Tue, 30 Mar 2010 / Post a comment
Contemplating groove and craftmanship, i decided to write this little piece after my party with Even Tuell last Friday. Small, but nice, with good people around, Even Tuell and i spun house, dub techno, disco and more .. This last one and a half year i've met a lot of people that have had a profound influence on my view on music, that have given me new energy and the desire to strive for craftmanship and be as eclectic as possible. Electronic music and music in general benefits from the continuous influx of new things, new sounds, new perspectives.
Below, a list of records that defined these last few days for me. Some are old, some are new, but i think for some strange reason, they are all highly compatible.
Sensu
Nitzer Ebb - Belief - Mute
Pulshar - Sacrifice of Love (Even Tuell Dancing Alone Now RMX) - Phonobox
Mordant Music - SyMptoMs (Version) / I'm Not Your Mate, Mate - Mordant Music
Luc Ferrari - Didascalies 2 - Sub Rosa
Ashra - Morgana Da Capo (from the Correlations album) - Virgin
Odaka - Warm Geometry - Thin Consolation
Luke Hess - Light in the Dark - Echocord
Grace Jones - Nightclubbing - Island
Kano - It's A War - Emergency Records
Agent Side Grinder - Irish Recording Tape - Enfant Terrible
Various - Annuit Coepmix - Puzzex
Gino Soccio - Remember (from the Face to Face album) -Atlantic
Goody Goody - It Looks Like Love - Atlantic
Ron Hardy - Sensation - Trax Records
Esplendor Geométrico - 1980-1989 | First Decade - Vinyl On Demand
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 / Post a commentSensu's contribution to the Timecast Podcast series
commissioned by Yves De Mey and Peter Van Hoesen
Magus Mix
A few weeks ago, I read this article in the online archive of The Wire magazine about the electronic music scene in Cologne in the Nineties. At the heart of this scene was a club called ‘Liquid Sky’. The music policy of this former Persian disco was eclectic to say the least, giving DJ’s the opportunity to play dissonant, downright weird tracks, without the audience running away in disgust. This combined with the question of Yves De Mey and Peter Van Hoesen to contribute a mix to their Timecast podcast series, made me think about how electronic music is perceived, how you tell a story with a DJ mix. My contribution to Timecast tries to reverse things a bit, starting of with a small half hour of dissonance that serves as a kind of headcleaner, and resulting in some more accessible, but to my ears, equally challenging stuff, more recent and more in sync with today’s electronic music scene. The mix is not intended to provide listening comfort. It is, on the contrary, meant to be played loud. It cannot, as such, serve as background listening. There’s a lot of old electronic music, from sometimes obscure composers, featured here. It is my believe that a lot of the aesthetic of electronic music composition of the fifties, sixties and seventies still has relevance today. It can serve as the aforementioned headcleaner and, as such, upset the patterns a bit, make things sound a bit more dirty, challenging or difficult. Today, the DJ mix often is valued only if it is seamless, often resulting in a dictatorship of blandness. To me perfection is boring and I firmly believe that everything that dares to take a stand should be applauded, or at least reacted to. On Autechre’s seminal 1994 release ‘Anti EP’, they printed the words ‘Agitate, Educate, Protest’ on the sleeve. Seems like a good idea to me to try and do just that.
