The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I've had most of this hanging around for a while, but doing these posts requires a lot of link-following and that's hard to do when on a crappy wireless and then LJ was DDOSed which makes posting tricky and I hate losing mid-post and blahblahexcusesexcuses OK enough, just listen to this. Bonus: a story at the end!

http://djsteveboy.com/groovelectric.html
DJ Steveboy's last mix of 2012 was an extremely solid deep house mix, with several tracks showing the new/old funk influences that first got me listening to Steveboy's sounds. His output last year was somewhat inconsistent and I didn't link to mixes that I thought had weak sections. This one is an hour of great background/dance/get-stuff-done mixing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDiNSyJRDhY
Beats Antique put out the video last month for their latest single, "Skeleton Key". The vid is a delightful, if slightly creepy, stop-animation cross of steampunk and Dark Crystal. The song is pretty much in their traditional instrumental vein, though with somewhat more orchestration and a richer mix than you tend to expect them to have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q0dsG8fTHY&feature=youtu.be
http://soundcloud.com/mashupgermany/mashup-germany-top-of-the
Lots of people linked to the first one, which is DJ Earworm's traditional year-end mash-up. Frankly I'm underwhelmed. I get that he's limiting himself to the Billboard top 25 list but the whole thing feels technically proficient yet uninspired. You can hear around 0:55 he's sort of built to the peak and then it kind of limps along from there.

I vastly prefer the second link, which is Mashup Germany's year-end mega-mix. It's 33 tracks (!) and it's a much better effort. It builds slowly up to about 1:22 and then you get several treats of sliced, sped-up, and interlaced bits that you're likely to recognize if you listened to pop music in the past year and then there are little ear-teasers that leave you going "wait, what?"

http://soundcloud.com/nickraymondg/krewella-killin-it-mutrix-1
Another new-to-me find picked off the SoundCloud dashboard this chop-step remix by Thissongissick of Krewella's "Killin' It" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ9-1WD-rBA) is awesome. The original is kind of frenetic and seems unable to decide whether it's hip-hop or dubstep. The remix is like "f all that; throw some electronica in there, smooth this out, and scratch the vocals all up". It's totally stomp-dancin' good.

http://audioporncentral.com/2012/11/frail-limb-purity-bare-naked-ladies-v-porter-robinson.html
You really don't see a lot of BNL mash-ups, so this one stood out from the start. Frail Limb Purity pushes it almost over the edge but if you can make it to 1:45 the mix really takes off. It helps if you like the underlying tracks (which I do) and feel like getting up and dancing (which kind of gets me odd looks at work, but who cares).

----- Story time -----

People think I know a lot of music, but mostly I listen to a lot and look up things when I am curious about them. Sometimes, though, I forget to be curious. For over two decades I've been listening to TGU - Trans-Global Underground - and you should, too. They were one of the first to do world fusion, and they've been wild and fun and experimental and different every time. It was through TGU that I found Natacha Atlas and Fun-Da-Mental, among other things.

For a long time one of my (our) favorite tunes of theirs has been "Nile Delta Disco" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XnEP-mzv90&feature=youtube_gdata) which is a fantastic mix of jazz, swing, and African-inspired beats under some psychedelic vocals. It begins with the invocation "Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies..." which amused me but I didn't think much about at the time. After all, the song's main refrain includes the line "Egyptian pharoahs fell from the sky/ fell from the sky and played the blues" and it assures us that "...the River Nile is like a disco." So, y'know.

Scroll forward to the long weekend just past in which I'm catching up on my back reading and I come across this piece on Boingboing: http://boingboing.net/2012/12/24/lord-buckley-meets-groucho-mar.html

That is Groucho Marx so you should not be drinking anything while watching it. I love all things Groucho, so I'm merrily listening along when HOLY CRAP WHAT DID HE JUST SAY?!?
Go on, listen to it, I'll wait.

Of course, I then have to search out Lord Buckley on the Web and be ashamed that I've managed to be ignorant of this corner of high American weirdness for so long. I tried to make up for it in a small way by adding this reference to his page on Wikipedia. And now I know a bit more about music and music history and how influences can travel than I did before. Maybe you do, too.

If you made it this far here's a little reward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfgdjfgtJw4
This is Natacha Atlas and TGU doing what they did best together - song and sound and drums and oh the beauty of her voice.

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.

Audiporn Central continues to be a prolific source of new music. As with anything new, Sturgeon's Law does tend to apply. Here's some of what I think falls in the good 10%. If you aren't moved by these then I don't know what to do for you.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/03/jacques-renault-ones-twos-mix.html
Jacques Renault (http://www.jacquesrenault.com/), despite the name, is an American DJ/producer. This here is one seriously funky mix stream from the man whose other work seems to be much more conventional disco-influenced non-vocal dance music. This "Ones & Twos Mix" seems to be sampling a bit of everything, but it's laid down over a nice mellow bass mix. APC calls it "spaced out" but it doesn't feel that way to me - it's much more Motown meets Deep Purple meets P Funk.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/03/junkie-xl-the-fairlight-ep.html
And now you get to find out just what kind of a serious old-school electro-nerd I am. I adore Jan Hammer even if I did get sick of hearing the Miami Vice soundtrack on infinite repeat in the 90s. Track one of this three parter features the man doing what he does best, which is hard unapologetic electric chords and swooping notes sustained over whatever else is going on. In this case, it's Junkie XL (http://www.myspace.com/junkiexl) whose solo stuff also features just the kind of driving beats that make this extra-excellent. The underlying pace and style of this EP are very similar to Junkie XL's popular "Cosmic Rave" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WaTJiPLIHc).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/03/frail-limb-purity-drake-v-sub-focus.html
Speaking of driving beats, this is a brilliant mash from Frail Limb Purity (http://fraillimbpurity.wordpress.com/) that uses the electro- thunder of Sub Focus's "Rock It" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdJgwf-_HGY) and where Rock It tends to have gaps and sort of fade out, this mix fills in with the rap lyrics and rhythms from Drake's "Forever" which features some of the bigger names in recent pop-rap. I'm not that fond of the Forever track by itself, but it works very well here.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/03/florence-the-machine-dog-days-are-over-2010-version.html
I have to admit that Florence is really growing on me. The more I listen the more I like her voice and I think she can get by without being weird for weird's sake (*cough*gaga*cough*). That said, you should watch the video, which is... um, really weird. And yet it has a beauty and sort of coolness that keeps me watching. Combining good use of saturate colors with random exploding people? Win!