Panutup

Hailing from the small town of Svelvik, located just southwest of Oslo, Norway -- an unlikely but proven city to breed and export influential electro artists -- Joachim Dyrdahl, otherwise known as diskJokke, makes acid house beats perfect for moving dancefloors and lays down chilled cinematic pop ideal for lounging. After going to school to study mathematics in a Trondheim university, he relocated to Oslo and started combining his classical and electro-disco backgrounds as a producer. He met up with Prins Thomas, who released two of diskJokke's tracks as 12" singles on his Full Pupp label.

Sagara was commissioned by Norway's Øya festival, which provided Dyrdahl the resources to travel to a place of his choosing and study music. After sampling musicians in Bali and Java, Dyrdahl abandoned the idea of a dance album and instead focused on incorporating the tones and modalities of Gamelan music into pillow-soft mood pieces.
The album travels in a slow build towards my favorite track, Panutup, the most transcendent song which lifts the tonal haze, meandering into Vangelis-esque synthesizer pop and then, unexpectedly, into a few blissful minutes of full-on 4/4 beat that feels, on arrival, like the aural equivalent of a tropical sunrise. Dyrdahl spins this sudden percussion into an uplifting Balearic anthem before fading it out again. Which is not to suggest that the rest of the album feels like it's missing anything, or is in any way inferior to Diskjokke's dance-oriented output.

Treat your ears to Panutup here!


Buy a copy of DiskJokke Sagura here.

Mozaik

Zomby’s Dedication is not your garden variety dub-step. It’s not the sound that’s peppered into the latest Britney Spears album, nor a Katy Perry remix. Yet, it is not a carbon copy of Burial, and it’s not wobbly or dirty like an album by Distance. What we have here ladies and gentleman is stripped down dub. While the overtones on the album are somewhat melancholic, and hey, that’s kind of what the pioneers of the genre were going for, after slowing down U.K. styles of Two-Step and Garage (not your father’s garage rock), they’re not enough to be outright depressing.

Zomby as a producer has extracted from many electronic music styles—synthy 80’s sounds, electro, video game soundtracks, and ambient music. Prior to Dedication, he had released a number of EPs in which one could say served as sketches for his experiments. If you visit his Myspace page, for instance, the varied songs you will hear are pretty different from his current output. That is exactly what lured me into Zomby—seeing that he has roots in mixing classic raver kid club cuts, all the way to synthy gems that signaled to me that Zomby was interested more in craft and not trend; beyond someone trying to make a name for himself in the latest hip subgenre in techno, which by the way, has been around for nearly a decade.
Since Dedication isn’t as wobbly or grimey as other albums within the genre, it might seem subcategorized as comfy ambient music. However, it’s too jittery and restless and rhythmic to work. Yet it’s not quite the album one might buy if one is a hardcore dubstep fan. This is precisely the quality I like about Zomby—not tightly fixated to the expected parameters of the genre, bringing instead crunchy beat experiments with ethereal sound-washes, the kind made by a studio loner stringing together little oddities. It’s definitely headphone music—so many nuances that you want to be able to hear every last snippet.

I believe that the songs on Dedication build up to a moment of dark euphoria, as oxymoronic as that may seem. He alternates between average length songs and some which are under a minute long. It’s definitely a journey, with the denouement being “Mozaik”, the sixteenth and final song. While this appears on other blogs as the single, it makes the most sense after hearing the fifteen tracks before it. Enjoy and shake your booty a little!

Take a listen:



Get your copy of Zomby Dedication here.

Take My Soul

Thievery Corporation's Rob Garza and Eric Hilton are back with Culture of Fear, their sixth studio album. By now, most people are familiar with their sophisticated, impeccably crafted musical soundscapes that reflect not only their broad appreciation for diverse styles of music (everything from Brazilian bossa nova and Jamaican dub reggae to vintage film soundtracks and psychedelic space rock), but also their take on the complicated times in which we live.

Despite its pointed title, Culture of Fear is not quite as politically minded as Thievery Corporation's previous studio album. While dubwise tracks such as “Overstand” and “False Flag Dub,” along with the Mr. Lif feature “Culture of Fear,” continue the themes of 2008’s Radio Retaliation, a higher number of cuts -- including “Take My Soul,” “Where It All Starts,” “Is It Over?,” and “Safar (The Journey)” -- feature the duo’s heavy-lidded grooves with seductive female vocals, particularly Rochester's own ex-pat, LouLou. “We’re probably more radical in our political beliefs than most of the hardcore punk bands,” Hilton says, “but at the same time, we’re realistic about what we can actually do. We feel like our role is to be commentators.” Adds Garza: “The best thing we can do is try to open people’s minds.” For both Hilton and Garza, the seeds for their shared philosophy were sown while growing up near the nation’s capitol, which has spawned an abundance of progressive punk bands over the years, such as Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. “We’re influenced by that mentality, but the music doesn’t need to be about super aggressive guitars or hard-charging beats to convey that feeling,” Hilton says. Their musical palatability serves as a means of more subtly purveying their ideologies without turning a potential audience off to them.

Thievery Corporation is my brand of "easy listening". It does not make them weak, nor unimportant or a duo to write off. Rather, it's what I put on when I want a consistent, mature, and intriguing journey as I am working.

Take a listen to Take My Soul, featuring LouLou here.



Buy your copy of Culture of Fear here.