Corporate Sucks Still Rock t-shirt
November 28, 2011Comments Off
Smalltown Supersound & Robotee presents:
“Corporate Sucks Still Rock” Tees in 3 different colors. The design is printed on American Apparel unisex t-shirts. Girls may prefer to order one size smaller, or the Jersey model. Design: Kim Hiorthøy. Click here to order and see sizes and colours.
Razika – Vondt I Hjertet – the video
November 23, 2011Comments Off
Razika – Vondt i Hjertet from Razika Razika on Vimeo.
Nisennenmondai European tour 2011
November 20, 2011Comments Off
Nisennenmondai 2nd European Tour 2011 Fall/Winter
Nov.21 Forum,London,UK w/Battles
Nov.22 Mains D’oeuvres,Paris,France
Nov.23 Rotondes,Luxembourg *
Nov.24 Le Guess Who? Festival Utrecht,Netherlands
Nov.25 Le Guess Who? Festival,Utrecht,Netherlands*
Nov.26 4×4 De Kreun,Kortrijk,Belgium w/Pinback
Nov.27 Festsaal Kreuzberg,Berlin,Germany
Nov.28 Fonden Voxhall,Aarhus,Denmark
Nov.29 Loppen,Copenhagen,Denmark
Nov.30 Bla,Oslo,Norway
Dec.1 Strand,Stockholm,Sweden
Dec.3 Sala Apolo 2,Barcelona,Spain
Dec.4 Siroco,Madrid,Spain
Dec.5 Mondo Club,Vigo,Spain *
Dec.6 TBA,Porto,Portugal
Dec.7 Ze Dos Bois,Lisbon,Portugal
Dec.8 Grim,Marseille,France
Dec.10 All Tomorrow’s Parties,Minehead,UK curated by Battles
Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid/Mats Gustafsson: The BBC review
November 20, 2011Comments Off
A welcome addition to what eventually became Reid’s late-period re-emergence.
Martin Longley 2011-11-18
It’s unclear whether this live recording was always destined for a release, or whether it’s been issued as a previously unplanned posthumous tribute to the recently departed New York drummer Steve Reid. Whichever way, this two-CD set is now a welcome addition to what eventually became Reid’s late-period re-emergence following decades of hip multi-genre collaborations amid a veil of semi-obscurity.
The five-year teaming of Reid and Kieren (Four Tet) Hebden culminated with this 2009 performance in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. They were joined by the Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, whom Hebden credits with providing the inspirational seed that led to him seek out Reid in the first place. He’s a highly appropriate addition to their musical mission. This trio converged from different countries, generations and stylistic zones, uniting in an electro-jazz pulse-improvisation. All three brought elements of their accustomed expression along, but the final result is a composite creation that’s ultimately unfamiliar to all of them.
Each of the two discs features three extended pieces, mostly bleeding from one into the next. A Krautrock-like repeating flow gathers its forces, somewhat reminiscent of Klaus Schulze’s latter-day sound. Reid swiftly sets up a splashing density, with a beating undertow. Rhythm speeds shift, as robotic meets organic within Hebden’s palette. Reid’s drum sound has an epic echo, whilst Hebden is intimately in-the-ear.
Gustafsson eventually hefts his saxophone, although he might already have been adding his own electro-ploppings, as his armoury has increasingly expanded with effects units. It doesn’t take him long to rip out those characteristic animal-in-agony howls. Meanwhile, Hebden’s jet is taking off, into a Hawkwind/Konono fusion-riff. Gustafsson continues to discover his inner beast. The trio are adept at maintaining their building-and-building motion, sustaining a climax over the distance.
The second disc continues the energy pile-up, as Hebden unleashes a funky glugging, and Gustafsson appears to be playing either a kazoo or humming through a paper’n’comb. It’s all the more powerful when his baritone-rending returns. Reid occasionally sounds like he’s in his own universe, not directly responding to the other pair, but mostly the resultant sound shimmers with a spectacular unity. The final run of The Sun Never Sets edges towards a Kraftwerkian industriousness, Gustafsson crying out aloft with a noir bluesiness.
Kieran Hebden and Mats Gustafsson interview for Fader Magazine
November 18, 2011Comments Off
Check out this great Beat Construction interview that Fader Magazine did with Kieran Hebden and Mats Gustafsson here.
Preview: This story will appear in FADER #77, on stands soon. Live at the South Bank is out this week from Small Town Superjazz.
Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden gets a reaction out of Mats Gustafsson and the late Steve Reid.
Like any true sampling whiz, Kieran Hebden thinks of his collaborators as reactive ingredients. “I love when you get musicians that play really free all the time to work with other musicians that do more groove-based stuff,” says the free-thinking British electronic producer who records as Four Tet. Hebden is on the phone from Brooklyn, recalling the 2009 London festival gig that united him with saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (the really free guy) and drummer Steve Reid (the groove-based one), the same show that’s out now on the two-disc set Live at the South Bank. Hearing the record’s ecstatic marriage of dance music and free jazz strategies, it’s easy to understand Hebden’s excitement. It’s doubly so knowing the moment can’t be replicated: Reid passed away in 2010 at age 66. His ’60s and ’70s résumé—including work with James Brown and Fela Kuti as well as cult-hero jazz expressionists like Charles Tyler—is impressive. But the drummer died at the top of his game. It was Reid’s collaborations with Hebden that brought him the widest recognition. On a series of joyously exploratory records, kicked off by 2006’s The Exchange Session Vol. 1, Reid added a human heartbeat to Four Tet’s lush sample-based collages.
For the ’09 concert heard on Live at the South Bank, the organizers of London’s Meltdown festival had asked Hebden, whose duo with Reid was by then a known quantity, to tweak the formula. Hebden immediately thought to rope in Gustafsson, since it was the Swedish saxophonist’s paint-peeling duos with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love that had first given him the idea to seek out his own percussive counterpart. It was a smart move. Think of Gustafsson as an aural irritant, the guy the pros (Sonic Youth or The Ex, say) call when they’re looking for a dose of pure punk-jazz grit. If the Hebden/Reid hook-up had lacked anything up to that point, it was raw aggression, and Gustafsson was happy to fill that void.
First, though, he waited. Before the South Bank gig, the only parameter the three players established was that Hebden and Reid would begin with a duet. “I was sitting onstage listening to them, and it was so freakin’ good!” says the saxophonist, speaking from a Lyon hotel room. “I don’t know how long, but it was quite a long wait until I started playing. In a way, I didn’t want the job.”
As you can hear on Live at the South Bank, Gustafsson takes his rightful place after about 20 minutes, unleashing angry-elephant brays over Hebden and Reid’s rumbling groove. As the set progresses, the players swap roles. The saxophonist triggers Reid’s still-sharp free jazz chops, and in turn takes rhythmic cues from Hebden’s body-moving sample riffs. Hebden, meanwhile, sends out clouds of bubbling static. By the finale, “The Sun Never Sets” (a piece first heard on Hebden and Reid’s 2007 album, Tongues), each player engages equally with rhythm and noise, yielding a teeming psych-jazz hymn that Sun Ra would’ve killed for. As abstract as the music gets, the rapturous applause that follows doesn’t come as a surprise.
Hebden stresses that this kind of response is what he and Reid were after all along. “The idea was to bring people together,” he says. “When we did shows, we didn’t want to do seated venues. People were standing, and ideally, we’d hit a point where they’d be dancing. Steve wasn’t that inspired by doing super-academic things; he was more of a raver, I think.”
Gustafsson is no dance music nut, but he relished the listener-friendly coherence of the Hebden/Reid collaboration. “I do so much abstract improvisation and noise-related music,” says the saxophonist. “So in a way, it’s more of a challenge to join something that has such a clear structure, and a harmonic center and melodic material. There’s been a lot of situations when I’ve been a little too uncomfortable with the material, and then it’s better just to shut up, but with Kieran and Steve, I never had the feeling that I should shut up.” Hebden is clearly thrilled at the brazenness his guest displays on Live at the South Bank. “Steve holds down this steady, tribal rhythm, and Mats doesn’t just play polite pop lines,” he asserts. “He’s screeching away in total madness the whole time.”
Two plus years on from the show, Gustafsson is in the grip of a different emotion. “He was such a sweet man,” he says, reminiscing about a pre-gig chat with Reid. “It felt so easy to just sit and hang next to each other. It’s just so sad that we can’t play together again.” Hank Shteamer
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Kieran Hebden/Steve Reid/Mats Gustafsson: 8,0 Pitchfork review
November 18, 2011Comments Off
The most vital document of Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and drummer Steve Reid’s five-year partnership is this performance as a one-time trio with Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson recorded 10 months before the 66-year-old Reid died of throat cancer.
Read the whole review here.
Lindstrøm: Six Cups Of Rebel (6. February 2012)
November 11, 2011Comments Off
Lindstrøm – Six Cups Of Rebel – CD/2XLP (releasedate 6. February)
Bio by Rob Young
Five… four… three… two… one…
With the latest album from dance producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, Norway’s latest entry in the space race has been launched out of the wooded outskirts of Oslo. Six Cups Of Rebel, Lindstrøm’s fourth solo album, is a super-sized cosmic disco rocket that burns up a galaxy of eclectic influences in its wake, from Bach to Deep Purple, from Prog rock and arpeggiator disco to Acid House, while sounding sleek and utterly contemporary. He may worship at the temple of godlike European DJs from the 80s like Daniele Baldelli and Beppe Loda, but the relentless, occasionally monumental scale of Six Cups Of Rebel has the power to move mountains all by itself.
From the opening “No Release” – a five-minute coitus interruptus of cascading cathedral organ – to the pumping Detroit pistons of “Call Me Anytime” and the wah-wah stabs and fizzing 808 basslines of the title track, Six Cups Of Rebel acts like a star map of Lindstrøm’s own voyage to the outer limits of electronic music. When he holds back, as on the ten-minute “Hina”, it’s only to let rip with added propulsion, like a satellite using a planet’s orbit to push it to the next level.
In the Lindstrøm discography stretching back to 2003, albums tend to be a small interruption in a constant stream of remixes and 12”s (including one, under the anonymous moniker Six Cups Of Rebel, on the Feedelity label in 2005). He forms part of a constellation of Nordic producers that includes Diskjokke, Todd Terje and Bjørn Torske, Prins Thomas, He also regularly collaborates with fellow Norwegian space disco wizard Prins Thomas, whose self-titled album received much acclaim last year.
But is the ‘cosmic disco’ label a medallion or a millstone? “If ‘cosmic’ means music without any limits, I don’t mind being discussed in these terms,” says Lindstrøm. “I guess my definition of ‘cosmic’ comes from listening to mixtapes from Daniele Baldelli, Beppe Loda and other ‘cosmic’ DJs. And what is typical of the music that these tapes consist of, is a wide range of diversity, both in musical style, sound and genre. I leave it to other people to label/tag my music this or that, but it’s true that these legendary tapes has been a massive inspiration for me over the years. I really believe in mixing up everything, and having no respect for the traditional way of doing things.”
One major innovation on Six Cups Of Rebel is the use of vocals, a first for Lindstrøm. On “De Javu” it mutters about “that feeling that you’ve been here before” – an uncanny sensation that echoes his own music. There’s “Magik”, with its eccentric falsetto call and response, and the sarcastic laughter in “Six Cups Of Rebel”.
Lindstrøm: “I have to admit that the decision of including vocals has been with mixed feelings. I’m no vocalist, but I wanted to include my own voice this time. I’ve been trying out different approaches on how the inclusion of vocals would sound ‘right’ for the music. In the end, I decided that everything was allowed, including pitching, stretching and all kinds of voice-processing and manipulation. The vocals here isn’t the most important element, but just another part of the music, as important as the cowbell, the ARP Solina string synthesizer or the free-running arpeggios. Lyrically, I’ve been more interested in repeating mantras, simple repeating sentences without any other meaning than what’s being actual said or sung. Might sound stupid for others, but makes perfect sense to me.”
Unusually for a dance album, it’s introduced with a grand swell of mighty church organ, an aching tension-builder that refuses drop th beat for a tantaslising five minutes. “I initially planned to do this live in a church somewhere,” says Lindstrøm, “but I really like that semi-natural feeling you get when combining MIDI-organs together as one big-sounding artificial church organ. So I ended up doing it in my studio instead.”
He cites the likes of Jon Lord, whose gnarly organs gave so much classical flavour to the early Deep Purple. “I wanted to give the opening track that ‘larger than life’ feeling, similar to how I remember those old Heavy Metal albums from my youth. And nothing is larger than a church organ…”
“Quiet Place” is the album’s other major curveball: an eccentric club banger that pleads, “All I want is a quiet place to live”… Not the normal sentiments of a man who spends much of his life rocking international dancefloors. “It’s just a simple desire to live somewhere quiet,” he says. “Nothing fancy. In fact, I do have a cabin in the woods just outside of Oslo that’s being used for recreation, and growing of vegetables and fruit trees. And I don’t find that too weird for a dance track. I mean, who hasn’t been to a disco, dancing to boring music, wishing for someplace else? I do that all the time.”
In fact, for an audio astronaut, this music’s maker is surprisingly down to earth, a family man turning out his music from a factory floor-type existence. “Well, I don’t believe in sitting up all night drinking and waiting for that special moment of inspiration. I’m working every day at the studio, nine to four, and I’m totally happy with a straight lifestyle. Being away on tour for more than four days makes me uncomfortable and grumpy. In fact I usually get homesick before I leave home. I love Mondays, and discovering that everything is just as I left it on Friday afternoon…”
It’s not rocket science: Six Cups Of Rebel might just be the finest dance record of 2011.
Let’s nerd! Todd Terje interviews Morgan Geist
November 10, 2011Comments Off
Todd Terje asks smart people stupid questions vol 2: Morgan Geist (Environ/Metro Area). Get nerdy here!
Lindstrøm’s De Javu named Best New Track by Pitchfork
November 9, 2011Comments Off
From Pitchfork: On Real Life Is No Cool, the 2009 collaboration between Norwegian space-disco mystic Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and singer/countrywoman Christabelle, the pair created delightfully squishy pop music that brought to mind both Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson and Lindstrøm’s earlier upwards-spiralling confections. On “De Javu”, our first peek at his forthcoming solo album, Six Cups of Rebel, a different musical icon is evoked– specifically, Prince, and the jittery funk of his 1981 single “Controversy”. “De Javu” (and, by extension, Six Cups of Rebel) is the first time we’ve heard Lindstrøm’s singing voice; while he’s no Prince, his pipes are plenty agile as they skip across the track’s shifting, mutant thud. The whole thing has a pop audaciousness that recalls ZTT Records in their 1980s prime, and as “De Javu” is brought to an abrupt halt after so much building up and coming down, you’re left wanting to hear what follows all this ecstasy on the album proper. That’s the great thing about this guy: whatever he’s doing, you never want it to end.
Great 4/5 Mungolian Jetset review on Resident Advisor
November 9, 2011Comments Off
From Resident Advisor: “Outer space where proggy disco is the superior race” is where we can assume Mungolian Jet Set came from, or at least wish they had. Their previous efforts and the wacky folklore they exude had made this pretty clear already, but never so much as on Schlungs. Barbarella-style cosmic misadventures, ’70s funk, disco and even the odd film theme are slathered over the usual clattering ethnic instrumentals and grubby basslines. But the aforementioned lyric—from the album’s pre-release single, “Moon Jocks N Prog Rocks”—discloses an attitude towards kitsch and cliché that doesn’t so much treat these qualities with good judgment as go at them full-throttle and, as a result, neatly sidestep their negative aspects.
Their third album (which is actually their first made entirely of original tunes) is the logical conclusion to their discography thus far. Starting with 2006′s experimental electronica-jazz-disco hybrid Beauty Came to Us in Stone, they’ve gradually reduced the chromatic squiggling and have ended up at their least esoteric, most emotionally upbeat album yet. Schlungs scans more like the art-pop of 10cc’s How Dare You than an introverted journey like The Wall. This is due in no small part to the inclusion of “Bella Lenay” smack in the middle, which takes the riff from Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and gives it five double espressos. It’s a hugely enjoyable track that bounds in effervescently and keeps up the energy throughout; it’s not easy to make a track that feels this effortless.
Although the last three tracks aren’t beatmatched, they move through each other and carry the album out with the flow of a DJ set. “Moonstruck” feels decidedly penultimate, and “Smoke N Mirrors” decidedly climactic. The closing lyrics, “I gotta shake my booty just one last time,” give away the fact that this isn’t a coincidence. Despite giving the impression that they don’t take things seriously, the tightness of everything here suggests that they know exactly what they’re doing.
Those who might find all of this cavorting a bit too silly would be missing the point: the whole thing is reeled off with such intention and gusto that to call it trite would be like criticising a steamroller for being big. While it would be sad to see them go too far down this road, Schlungs does nothing to diminish Mungolian Jet Set’s reputation as one of the most genuinely entertaining acts around.
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