Archive | November, 2019

Balls & Almonds

Soft Cell, particularly (as always) the earlier material is pure sleaze. Punk as Fuck, the real deal. There’s just a perfect marriage between Dave Balls sparse productions and Marc Almonds impassioned down and dirty lyrics. So many acts have tried and failed to follow in their footsteps.
They also have a song called Sex Dwarf…

Homegrown

Sometimes the best material is right on your doorstep (Ards to be exact) but you are often more concerned with what’s happening in foreign or more exotic territories that you don’t put enough attention on the home team. Gary Irwin has been entwined in the fabric of quality electronics in Northern Ireland since the mid nineties, cutting his teeth as the in-house engineer at David Holmes’ Exploding Plastic studio in Belfast, recording dancefloor bangers as CPU and more recently came out of hiding with the incredibly dubby and easy on the ears project, The Vendetta Suite.

Here are five great examples of TVS in action and a beautiful library music mix, oh we’ve also heard the new stuff that is coming and it’s amazing too!

Stripped

A lesson in how less is more. Daniel Bell (DBX) is a master at taking a few elements and making it work. Pure minimal (in a good sense) club music. Made to make you sweat. His tracks really need to be heard on a good system in a sweaty club to make sense.

5 below that bang.

Simplicity Dates Well

Been listening to some early breakbeat and ‘rave-y’ stuff lately. Not sure why this appeals to me more as I get older, but it just does. I suppose it’s the sheer simplistic naive joy of these types of tracks that I love. A lot haven’t dated that well – but the ones that have still sound amazing.

I just wish more producers were making this sort of raw music now, rather than polishing their tracks to polite pointlessness.