Thinking out loud...

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^Very cool. I wouldn't even know what to do with all that gear...good lord!

[wub]

SPIN's 1994 cover story "Subterranean Homeboy Blues"

This is Beck. He's not a slacker, an angst-ridden mouthpiece, or a loser, baby. He's a cosmic naïf with one foot on the zeitgeist wahwah pedal and a scary inner-bluesman aching to turn it loose. MIKE RUBIN wonders if you'll still love him tomorrow.

"The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium," wrote social historian Mike Davis in the prologue to his 1990 dissection of L.A. development, City of Quartz, "is from the ruins of its alternative future." Granted, the specific ruins Davis was discussing were the crumbled vestiges of the former utopian socialist hamlet of Llano del Rio, its vacant desert acreage awaiting annexation as a subdivision for the white flight of the 21st century; and, of course, his definition of alternative had nothing at all to do with a contrived corporate radio format. But, oh well, whatever, never mind. I figured that the best place to view Los Angeles's "alternative" future was from the ruins of its indie-rock past, from the hieroglyphic squiggles of its bands' promotional graffiti, from the faded small print on its wrinkled-up paycheck stubs.

And so that future, as embodied at the moment in the scrawny frame of Beck, a.k.a. Beck Hansen, a.k.a. Beck Campbell, 23-year-old folk-rap-noise balladeer and MTV Buzz Bin sensation, is busy excavating the rubble of his own past for me.

"See that sign over there?" asks Beck, pointing out the car window as we drive down Hyperion Avenue in the fading light of day. "I painted that sign." I crane my neck to see a plain brick building, its facade festooned with big block letters — THRIFT STORE. The nondescript storefront testifies to how far the sandy-haired urchin has come in a very short time. Only two years ago he was painting electric pink and blue signs on lingerie stories, eating Chee-tos, and making living-room cassettes of his twisted pseudo-folk songs for friends. Today, he still eats Chee-tos and makes living-room cassettes, only now his single, "Loser" — recorded in just a casual couch-potato scene — has been the hottest request on the radio stations across the country. An irresistible snatch of honky hip hop, it's a demi-dadaist rap in the (somewhat clunky) cadence of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," laid over a funky backbeat and grafted to the most infectious slide-guitar lick since the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" was drafted into a beer commercial. His debut album, Mellow Gold, originally slated to be released on L.A. mini-indie Bongload Records, has instead come out on mammoth DGC.

The critical avatars of the boomer media have anointed him a spokesman for his generation, an honorific with slightly less power than the Prince of Wales — call it the Prince of Wails — and ten times the royal pain in the ass. Such a burden sits uncomfortably on Beck's head and shoulders, which are currently covered by a blue polyester shirt and a leather-brimmed baseball cap with the Ford Pinto logo on the front. (The Beastie Boys' Mike D, an acquaintance of Beck's and no '70s sartorial slouch himself, says Beck is "one of the best dressers I've hung out with in a while," citing in specific his corduroy flares, Jordache jeans with the hems let out, and "a thrift-store T-shirt collection that can rival anyone's.") The Dylan comparisons are dangerous enough and this spokesperson stuff just doesn't wash with him. "Jesus!" exclaims Beck at the very notion of being a mouthpiece for millions. "You'd have to be a total idiot to say: 'I'm the slacker generation guy. This is my generation, we're gonna fuckin' — we're not gonna fuckin' show up.' I'd be laughed out of the room in an instant."

So let's set one thing straight: Beck is no slacker. "I've always tried to get money to eat and pay my rent and shit, and it's always been real hard for me," he says, affecting a certain amount of B-boy swagger. "I've never had the money or time to slack."

For the past year, Beck's been collecting unemployment checks after being laid off from his $4.00-an-hour video-store job, unable to find any work at all. He doesn't even watch TV; though he's performed a song called "MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack" for the last few years, he's never really seen the channel. "I was blissfully ignorant," he admits.

"If you told me a year ago I was going to have a record deal, I would have laughed at you," he says. And not just one deal. In addition to Mellow Gold, he has a new album on Flipside, Telepathic Astromanure, as well as an album and a seven-inch single to be released on K Records this summer. With a handful of indie EPs and the full-length cassette Golden Feelings (from Sonic Enemy) out last year, Beck is rapidly becoming as prolific as a low-fi Prince.

The tour continues. Passing a prefab-looking shopping strip, he points out the former location of the video store that laid him off, now itself a figment of the strip mall's past. On Sunset Boulevard he motions toward Tang's Donut Shop, an all-night pastry hut where he would hang at 4:00 A.M. getting a "nice sugar rush" while watching homeless guys play high-speed chess. Further down Sunset, Beck points out a revolving sign for a podiatry office. On one side of the sign is a "before" cartoon foot, propped up on crutches and sporting a miserable frown; on the other is the after-care foot, beaming with post-appointment relief. The sign gets turned off every night. A few years back, Beck lived in a house right behind it. He and his roommates would sit around at dusk, drinking beers and waiting for the sign to stop spinning. If the sign came to a halt and the happy side faced the house, he says, they'd head out for action, but if the sad foot pointed in their direction, they'd call it a night.

He's had jobs moving refrigerators and furniture. He worked at children's birthday parties as a hot dog man, serving root beer and hot dogs to little kids. As his song "Beercan" attests, he quit his job blowing leaves, but not before his leaf-blower ended up on stage with him as a musical instrument. "It's a very large population here," he says of leaf-blowers. "There's a leaf-blower contingent. There's no union that I know of so far, but there's certainly a spiritual brotherhood. They are the originators of noise music. It's like a cross between a Kramer guitar and a jet pack."

Later, he tells me, "All the shit that's happening to me now is totally insane, because if you ask anybody that knows me, they'd tell you I've had the worst fucking luck. This is all an avalanche of confetti and balloons and kazoos. Before, the party was just an empty room with a bare light bulb on the ceiling. It was pretty bleak."

When I suggest that with such sentiments he's veering dangerously toward Vedderian angst, he laughs and begins sarcastically whining in a pinched voice, as if lecturing his inner Jeremy. "Oh, the tragedy and the anguish. You just gotta Rage Against the Appliance, man. The toast is burning and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Rage Against the Toaster."

If not for "Loser," Beck would still be a street-fighting folk singer with a distortion pedal and a dream, if not quite a — well, loser. Beck's path through the pop charts is certainly one of the most unlikely sagas in recent music history, a harmonic convergence of indie-rock dissonance and the new A&R paradigm. Gigging at L.A. coffeehouses and clubs and circulating his tapes, Beck was spotted by Bongload co-owner Tom Rothrock, who eventually put the cosmic naïf in touch with producer Karl Stephenson. Goofing around with some songs over at Stephenson's house, Beck laid down some slide guitar which Stephenson recorded, looped, and set to a hip-hop beat. Beck wrote some lyrics on the spot and got on the mike trying to deliver a Chuck D-style rap. "When they played it back, I was like, 'I'm the worst rapper!' So when I did the chorus I was just putting myself down." Meaning the put-down currently being appropriated for an already put-upon generation — "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?" — is actually just Beck's critique of his own Chuck D imitation.

While Beck's collision of folk and rap might seem jarring, to Mike D it's not an incongruous mix at all. "He fits into the nomadic folk tradition of Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the whole traditional coffeehouse balladeer tip," he says. "But his hip-hop side legitimizes Public Enemy as the real folk music of the '80s, because he draws on that aspect just as much as on anything else that he's picked up along the way."

"Loser" sat around for over a year, until Bongload released it in March '93 in a pressing of 500 copies, just for friends and local college radio stations to play. "But last fall these really heavy-duty commercial stations starting playing it," says Beck. "They didn't even have copies. They were making cassette copies off of someone who had a copy of the vinyl." Unwittingly, his song played into the hands of those who would demonize his peers as do-nothings. "I didn't even connect it at all to that kind of message until they were playing it on the radio and I heard it, and they said 'This is the slacker anthem,' and immediately it just clicked and I thought, 'Oh shit, that sucks.' "

Beck hasn't sung the line live in over a year. "It was a fun song to make, and when they take it out of context like that, it's kind of a drag. It's tongue-in-cheek, you know. It's not some anguished, transcendental 'cry of a generation.' It's just like sitting in someone's living room eating pizza and Doritos."

The self-deprecating stance of "Loser" is nothing new. The song mines the rich tradition of self-mocking shemphood that probably made its first dent on the hit parade with the Beatles' 1964 "I'm a Loser," continuing on through the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," and Sebadoh's "Losercore." Sub Pop even put "LOSER" in big block letters on its T-shirts back in 1988. Like rappers' use of "******" and gay activists' use of "queer," embracing "loser" may even have an empowering quality, although it may just as likely indicate that young people have internalized their buzz-word abuse at the hands of boomers.

Now that he's helped perpetuate this generational "Loser" phenomenon, Beck has come up with an alternate plan to combat it. "I'm going to get this gigantic 40-foot-wide pair of pants and get all the kids to get in the pants with me, and we're going to do aerobics. The problem with these kids is they've just gotta get in shape. I'm just going to be sort of the exercise instructor…"

"Of a generation," adds Chris Ballew, Beck's backup guitarist.

"A human aerobics tape, if you will," continues Beck. I suggest that perhaps Neil Young has already explored this oversize theme as a tour motif. No problem, says Beck. "You have to pay homage to your elders. That's part of the new respect with this generation. Once they're more in shape they can pump their fists with confident biceps and all that shit."

Beck's unconventional upbringing prepared him for his sudden explosion into the national zeitgeist. His mother, Bibbe Hansen, was a former scenester at Andy Warhol's Factory, appearing in Warhol's (unreleased) film Prison along with Edie Sedgwick. The daughter of Al Hansen, an artist who was part of the Flexus movement in the 1960s with Joseph Beuys, she raised Beck and his brother with a deliberately hands-off approach, stressing self-reliance. She takes no credit for the way he turned out. "Oh no, he's an original," she says when asked if her bohemian background had somehow influenced him. "He did it all completely on his own. I wouldn't have a clue as to how Beck became Beck."

As a kid, while his single mom was struggling to make ends meet (and his father, whose surname is Campbell, was off starting another family), Beck was shuffled back and forth between L.A. and Kansas, where he lived with his paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister. At age 12, he returned to live with his mom in L.A. where the hardcore scene was in full flower. "She would let punks stay at our house who didn't have a place to stay," says Beck. "She actually claims that Darby Crash crashed out a few times on our living room sofa. She was older, but she kind of felt sorry for them." Beck's mom confirms that her acts of charity reached out to members of the Screamers, the Controllers, and yes, Bobby Pyn, later known by his Germs stage name Darby Crash. "Punk was like the best thing I'd heard in years," she admits. "So yeah, there was always a peanut butter-and-jam sandwich and a couch."

One day over at a friend's house, Beck found a copy of a Mississippi John Hurt record from the '60s. "It was shrink-wrapped, it hadn't even been opened, and it was this insane close-up of his face, sweating, this old, wrinkled face, and I took it," he says with more than a trace of Midwestern twang. "I was going to return it, but I didn't. I loved the droning sound, the open tunings, the spare, beat-down tone. And his voice was so full. He just went through so much shit, and it comes across really, really amazing."

Exhilarated by his discovery, he began banging out tunes on an acoustic guitar that was lying around the house. Around this time, after finishing junior high, he dropped out of school. "I didn't have any friends, it felt kind of like a waste to me." Instead of high school, he'd sit around his room all day playing along with his Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson records.

To get over his shyness about performing, he would go to the park near his home in L.A.'s Little El Salvador neighborhood and serenade the Spanish-speaking soccer players. "There would be these Salvadorian guys playing soccer and this little white boy playing Leadbelly songs. Nobody would listen," he says. "It was really pathetic." Some days he'd board the back of a bus, riding the Vermont line down through South Central and back around up to Hollywood, practicing Fred McDowell slide-guitar licks, changing the setting of the lyrics from the rural south to his mass transit surroundings. Every now and then another musician would come to the back and jam with him, but mostly he got blank stares or verbal abuse.

When he was 16 or 17, Beck began making tapes by recording onto one cassette player, then playing along with that cassette player into another, repeating the procedure until the sound was completely distorted. The screwed-up tape speeds resulted in a helium-enhanced vocal effect of which Beck is still fond. He was also weaned on records by Sonic Youth and atavistic aut-rockers Pussy Galore, whose album he bought out of curiosity at age 15 because he had been "a total James Bond freak" as a little kid. "Pussy Galore was a Bond character so I bought it. It was so distilled and pure. It had all the elements, just turned up." To Beck, noise became like a drug: "Once you start doing it, you can't stop."

In 1989, he set out for New York with a girlfriend, only to have her ditch him soon after arrival. Hanging around the Lower East Side without a place to live, he crashed on friends' couches and in anarchist squats, working a succession of odd jobs, such as taking ID photos at an Upper East Side YMCA and checking jackets at an East Village bookstore. One night, sitting out in front of Chameleon, a bar on 6th Street and Avenue A, picking his guitar, a fellow wayward troubadour played him a number he'd just written about potato chips. Blown away by this deep-fried approach, Beck discovered that such bizarre subject matter was being explored regularly inside Chameleon on their open mike nights, and he immediately took to performing there and at ABC No Rio as part of the "antifolk" scene that had already spawned Roger Manning and John S. Hall.

As he worked at honing his songwriting craft, Beck fell under the charismatic spell of poet-performer Mike Tyler, at the time the publisher of American Idealism Rag, or A.I.R. "He knew Bukka White, you know what I mean?" says Tyler of Beck. "He could get up on stage with somebody else and it just always seemed perfect. All the false alternative hypocrisy just seemed to fade away when I saw him."

Sunlight streams through the window and onto the cluttered record stacks at KXLU out in the Westchester section of L.A. It's a beautiful southern California afternoon, but we're jammed into the college radio station's minuscule offices on the campus of Loyola Marymount University where Beck and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore are broadcasting a live performance. Crammed practically onto each other's laps in the tiny studio, Beck and Moore look like micro- and macro-versions of one another: Moore wearing sunglasses and a plastic visor; Beck, the test tube Moore, in a flannel shirt and his Pinto cap. As the duo serenade a pudgy DJ in a Rollerskate Skinny T-shirt across a table full of recording equipment — Moore assaulting his guitar, Beck gurgling into a mike — the feel is improvisational and the theme is ferocious noise.

"The next song is called — what's the next song called?" wonders Beck. "The next song is called 'Super Christ,' " says Moore, announcing what will probably be a big hit among listeners at this Catholic university. Beck launches his Moog into a succession of burbles and squiggles while Ballew, the only member of his band present, plays percussion by scraping the metal arm that supports the studio mike.

Suddenly, mid-song, Beck runs out of the studio, down the hallway, and disappears. Three minutes later he comes running from the opposite end of the hallway back into the studio. A few songs later, he repeats his disappearing act. Later, he tells me he had set his Moog to play a sustaining note while he ran a lap around the station office, rode down the elevator and back, all with the keyboard continuing to bleat away.

After 30 minutes more of joyful noise, Moore calls it a set and the DJ segues from the super-session into Superchunk. A young station staffer ambles up to Beck as he's unplugging his synthesizer.

"Do you know how to play the piano, or were you just faking it?" she asks.

"I can't really play anything," he replies, glancing up wide-eyed. "I just try to feel my way around it." He pauses, looking perplexed. "Why, did it seem like I was unknowledgeable?"

The girl, perhaps sensing a confrontation between the forces of market-driven conventionality and the free-form impulses of the avant-garde, evades answering the question. Beck packs his Moog into a beat-up old suitcase worthy of a door-to-door salesman and disappears out the studio door. Five minutes elapse. Then Ten. Moore, responsible for driving Beck to another radio appearance, begins searching.

"Maybe he's lost," offers the girl.

"He is lost," answers Moore, speaking generally. "And sometimes he gets found. These days, he gets found a lot. It's like Hendrix, he took drugs to get straight."

It's Friday night, and downtown L.A.'s Troy Café is abuzz with more than just caffeine. A tiny coffeehouse whose narrow confines make CBGB look like Madison Square Garden, the Troy is vacuum-packed for the second public performance by Beck's band, the crowd stretching from the cappuccino machine out on to the street, despite the gig's lack of advertising.

"This is a total harmonica freakout from 1896 called 'One Foot in the Grave,' " announces Beck as he takes the stage alone, launching into a frenzied mouth-organ blues. Stomping his foot on the floor for percussion, bellowing vocals through a fuzzed-out monitor, he sounds like an ancient southern bluesman trapped in a teenage smartass's body. It's roots music that's been peroxided blood.

After the solo number, the rest of the band comes up on stage: guitarist Ballew, whom Beck met in Seattle when Ballew jumped on stage at a solo show to provide human beatbox sounds for "Loser"; bassist Dave Gomez, a burly veteran of several local hardcore bands whom Beck describes to me later as "a Long Beach O.G."; and Joey Waronker, a drummer from a musical family (sister Anna plays guitar in That Dog, father Lenny is the president of Warner Bros. Records). For the time being, the group has decided to call itself "After School Special," although no one is quite sure if ABC-TV will appreciate this.

"This is a crazy little Gary Numan song called 'New Wave Cocksuckers,' " declares Beck, as he and the band break into an indecipherable, high-speed thrash. "What's with these 'LOSER' T-shirts?" he asks between songs, spotting a familiar message on some chests in the crowd. "Don't you people have any self-respect?" A song called "Teenage Wastebucket" begins in a mellow lope, accelerates into a breakneck romp, then suddenly segues back into the slow groove before devolving into a Sonic Youth-style espresso-to-your-skull feedback drone. After Beck flails about like a spastic dervish, nearly trashing Waronker's drum kit, a female voice calls out, "I love you, Beck!" Picking himself up from the floor with an embarrassed grin, Beck replies, "Thanks, mom."

Of course, the heckler probably is Beck's mom: Not only is she the co-owner of the Troy Café, she's also the guitar player for the evening's headlining band, Black cigarette, a punk-rock performance-art group fronted by a six-foot seven-inch African-American drag queen named Vaginal Creme Davis.

The next night is the band's final send-off before the tour, and they've chosen to celebrate the event at Fuzzland, a roving club that changes locations from show to show. Tonight's gig takes place in a dilapidated former bowling alley, with the stage set up at the end of one of the lanes. It's supposed to be a record-release party for Beck's Flipside CD, but in typical indie-rock form, the records aren’t ready yet.

The show moves through various acts of Beckian theater, including auditioning drummers to fill in for an ailing Waronker (who, as Beck tells it, ate "some fucked-up Satan sushi"), before Beck finally relents and gives the people what they want. "This song is called 'K-Rock Set My Dick on Fire,' " he bellows, introducing "Loser." In time to the beat, Beck tugs at a chain dangling above him, turning a neon Miller Genuine Draft sign over the stage on and off. Tonight the Spanish lyric, "Soy un perdidor" (a rough translation of "I'm a loser") sounds like "signed to Polydor," and the chorus's response is "Why don't you kill yourself?" Raw and distorted, Beck's rapping more off-kilter than ever, the song bears little resemblance to the smash hit that's beginning to hang like a dookie rope albatross around his neck. It's somehow fitting that the show comes to a close with Gomez leaping off the stage and squashing several members of the audience sitting on the floor.

"We need about two or more weeks of rehearsal," Ballew tells me after the show. How soon till the band leaves on tour? "Two days." He laughs. "Well, we'll work it out on the road."

As I leave the club, I'm not so sure. I think back to Beck's words in "Pay No Mind": "Give the finger / To the rock'n'roll singer / As he's dancing upon your paycheck." In his live performances, Beck has changed the target from a rocker to a "folk singer." He might be singing about himself, knowing, as he seems to, the ebb and flow of rock's fickle spin cycle. He's a protest singer for the irony age, chronicling the punchline, not the breadline. So he knows full well that someday, probably sooner than later, he'll be the recipient of that bird.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.

[nowaysj]

Always amazes me the roots these people have, in this case going back to Fluxus (a typo in the article).

A manifesto theme lately here on dsf, well here is one for you:

[wub]

THE NEW STEP // Early Dubstep, Grime and FWD radio documentary 2003. BBC Radio 1 documentary from 2003 exploring the emergence of 8-bar Grime and Dubstep from the UK Garage scene in London.

[wub]

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandcult ... ngle-fever

Returning to its Music Nation series with a new documentary, Dazed's Jungle Fever traces the roots of the junglist movement. Marking the final entry in the Channel 4-commissioned series (which has included films on the salad days of UKG and the spread of Baleric culture), the new doc includes interviews with key players in jungle's evolution, tapping artists such as DJ Hype, Fabio & Grooverider, Kenny Ken, Ragga Twins, and others to discuss the history, drug culture, and commercialization of the fast-moving and deeply influential scene.

[wub]

Bicep Details the Five Most Essential Pieces of Its Studio Set-Up

UK duo Bicep (a.k.a. Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar) has undergone quite the transformation over the past few years. Once known primarily for their blogging prowess and a keen ability to unearth quality bits of classic house, Ferguson and McBriar gradually made their way into the international DJ circuit and has boosted that effort by issuing a steady series of high-quality productions. And while Bicep's initial offerings borrowed heavily from '90s house and garage, Ferguson and McBriar have slowly expanded their sonic palette, often flirting with techno and making it so that the Bicep sound is now a lot harder to pin down. A big part of this musical evolution can be attributed to the duo's growth in the studio, not only terms of production skills, but also in terms of how much gear is on hand. With a new 12" slated for release later this month via Aus Music, we asked Ferguson and McBriar to go through their fleet of equipment and tell us about the five pieces that they think are the most essential to their craft.



Roland TR-909
Yeah, yeah the TR-909, you've heard it all before, blah blah… but we've got to include it as a real staple of our workflow. It was one of the first things we bought when we delved into the analog world, and it's safe to say we will never part ways with it. For the kick alone, the 909 is worth it. Kicks are one of those things that are generally important when making dance music, and by just sticking it in a compressor or driving it through a filter, you have thousands of variant kicks to suit your track. I'm not sure where we would be without it now.


Roland SH-101
Like the 909, the SH-101 is renowned in the dance music world as a staple bass machine. This was one of the later things we bought, and with 15 different synths hooked up in the studio at the moment, nothing comes close to her low end. In an ideal world, we would have an ARP 2600—after working in the the studio with Simian Mobile Disco and with Max Pask in NYC, we fell in love with that machine, especially for the low end. But yeah, they are super expensive and not easy to come across in good nick!


Korg Poly-800
Probably one of our favorite synths in the studio is the super-cheap Korg Poly-800. It's not particularly groundbreaking or versatile, but it just has some really really ace noises. For the price and flimsy build, it really packs a massive punch, holding its own with our more expensive polysynths easily. We got this one modded with a pair of Moog filters (Polybeast mod), making it more hands-on and intuitive. You can really take its classic '80s sound and bring it somewhere very dark and distorted!


ARP Odyssey
We originally got the ARP Odyssey for a lead synth and for bass, as we heard it 'really' has got a sound of its own. Some days we are cool and get on with each other, other days it just bounces out of tune every minute… but that's part of the character of this machine. Back in the '70s, people loved it because they could get sounds like no other, but it was notoriously a hard synth to play live; even the smallest tweak can change up everything (you have to tune each of the oscillators by hand). As a studio instrument, that makes it fun—you know you are never going to get the exact same noise out of it twice. Apparently, Korg are going to remake this one like they did the MS-20. It will be very interesting to see what they come up with.


Sherman Filterbank 2
Last but not least, there's the Sherman. This thing is amazing. The fact that it comes with an 'Abuser's Manual' and about 30 warnings how not to blow up your speakers makes you immediately comprehend the power of it. We're sure this thing alone has upped the tinnitus rate a couple of notches—in the wrong hands, it is an untamed beast. The Sherman is basically the best mod for any synth/drum machine you could ever want; run anything through it and there will always be interesting results. Even stick a £10 casio toy keyboard through it, and it will turn into a raved-out Juno Alpha with acid on top. We still don't even know half the capabilities of this thing, but we're looking forward to finding out (with earplugs in).

http://www.xlr8r.com/gear/2014/05/bicep ... ential-pie

[nowaysj]

Gonna get one of those cheap korg polys. Gonna.

[rockonin]

The Roland Sh 101 seem to trending quiet high lately.

[wub]

The Sherman is jokes, found this video where the guy is making bass sounds just by touching an unearthed cable;

[fragments]

This doesn't help my long campaign to convince myself I don't need a Sherman Filterbank. So thanks, wub, thanks a lot.... ;p <3 That is pretty flippin' cool, actually. I am seriously about to just resample this youtube video...

[wub]

[+] Spoiler

an interesting mini documentary on the origination of the Beats movement in LA. If you love hiphop, you love the beats scene, you love to broaden your musical horizon, if you love Los Angeles, you need to just press play.

[+] Spoiler

A documentary film by Coleman and B+, filmed in Sao Paulo, Brasil. In September 2002 Coleman and B+ went to Sao Paulo for nine days. They had a week to link with (hip hop) Brasil, enlist three drummers and find enough breaks to make a break record to guarantee commitment from our oversubscribed DJs back home.

Featuring: Paul Humphrey, James Gadson, Wilson Das Neves, Ivan Mamao Conti, Derf Reklaw, Joao Parahyba, Babu, J.Rocc, Madlib, Cut Chemist, Nuts.

DJ Dusk's Root Down Soundclash: Madlib Vs Cut Chemist (2008) Pt.1
DJ Dusk's Root Down Soundclash: Madlib Vs Cut Chemist (2008) Pt.2
Will.I.Am in Root Down Soundclash 2008 pt.3

Links

Low End Ballers: Five Parties Taking Beats Into The Future
How an old Sketchbook flyer led me to a story I’d forgotten
Bring The Beat Back - interviews
“Prince came to my club” – the birth of the L.A. beat scene, as told by Kutmah

Sounds

Soundcloud
Soundcloud

[wub]

David Guetta has two iPods and a mixer and he just plays tracks – like, ‘Here’s one with Akon, check it out!’,” he says. “Even Skrillex isn’t doing anything too technical. He has a laptop and a MIDI recorder, and he’s just playing his shit … People are, thank God, smartening up about who does what – but there’s still button-pushers getting paid half a million. And not to say I’m not a button-pusher. I’m just pushing a lot more buttons.

I know who you are. You are some record company or failed journalist asshole left over from the last century who is jealous of the way electronic music is working in this brave fast new century. The only button you and people like you are interested in pushing is a nuke for the Palestinians. You come into our system that we have nurtured for the last 25 years, trick hardworking people into giving you their money, con honest promoters, take large sums of money out of the system and then spit back into our faces that YOU are tricking everyone.

“I agree there are loads of people like you who do fake it. It is easy with the software you are using. Don’t worry we are going to find ways of stopping you. You greedy rat head fuck.

we all hit play.

its no secret. when it comes to “live” performance of EDM… that’s about the most it seems you can do anyway. It’s not about performance art, its not about talent either (really its not) In fact, let me do you and the rest of the EDM world button pushers who fuckin hate me for telling you how it is, a favor and let you all know how it is.

I think given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of ableton and music tech in general could DO what im doing at a deadmau5 concert. Just like i think ANY DJ in the WORLD who can match a beat can do what “ANYONE else” (not going to mention any names) is doing on their EDM stages too. have a look, then let me explain:

stuff

okay, so heres me, in a big silly mousehead.. twiddlin a knob or somethin… okay so heres how it works…. Somewhere in that mess is a computer, running ableton live… and its spewing out premixed (to a degree) stems of my original producitons, and then a SMPTE feed to front of house (so tell the light / video systems) where im at in the performance… so that all the visuals line up nicely and all the light cues are on and stuff. Now, while thats all goin on… theres a good chunk of Midi data spitting out as well to a handful of synths and crap that are / were used in the actual produciton… which i can tweak *live* and whatnot… but doesnt give me alot of “lookit me im jimi hendrix check out this solo” stuff, because im constrained to work on a set timeline because of the SMPTE. Its a super redundant system, and more importantly its reliable as FUCK! And obviously, ive done the show a couple hundred times easily by now, so the focus over the past few runs with the “cube show” has been more revolved around adding new audio / visual content to keep it current.

so thats my “live” show. and thats as “live” as i can comfortably get it (for now anyway) of course itll evolve, and change up, but im sure a few key principles will always remain the same.

Im just so sick of hearing the “NO!!! IM NOT JUST DOING THIS, I HAVE 6 TABLES UP THERE AND I DO THIS THIS AND THIS” like… honestly. who gives a fuck? i dont have any shame in admitting that for “unhooked” sets.. i just roll up with a laptop and a midi controller and “select” tracks n hit a spacebar. ableton syncs the shit up for me… so no beatmatching skill required. “beatmatching” isnt even a fucking skill as far as im concered anyway. so what, you can count to 4. cool. i had that skill down when i was 3, so dont give me that argument please.

my “skills” and other PRODUCERS skills shine where it needs to shine… in the goddamned studio, and on the fucking releases. thats what counts… because this whole big “edm” is taking over fad, im not going to let it go thinking that people assume theres a guy on a laptop up there producing new original tracks on the fly. becausje none of the “top dj’s in the world” to my knowledge have. myself included.

you know what makes the EDM show the crazy amazing show that it is? you guys do, the fans, the people who came to appreciate the music, the lights, all the other people who came, we just facilitate the means and the pretty lights and the draw of more awesome people like you by our studio productions. which is exactly what it is. But to stand up and say youre doing something special outside of a studio environment, when youre not, just plain fuckin annoys me.

[Sexual_Chocolate]

i really wanna buy one of those tascam tape thingys.

[fragments]

i really wanna buy one of those tascam tape thingys.

A four track?

[wub]

Dear Hume,

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles … "

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he's not after the "big rock candy mountain," the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?

The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It's not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on "the meaning of man" and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term "god only knows" purely as an expression.) There's very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I'm the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

I'm going to steer clear of the word "existentialism," but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called "Being and Nothingness" by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called "Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre." These are merely suggestions. If you're genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you're doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires — including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let's assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let's assume that you can't see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN — and here is the essence of all I've said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn't as easy as it sounds. You've lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn't any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, "I don't know where to look; I don't know what to look for."

And there's the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don't know — is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

If I don't call this to a halt, I'm going to find myself writing a book. I hope it's not as confusing as it looks at first glance. Keep in mind, of course, that this is MY WAY of looking at things. I happen to think that it's pretty generally applicable, but you may not. Each of us has to create our own credo — this merely happens to be mine.

If any part of it doesn't seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I'm not trying to send you out "on the road" in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company.

And that's it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,

your friend,
Hunter

[fragments]

^ Nice one wub. I came across this recently in a quite random way. How true is the last bold bit eh? After reading that I couldn't decide if I just went with the flow and ended up where I am or if I took the world by the balls and got here myself...these days I feel like I am just going with the flow.

[wub]

There's definitely an inverted bell curve when it comes to the possibilities of taking a year off from the life we otherwise lead. It's almost fearful. Not so much a missed opportunity but a quick gear shift into something that would forever screw the transmission.

[fragments]

Adding up the bold parts really gets to me...because to an extent I feel like I have gotten myself to a place that while I am "working for the man" I have found a groove and in that groove is enough money and time to enjoy making music among other things.

[Sexual_Chocolate]

i really wanna buy one of those tascam tape thingys.

A four track?

yea man. but some buttholes over here are decided they're vintage (eg trying to sell them for 200squid +)

i would just love to be able to throw a synth through a cassette or even the drums, see what kindve sound id get.

[nowaysj]

Got one for a buck, mf'er.