The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Just out of 3.5 days of solid work meetings and I need some other sounds in my brain. Fortunately I have this lovely set of music tabs to share with you. Also, I feel it necessary to pass on a particular musical milestone. This past weekend I was rockin' out to DJ Steveboy's 10th anniversary Groovelectric mix and got Thing 1 interested enough to listen. And then he downloaded it to his iPod. The torch, it is passed. FUNK4EVAH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sntzSLk05Eo
Bessie Jones also deserves to be remembered forever, and here Enzo Siffredi takes her blues vocal hook from "Sometimes" and uses it in his own take on the track. White Americans like me probably recall this hook best because Moby used it in his very popular tune "Honey" in the late 90s (1998, Wikipedia tells me). The description explicitly credits Scorsese and and Berlin's Underground, which is quite the pair to draw off of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVERjAdaWdg
The All Good Funk ALliance put this out a couple years ago but I just came across it. Keith Mackenzie and DJ Fixx give us a fast-talking breakbeat track with a definite funky vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B8W6pe6ReM
Shifting gears into a high-pitched electro-synth vibe, "The Blitz" - from Swanky Tunes & Sunstars - gives us an energetic three minutes. The video is fun to watch as well, a little action-adventure, a little parkour, and a funny ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b74YehJMEQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GISQcX-C_gQ
I've been playing around with a new station on Pandora that's based on music similar to Pegboard Nerds so a lot of P.N. has shown up and I'll probably link some of it so I can talk about it. The first track is Pegboard Nerds' remix of Elizaveta's "hero". On the one hand, I'm not all that much of a d&b fan and P.N. also use some dubstep tropes that were hot a couple years ago but feel worn now. On the other hand, Elizaveta's vocals make this this track smokin' hot. European vocal trance has brought some operatically trained singers to EDM, which I really like. Elizaveta has that kind of training and although there's a pretty heavy production hand on this track her voice still lifts this track out of the realm of the ordinary. I also like the way it works in unusual tempos and beat changes.

The second link is her original version, which is much more orchestral/choral and more clearly drawn from European folk roots. I can see why P.N. wanted to remix it and I think the pair go well together as two takes on one idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxniucMF2ck
Also out of that same messing around comes Nick Thayer, whom I stumbled over once a few years ago. This track is also a few years old but it has aged well. It's electro, hip-hop, and glitchy. I like that EDM has moved away from the more glitch-filled styles of a few years ago, but it's nice to revisit once in a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iKekphXwQg
One of the things glitchy electro evolved into was glitch-hop, of which this is an example. It's still got many of the wub and fuzz effects from the earlier tracks but now it's integrating new sounds. This one, "Viper" from Howla & WBBL, is obviously a tribute to big band dance tunes from the mid-20th century. This is still not a sound I'm going to listen to a lot, but as I'm putting together a new stream interesting variations pop up and I'll blog things that catch my ears.