house from all over the world, and throughout the past 25 years. I think I like this one even better than the first one he did for us!

Tracklist forthcoming in a week or so……

Download the mix here.

So I’ve been a bit quiet of late, mainly because I’ve not had much work and consequently have been pretty poor, which has meant that I haven’t really bought any vinyl for a while. I’ve still been nosing round charity shops however, mostly coming away empty-handed, but today my luck changed… I was in one of my usual spots, looking through the same old rubbish they had last week, when on another rack, I spotted a Chic record. My heart quickened slightly, but I wasn’t too excited, because as brilliant as Chic are, their stuff does crop up in charity shops fairly frequently. So, I looked behind it, only to see a TK Disco sleeve. Behind that, another Chic record. Well that did it for me, I scooped up the 30 or so records in that section, got comfy sat on the floor, and started to flick. Anyway, you can probably guess where this is going, so here’s what I scored - most of these were £1, a couple were £1.50.

Worthy of first mention was something straight off my wants list, T-Connection’s “Do What You Wanna Do” on TK Disco, a much sampled disco bomb with superb percussion and synth work, and plenty of drama. Then, on the mighty Prelude, and again in near mint condition, was Sharon Redd’s “You’re a Winner”, backed with “Activate”, boogie action, nice! Next up, Third World’s “Now that We’ve Found Love”, produced by the legendary Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, unplayed copy!! It’s a nice mid-tempo disco number with a slight reggae feel, very cool. Now, Chic, as mentioned…. Can I take this opportunity to say that anyone who doesn’t dig Chic is probably not worthy of this earth, Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards are 2 of the greatest producers that ever lived! Firstly, and currently wowing the masses in the form of a Todd Terje edit, I found an “I Want Your Love” remix, backed with two other crackers - “Le Freak!” and “Chic Cheer”. Personally I’m not fussed about Terje’s effort, I will stick with the original and the superb “I Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits”, a dazzling hypnotic builder which craftily sampled it, by ISM favourite Moodymann. Another Chic 12″ yielded something I’d never heard before, it’s called “Jack Le Freak”, and as the title suggests, it’s a version of the classic “Le Freak!”… basically this sounds like a Fast Eddie remix!! It’s got all the bumping bass attitude, the Chi-style drums, a looped up Jack-ja-jack-jack vocal, and of course the original track sliced and diced to pieces! What the fuck! This has house party written all over it. Now onto something that might divide opinions - I certainly know some people that hate it, but it melts my heart and I love it to pieces - the full, 10′45′ special disco version of Mcfadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”, the UK pressing, but I’m not too precious about stuff like that, it’s in great condition and is another one ticked off the wants list! I’ve been on the lookout for the LP with “There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground” on it for quite a while, and while I didn’t find that, I did find another Tower of Power LP, “Monster On a Leash”, a much later album; this unfortunately sounds a little disappointing, although I’ve only had a brief flick through it so far. Also grabbed a copy of MFSB’s “Love is the Message”: obviously I already have this, but I thought it would make a nice gift for a friend who recently gave me a spare copy of a Stevie Wonder LP I didn’t have. I also picked up a copy of George Benson’s “Give Me the Night”, because although I’m not a huge fan of the title track (Quincy Jones or no Quincy Jones!), it has “The World is a Ghetto” on the flip, which I already have on his LP “In Flight” (Imo his best album), but this looks to be a better pressing, and I absolutely love that track. A Detroit Spinners 12″ came home with me too, on Atlantic, and in great condition - “Working My Way Back to You” (yes, that one!) Finally, a Diana Ross & The Supremes thing which has a medley on the A-side, which I suppose would be cool for weddings or something! But tucked away on the flip- a killer version of “Love Hangover”, with a kinda slow intro section that leads into a mostly instrumental version. Motown goodness…

In an interesting parallel to Theo’s comments, my wife sent me this link just now. I for one cannot believe it has been 20 years. The really depressing part is to think of how far black musical artists came in the 20 years preceding that album which surely has to be a pinnacle of political and social thought in art, drawing from what James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, and Marvin Gaye (amongst many, many others) did before them. Consider the past 20 years. Looking out there now, all that you can see is clownish stereotypes of uneducated, drug dealing, gangbanger thugs who sing nursury rhymes and do silly dances while covered in diamonds from head to toe. And people wonder why it is that Theo Parrish is angry about the way black artists are handled by the white recording industry and music media? They have had their balls cut off and smashed into the ground.

Those negative stereotypes of black artists that are plastered all over have also helped perpetuate the idea that it is okay to be ignorant, regardless of the race of people listening to the music. Not all music needs to have a college degree’s worth of ideas behind it, but when there is nothing more serious than “superman that ho” to choose from, that shit is wildly depressing. Especially when the history of black musical culture in the US has had intelligence and awareness as part of its legacy for quite a while now, this continued emphasis on only the most ignorant music despite the presence of many other options throughout the underground is especially cynical and evil.

Also of great interest is the fact that PE will be performing the album for a Pitchfork festival. Quite an interesting turn of events that the “black CNN” is now simply entertainment for pseudo-intellectual priveleged white folks.

Having not one but two dancey gigs in the same weekend was pretty nice, especially since the past bunch of sets I have played were more like bars where I was playing lots of other types of records. I got to trot out a bunch of different things that I had either never played before, or hadn’t played in a long time. These are the cuts that either surprised me or are now stuck in my head, I  think they have all previously been mentioned here before:

On Friday night, the spot was kind of chill for the beginning of my set so I got into the really really deep minimal stuff, “Deep Hypnotic” on that new Fred P. on Soul People Music sounded especially nice loud so you can hear the sub-bass which really dominates the track. Later on I played Patti Labelle’s “Music Is My Way of Life” which I had completely forgotten how much I love. That track sums up the feeling of disco music for me perfectly.

The jam that really hit the spot for me both nights was Frankie Knuckles’ vocal mix of Hercules & Love Affair’s “Blind”. I guess it is kind of comparable to the Escort remix of Tracey Thorn (which I was obsessed with last summer, and really I still am) as it is the perfect mix of underground soulful dance with a pop vocal on it. I have seen people dissing Frankie’s mix of this, but they really couldn’t be more mistaken. As with the Tracey Thorn, I feel like the remix actually sounds more like what should be “the original mix” to me. The pads, pianos, and beats have such a smooth old school Chicago deep feeling to them but when the horns come in is when it all starts to come together. Antony sounds wayyyyy too much like Morrissey, it seems as though a vocal house track would be exactly wrong for his voice. But it isn’t, and Frankie’s dub effects on the vocals adds even more lushness to the mix. This is just about a perfect dance tune to me, and it has skyrocketed into pole position for track of the year as of right now. It really has a nice hot summer night feeling to it which makes it even better for playing around this time. Usually I don’t subscribe to the idea of a person’s production being “elegant”, but it is songs like this that make me reconsider. Lovely.

Moodmat dropped what they are calling a “one question interview” with Theo Parrish, and of course he has some interesting things to say about the question of race and gender in dance music. It annoys me to no end that they are not allowing comments on such a piece of writing As per Theo’s request, they turned off commenting, but I am more than willing to allow any discussion about it to occur here. So let’s talk about it.

Aside from a pretty ridiculous mistake in calling Rage Against the Machine an all white band (Tom Morello and Zach De La Rocha, the two dominant creative and political influences in the band are of mixed racial and cultural heritage including African and Latin American roots) I think he is 100% spot on. Being involved with the underground soul, hip-hop, and dance communities, I see the kind of pigeon-holing that bigger labels and the media pin on black artists who want to do something outside of the “acceptable” range. I think his argument can even be pushed further when you look at the kind of watering down that even the “conscious” rappers like Mos Def or Talib Kweli have had to do to achieve major label success.

The marketability of white artists mimicking black music and being more successful at it is also quite obvious. This is one of the most major problems in all of popular music today, but as he points out it is especially prominant in dance music even though there is less corporate pressure to do so. The lack of perspective in the media is one of the reasons we started this blog, to remind people of the roots of dance music and to try to do our best to not allow this mistake to perpetuate itself any more than it already has.

Scott came through with one of the more eclectic and odd mixes we have had here at ISM for his first guest mix, so you know he had to come even crazier for the second one. And he did. What I find interesting about this one is that he manages to take a bunch of 90’s rock tracks and edit them to take on an almost “punk-funk” feel. Did you ever imagine getting down to Nirvana’s “Love Buzz” in a club? Neither did I before this mix, despite it being one of my favorite cuts off of Bleach. He mixes tunes like that up with some vintage 80’s punk-funk by Liquid Liquid, some 00’s new wave influenced stuff by Erlend Oye, and even some German minimal to come up with a funky rock dance sound that is 100% irony free. This is pretty exciting for me, I think he is truly doing something different here and we are quite pleased to be hosting it!

Tracklist:

Nirvana “Love Buzz” Bleach [bass loop]
Spoon “Was It You?” Gimme Fiction
The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army [sf edit]” Elephant
Sonic Youth “Bull In The Heather” Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
Liquid Liquid “Cavern [sf edit] ” Liquid Liquid
Smashing Pumpkins “1979″ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
No Doubt “Its My Life [sf edit]” Greatest Hits
Brazilian Girls “Don’t Stop [sf edit]” Brazilian Girls
Erlend Oye “Sudden Rush [sf edit]” Unrest
Miss Kitten & The Hacker “Stock Exchange Woman” International Deejay Gigolos
Information Society “What’s On Your Mind [Club Mix]” Information Society
Andreas Dorau “Girls In Love [Grungermun Mix]” 3 Remixes fur Andreas Dorau
Andreas Dorau “Girls In Love [Forever Sweet Mix]” 3 Remixes fur Andreas Dorau

Download the mix here.

Also be sure to check out Scott’s new website with blog that he just launched for info on his deejaying and production as well as the site for his label Ferris Park (which is now unfortunately all digital) for releases by other Detroit and related artists.

I am still not sure how I feel about Ableton sets in general. I have heard a few good ones, and many bad ones. This one is a little more like a standard deejay set in that the songs aren’t edited/looped into nothingness so it works well for me. Less is more. You can even hear some mistakes in it, which adds to the humanity of the set. The mp3-jay is our man Chaircrusher who hooked us up with the Stewart Walker live set a few months back and the man behind our mix hosting. I’ll let him describe the scenario of the mix:

As most people know, Iowa in general, and Cedar Rapids and Iowa City
in particular have been flooded out over the past few weeks. My
mother-in-law’s consigment clothing store took on five feet of water,
and we spent a couple of days removing several tons of stinking, soggy
clothes from the building, piling them into a mountain of fashion
hopes dashed. We’ve been through this before, but it still saddens us
all. My immediate family had no issues with flooding — my wife’s
business is in a building about 6 feet above the river’s highest
excursion. But even for those those houses and businesses were
trashed, there is the one consolation that nobody died as a result,
but everyone wanders around gobsmacked at having their town trashed
yet again.

But back to more selfish concerns: I played a Ableton DJ set Saturday
night at a disastrously under-attended show. Originally my friend
Dave Powers was going to drive in from Chicago to do a live
house/techno set, but his car wasn’t up to the job; one of the other
guys who was supposed to play had his laptop laid low by OS X. So
after a scramble, I was able to get two noise/electronic bands to jump
on the bill — Lwa and One Indian Tear.

The end result was that what had been a mostly dance-oriented bill
turned into a mostly noise/experimental show, which I opened to an
empty club. People gradually filtered in, but they were not a
dancefloor audience — they huddled in the back by the bar throughout
my whole set, which doesn’t get the performer juices flowing exactly.
I was essentially playing electronic music for people with little
affinity for it. Ironically about half of the 20 or so people there
came up afterwards and said they really enjoyed it, so maybe I made a
few conversions in the process.

At any rate, I didn’t get a recording of my set so last night I sat
down at home to knock one out based on the tracks I’d pulled together
for the saturday night show. I can’t really say in words the feeling
I was going for but I think I achieved it. After all when you try to
make some sort of art the real goal is to do something unexplainable
and irreducable, isn’t it? The outer intellectual goal was to make
something that incorporated a lot of music made over a the past 30
years, and yet incorporate a bunch of relatively recent tracks that
have been knocking me out. Emotionally it was a sort of escape from
recent craziness, a retreat to higher ground, if you will.

Most of the tracks are pretty obvious choices, but they were obvious
because they were tracks that grab everyone’s ears. Nothing that has
been played out to the point it’s annoying, and I hope there are at
least a couple of surprises.

The tracklisting is as follows:

1. Ectomorph - Lost Angles (Manyangles Version)
2. Adult - Nightlife
3. ESG - Dance
4. Chaircrusher - Purple
5. John Tejada - Sweet On The Walls
6. Five Mic Cluster - Basildon Lover
7. Ame - Sun Sugar
8. Alif Tree - Forgotten Places (Moodyman Remix)
9. Arthur Russell - Get Around To It
10. Thom Yorke - Harrowdown Hill
11. Liquid Liquid - Caverns
12. Carl Craig - My Machines
13. GrandCru - Out Of Isolation
14. Omar S - Untited B01 (Detroit EP AOS-2)
15. Tolga Fidan - Tanbulistan
16. Fred Giannelli - Delirious
17. Modern Lovers - Pablo Picasso
18. Gregory Tresher - A Thousand Nights
19. Sebbo - Watamu Beach (Moritz Von Oswald Rework)
20. Laurie Anderson (Henry Cullen Bootleg remix)
21. Coldplay - Talk (Francois K Dub)
22. Eamonn Doyle - Red Shift
23. As One - Chiaro
24. Blackdown/Burial - Crackle Dub
25. Burial - Archangel
26. Reinhardt Voigt - Charge Your Dreams
27. Coolzey vs Chaircrusher - Easy Pimp
28. Terrence Parker vs Joe Smooth — Love’s Got Me High/Forever My Love

There’s some of Chaircrusher’s own original material in there, as well as a house mash-up he did at the very end that works quite well. This will kick off a string of really nice mixes over the next few weeks here at ISM. Enjoy!

Download the mix here.

Last Saturday night saw one of the most eagerly anticipated nights of the year in Dublin finally arrive, when the legendary Dopplereffekt rolled into town for their debut (and most likely only) Dublin show. I’d first heard wind of this gig as far back as March, when at Bloc Weekend whispers abounded of the attempt to put on a night of nights; Dopplereffekt performing an early gig to be followed by Dutch maestro’s Alden Tyrell and Intergalactic Gary rocking up for Lunar Disko’s 2nd Birthday party.

The fact that Doppler’s show was being put into place by not one, not two but THREE promoters was proof enough how much of an event this night would be. I arrived up at The Sugar Club just before 7.30 and already a small queue had formed while Gerald Donald stood outside smoking a cigarette looking decidedly normal. I’d had a (very) late night the night before so I made no attempt at any sort of small talk with the man himself, I just stared at him for a bit instead.

Ireland’s own don of electro; Decal, was on warm up duties but there was to be no electro from Alan tonight, instead opting for darker, dense compositions rarely relying on any beats, more so on feedback and distorted sounds. I hadn’t expected any traditional electro from the warm up and it was an obvious pointer to the type of set Dopplereffekt were going to perform. To be honest anyone who was expecting Dopplereffekt to storm out with Pornoactress or it’s ilk obviously haven’t really paid any attention to them post-Gesamtkunstwerk. Also the fact that The Sugar Club is a seated venue made it a bit of a no-brainer really.

By the time Dopplereffekt arrived on stage the venue was pretty much packed, proving that Donald and his many guises still matter, with a mixed crowd of younger clubbers through to some who may not have seen the inside of too many dance-halls in the last few years. Doppler kicked off the show as they planned to continue with heavy washes of synths both on backing track and being performed by Donald on his Korg. For the first 15 minutes or so his female companion did an excellent job of staring straight at him, and eh, not much else. Due to the coupling of a serious hangover and a few sneaky whiskeys I am unable to start reeling off track names, but I did hear some of Myon-Neutrino/Z Boson and (I think) “Non Vanishing Harmonic Spinor” from Calabi Yau Space, but this was less about individual tracks and more about mood and spectacle. As the photo above shows, the performance consisted of the pair sitting facing each other backed by projections - some of which amusingly revealed Donald even though he wore a mask on stage. It was deceptively simple but also strangely engrossing, as their fingers would twitch in time to the music before hitting the keys. As with the Calabi album there was very little in the way of beats, mostly random sounds triggered by Donald as those deep menacing synths came in and out, at times even sounding like an out-take from the Blade Runner score.

Before the end though they would concede somewhat and for the last ten minutes or so some classic Doppler beats were dropped, prompting some of us at the front to even get up and have a little shimmy. They had very slowly but surely built up to this and it was great to see that after 45 minutes of the more avant garde side of Donald they could show that no one has bettered that crisp electro sound that had all of us fall in love with them originally. With as little fanfare as their arrival, the pair got up and exited stage left with no acknowledgement to the crowd, instead leaving us dancing to a loop that could have gone on for another 20 minutes.

While personally I thoroughly enjoyed the show (as did many others), it was not without it’s detractors, with the main criticism being just how much of the show was actually live. “When are they gonna change the CD” and “the milli vanilli of electro” were just 2 digs over heard, but if there is anyone who couldn’t give a fuck about peoples perceptions its Gerald Donald. As I mentioned this was just as much about the mood and spectacle of the show, one as original as much of the groups output. Congrats to the promoters for choosing the perfect venue in The Sugar Club, an environment perfect for the show, with its tiered candle lit seating and table arrangements. It certainly made for a nice change to your typical club environment.

With the sounds of Journey of the Dragons playing out over the PA many slipped away down to part 2 of the night where Intergalactic Gary and Alden Tyrell raised the roof off for the Lunar Disko lads 2nd birthday party. Intergalactic Garys seemless mix of classic electro and italo with newer cuts (including one of John Dalys new 12″s) was the perfect precursor to Tyrells new live set, generating the best atmosphere I’ve seen in a Dublin club in a very very long time. Tyrell dropped classics such as Love Explosion and Hills of Honolulu along with newer bombs from his latest releases on Moustache and his The Hasbeens guise, with the crowd singing along while flinging a blow up Llama through the dancefloor (obviously) and generally going nuts. I stumbled out of the dancefloor literally dripping with sweat, gasping for fresh air, unable to dance anymore as Gary finished off the last half hour of what is sure to go down as a classic night.

No doubt speaking for many in attendance, I’d like to give a big vocodored shout out to the Electric City, Test and Lunar guys for putting together such an unforgettable night.