The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I keep thinking I can do this post, what with all the meeting cancellations, but stuff keeps getting in the way. Let's see if I can close this out as the week ends. I've been a bit stressed out of late so this is mostly gentle relaxing stuff. Not ear-filler, but engaging soothing sounds.

https://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/thomas-jack-symphony-original
Thomas Jack (http://thomasjackmusic.com/) is a new name to me. He's a young new DJ out of Australia who seems to specialize in deeper house/electronics. This track, however, caught my ear because of the way it uses traditional instruments. The piano/horn segment from about 2:00 to 2:20 is just beautiful and the entire track has symphonic sweep and bright touches. Yes, that's a house beat but I don't think this is like any house you've heard before.

https://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/felix-cartal-feat-ofelia-new
CRNKN (https://soundcloud.com/crnkn) sounds like someone who should be producing hard-hitting floor clearers, but this is a vocal-driven, low BPM, electro-house track. The original is Ofelia (https://www.facebook.com/ofeliasings) a classically trained vocalist singing for Felix Cartal (http://www.felixcartal.com/) on a track called "New Scene". The track is off Cartal's latest EP, which I intend to grab and may blog again.

https://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/cash-cash-take-me-home-ft-bebe
Another three-parter that mixes two distinct styles. From the top: it's Bebe Rexha (http://www.beberexha.com/#!) a New York-based singer/songwriter fronting for Cash Cash (http://www.cashcashmusic.com/) on a track called "Take Me Home". The original (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDo2SiW3JHU) is a kick-drum heavy track that pushes Rexha's vocals up and into dance space. The Flaxo (https://www.facebook.com/Flaxomusic) remix here is much more chill and stylistically varied, ranging from near vocal trance to prog to moombahton.

https://soundcloud.com/rac/imagine-dragons-on-top-of-the-world-rac-mix
RAC turns in another fine remix. This time he's working with Imagine Dragons' "On Top of the World". The original (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8PrTzLaLHc) is a pleasant hand-clapping dance rock track with afro-carib influences that came out last year. RAC builds up a lusher and more layered sound than the original, while still keeping its bouncy spirit intact.

https://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/sub-focus-turn-back-time
With any luck the previous four tracks have you relaxed and feeling like you can let go, in which case you want to listen to this one. It's Steerner remixing Sub Focus's "Turn Back Time." The original (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWRJbHmvtIU) just came out in September and it starts out as a nice vocal house banger but drifts into annoying bloopy electronica. Steener strips out the most annoying bits and amps up the electro-house banger bits. A definite improvement on the original.

https://soundcloud.com/divideandkreate/get-lucky-divide-kreate-remix
This track has been making me crazy with that "I know this..." feeling. Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) is at it again, remixing favorites. This is his bootleg remix of the popular Daft Punk "Get Lucky". It's a good mix. What's making me crazy is the opener - the first 25 or so seconds where D&K has put the string bits. In the track comments I asked him about it and he said he played it from the vocal track. Which is fine, but that just tells me Daft Punk lifted this from something else. But frelled if I can figure out what.

https://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/ghostbusters-kill-paris-remix
And finally, a remix to get you grinning. Kill Paris (https://soundcloud.com/killparis) takes on the thematic track from the Ghostbusters movies, giving it what he calls a "future funk" sound. That's not a bad descriptor for something that has heavy fuzz electronica but the fundamental timings of funk. It's a loving and danceable cover of the original.

I'm off tomorrow so I want to see how many music tabs I can close out today....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_BRv9wGf5pk
This is an old song - Snap! doing "The Power" - with an interesting history, which is laid out in interesting detail in the Wikipedia page. It holds up well despite its age and is a fun re-watch.

http://www.4shared.com/audio/vVmVa92o/Sarah_Connor-_Under_my_Skin.html
I wish I could find an official video for this one. Unfortunately the most popular video on YouTube is this track over an Asian male pop group. It's still Connor's song, "Under My Skin", but it was sold separately for English-language and Asian recording. There's a non-English recording of this, which I expect goes with that video but someone mashed up the two and it makes my teeth ache to watch. Connor's vocals are rich and sweaty and even though I can detect some of the places where they autotuned her I still think she's head-and-shoulders above most of the pop divas. Yes, I do have a thing for Motown/soul-influenced sexy music - does this surprise anyone?

http://soundcloud.com/villamakesmusic/adele-rolling-in-the-deep-villa-remix
http://www.myspace.com/villanese
Speaking of current pop divas, Adele continues to impress me. I've been trying to use her as an example to explain to my kids what a good voice sounds like (and why Katy Perry and Ke$ha and their ilk are just not this good). Like Connor, there are definite deep soul and R&B influences there. I picked this one off the Villa page as a real stand-out. The other Villa mixes are fun, thumpy, dance-club fodder. I recommend just tossing all the mixes into the MySpace player and letting them spin. They start with good material and come out with good results.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/07/illegal-sunday-frail-limb-purity-britney-spears-v-the-glitch-mob.html
I really want to like this track. I do. I think Britney is maturing into a decent singer and I think Frail Limb Purity have real flashes of brilliance in mixing. But unfortunately what this mix shows is that if you mix Britney with a Glitch Mob track, you get a good track that is only a little bit worse than a pure Glitch Mob track. I'm sure there will be mixes of "We Can Make the World Stop" that I will prefer listening to. This one is just not quite there.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/07/illegal-sunday-divide-kreate-blue-beat.html
It's been a while since I put on a mash that made me sit upright and say "Oh no, you did NOT just do that." Oh yes, he did. Divide & Kreate (http://www.divideandkreate.com/) put Michael Jackson's classic "Beat it" up against New Order's equally classic "Blue Monday" and then sped the whole thing up to modern dance BPM. I can't decide whether to laugh or be appalled, which is probably the intended effect.

It's been a while since I posted any music so I've got a bucket of open tabs. What follows is a sampling of the most awesome stuff in a while.

http://soundcloud.com/kleptones/a-night-at-the-hip-hopera
This is an hour and eighteen minutes of concentrated AWESOME. It's a huge flashback to things that were popular - and being remixed - in 2004 when the set was put together. There's a heavy helping of 90s and 80s favorites and some of the best hip-hop from the first part of the decade. The Kleptones have been brilliant for longer than I realized.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/divide-kreate-tarzan-gurls.html
There's this notion of a "summer song" that's hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. Generally it's up-tempo, not too fast, and just bouncy enough you won't get in trouble blaring it out speakers next to your beach towel. Here Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) give us one such tune by mashing up Katy Perry's "California Gurls" with Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". Katy Perry's tune was already listed on Billboard's "Songs of the Summer" chart (http://www.mtv.com/videos/katy-perry/527631/california-gurls.jhtml) and what Divide & Kreate has done is keep the essential female vocal from Perry and laid it over the electronica and boy-band backing sounds of Baltimora's one-hit wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0n9Dv6XnY).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/dj-fresh-gold-dust.html
Also in the summer-sound category, but in a very different way, is DJ Fresh's "Gold Dust." Where the first one was very white and beach, this one is black and inner-city playground. You absolutely MUST watch the video for this - it features some of the most amazing double-dutch I've seen in a long time. How Fresh (http://www.myspace.com/freshbadcompany) who is himself a white boy from the UK, managed to put this together is beyond me.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/superiddol-superman-simon-iddol.html
At last something new from Simon Iddol himself. Well, it's not precisely new - all the tracks in this mix are ones I've heard before. Iddol and a friend who DJs as Superman put this five-track sampler together as a promo for their July shows. It's a blast!

http://www.rhythmscholar.com/
Once upon a time the legendary Fatboy Slim teamed up with Christopher Walken to make a video for "Weapon of Choice." The video showed off Walken's dancing skills - he's no Fred Astaire but he was pretty damned good. Recently someone pointed me to a remix not just of the song, but of the accompanying video. The video was done by someone calling himself gfxdave99 (http://www.youtube.com/user/gfxdave99) to match a mix of the song done by Rhythm Scholar - a Chicago-area DJ. Well, if you're looking at the Scholar's page in another tab (as you should be) you can see he's got six different mixes of just this one tune. All the mixes are good, provided you don't object strenuously to scratch-dub.

And below that, my kind of music heaven. A dozen funky mixes of old favorites. Everything from Tom Tom Club to (gods help us) Billy Squier, with side trips into The Fixx, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Queen. The mix style tends to be somewhat similar from mix to mix - scratch/stutter, some beat-shifting, lots of sampling, and some very clever layering. Plus phat horns and funky extra bonus bits.

I particularly fell in love with his Art of Noise remix. I'm a long-time AoN fan(*) to begin with, and nobody remixes AoN. They've remixed themselves several times, but their sound is generally too odd and experimental for most folk. Rhythm Scholar does an amazing job blending together at least 8 different AoN tunes that I could identify, sampling stuff from their very early days to more recent pieces.

(*) Back in the days when music came on things called "records" that were made of "vinyl" I used to be an impoverished college student. Which meant I couldn't afford new records. I used to ride my bike down to Philly two or three times a month and pick over the really cheap offerings in the used record stores down there. The place was on South Street, near Zipperhead, back when that part of town was punk and slightly edgy, which it most certainly is not these days. I once saw Siouxsie and the Banshees doing promo songs from the back of a stripped down flatbed trailer truck down there. But I digress...

Anyway, one of those days I'm pawing through the bins and I realize that there's something different playing from the store's speakers. It's nohow like the usual 80s pop. It's kind of oddly clashing... and it appears to feature chainsaws. But it's got a beat. Ah yes, that beat. I abandon any of my usual youthful pretense of being hip and hurry up to the counter. What the heck is that? It's The Art of Noise, "Beatbox" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyGdk23KNU). The clerk, who doesn't have to pretend to be hip, motions me to be quiet and just listen. Which I do. And then I buy out every AoN record he has in the store, undergrad student budget be damned.

Once upon a time, record stores had clerks who Knew Things. Their jobs let them listen to music all day long and pass judgment on the good, the bad, and the things that were so good everyone ought to know about them but nobody did. When I blog about music I feel like I'm paying back a little of what I got from people like that unnamed clerk in that South Street record store.