I am so honored and stoked to write a feature on Ben Samples on glitch.fm. In my opinion, Samples is the best young gun on the glitch hop scene at the moment and an unrivalled producer of heavy bombs which make my head swing like crazy to the hammer beat, lazer synths and ultra-crunky bassline. I have been his devout fan since the early days of Glitch Hop Forum. He is churning tracks with a speed of automated factory assembly line. Alas in his case, the quantity comes with quality. I am really impressed with the way his skills develop, you would not believe listening to his crispy sounding tunes that he has seriously started producing glitch hop less than a year ago!! In case of Sample’s style, industrial and robotic associations seem natural, he pitches and distorts synths and basslines to the max creating vibrant, powerful and banging ‘metallic’ sound, yet never forgets about good melody line and proper build-up.
Artist - PANTyRAiD
Title - The Sauce
Release Date - September 21st 2009
Label - Marine Parade
PANTyRAiD are Josh Mayer aka Ooah of The Glitch Mob and Marty Folb aka Marty Party. They make brilliantly futuristic hip hop, in their own words: "PANTyRAiD is a true cross over project - hip hop, dubstep, electro-crunk... all done right with hard booty shaking instrumentation" I can only confirm the accuracy of this description.
The Sauce, full-length album of PANTyRAiD eagerly awaited by their fans will drop officially next Monday 21 September 2009 on Marine Parade but you can grab it already from Bleep (look for a link at the bottom).
In The Sauce, PANTyRAiD delivers a very unique and original ‘made in West Coast’ blend, floating between diverse styles of electronic music with ease and craft. Crunky, wonky, heavy, spacey …. one can add many more adjectives here. It’s quite difficult to describe their music in a few words, which is always a good sign. The shattered, looped and glitched hip hop beats colliding with heavy dubstep bass, riding a slow-mo rollercoaster of beautiful, oneiric melodies reminding me of cinematic score or android dreams. Electronic in form and glitchy in contents, with quite widely expanded instrumentation and great focus on details. Heavy, disturbing and unsettling, yet so fragile. No two songs resemble each other but all of them sum up to the top-notch whole. For me personally, The Sauce is the ultimate listening experience. Pardon my bombastic statements but this is how I feel hearing Dreaming, Worship the Sun, Enter the Machine or Upset.
The album starts with Crunculicious. Very sleek, crunky beat with lazer synths, ass-kicking snares and lots of music ‘maneuvers’ along the way. Welcome to the vast instrumentarium of PANTyRAiD! Moving to beautiful piano in Upset, the listener is flooded with very versatile beat and nicely deconstructed glitched bassline. African chants add a really weird dimension to this track. It sounds as if you heard this somewhere but cannot remember where and when. PANTyRAiD seems to open a hidden path to some archetype or a strong music mem. This one will definitely be heavily rinsed by DJ’s and fans. Marty Party and Ooah follow the similar concept but with more epic touch in Worship the sun. Ethno-oriented bomb, where tribal gathering of sun worshippers (not necessarily archaic ones) collides with mutated hip-hop beats and infectious acapellas creating a fantastic electronic voyage in the process. These guys really know how to build mesmerizing and powerful sonic landscapes. Dreaming is my personal best track of the The Sauce. One can definitely hear inspiration from former solo productions of Ooah and the title speaks for itself. Digital dream full of artificial liquidity and low-key frequencies. The music of sentient AI traversing extensive virtual data fields in search of L.I.F.E. One of the best ambient (yes!) tracks I’ve heard in ages.
After a short trip into calm territories, PANTyRAiD’ers show their music in full gear in two mid-tempo tunes. One mo! attacks the listener with disturbing, glitched synths, raw and unsettling rhythm in a heavy shit bomb! Just wait when acapella drops! It’s funktastic! Headcase on the other hand is pure glitch hop heaven with very characteristic wobbly bassline (the real PantyRaid trademark) and fantastic melody. Beba Be ba Be Be Be ba Be ba, infectious vocal job in a nasty hip-hop track, a real crowd-pleaser. This time, dirty bass is crunked to the max, hooking the listeners instantaneously.
Enter the machine simply overwhelms. Great track, for me personally the tip of the release next to Dreaming. This slow wobble and ultra distorted bassline is just my thang! It builds and twists like a snake. Sounds like dubstep but there are much more layers in this single track than in 10 typical dubstep tunes. Again, this music has space, it’s definitely 3D or even 4D. Too fine to do time - dreamy and mystifying female voice in a multi-textured composition with crispy synth-driven beat and ear-catching melody. Just listen to what’s going on at the front in the middle and in the background of this track. Pantyraid switch tempos, beats and drums with such an ease while at the same time producing tight and coherent journey through IDM / electronic seas. I really dig their sensitivity and touch. Like that - downtempo, head-nodding bravado with extremely glitched bassline. And this girly voice sample is totally weird, yet very warm, tempting and inviting like a strange attractor. I nearly fell in love with her. I wish I was the producer and had the appropriate vocabulary to describe all the nuances, tempo-shifts, broken rhythm and many synth layers one can hear in this composition. Finally, Our second chance. Marty Party and Ooah again showing their top-notch production skills and a wide array of instrumentation creating multi-layered sonic textures in a kind of unreal, futuristic heavy bass sonata. I could not think of a better crowning of this absolutely outstanding piece of music.
This record really grows on you. Take your time, do not run through PANTyRAiD on fast-forward. This album requires full attention of your ears and mind from the first note till the very end. I know it’s pretty difficult in the current short-attention-span era but trust my werd, the music will pay back all the efforts in beautiful and unique currency. With each listening I have been more and more enthralled and enchanted by spellbound and dreamy sonic landscapes conjured up by two skillful magicians. I have now developed a kind of music addict routine, starting my day with at least a few tracks of PANTyRAiD. Being Doctor and all, I officially prescribe The Sauce as the best mood-boosting medicine currently available on the market. Throw away your prozac pills people, you won’t need them anymore.
Best release this year (next to Nosaj Thing’s Drift) – 10/10
1. Watchtower
2. Paradise Lost
3. Hollow Man
4. Powertrip
5. Forecast
6. Requiem
This release is EPIC! I know this EP had been already published on vinyl and in digital format at the beginning of this year, but I somehow missed it (like many many other quality staff out there in the infite depths of the data highway) and I have just found it on Lorn's bandcamp. It's on a constant repeat in my player for the last few days. It's haunting, tight, intense, heavy and yet full of space and absolutely one-of-the-kind deep melancholy mood. I love every single note and bleep on this record. Yeah, I know I sometimes tend to exaggarate, but believe me, Grief Machine EP will make you cry with emotions and joy simultaneously. Lorn is really in control of all things here merging ultra tight glitched structures with post hip-hop beats adding heavy dubstep-like bassline and weird drums rolling with the consistency of a German tank.
Fantastic Watchtower sets the pace of the entire release, moving through beautiful and eery Paradise Lost to mind-bending and epic Hollow Man - I listened to this track like 20 times in a row! Powertrip rolls on in a properly heavy way to meet head-on with Forecast where distorted and repetitive drums imprint the beats in the listener's mind with a force of a hammer. Requiem crowns the entire release with excellent glitch hop meets dubstep aeasthetics. The synth work is astounding and the bass vibrates in low frequencies putting all my neurons on full alert, and me likes such bass a lot, a lot!!I wish I found such precious music gems as Grief Machine EP each day. Lorn - trained by the pain
Lorn has recently joined the mighty Brainfeeder. He's just posted a few beat-rap tracks (feat. Notorious B.I.G, Mobb Deep). Wake up, fucked up is my personal best in this set. Check it to see how diverse Lorn's sound is. His brrap edits push hip-hop genre to a totally different level and once again prove that glitch-hop (lazer bass, brap) is the genre of the future. As opposed to classic hip-hop, in the case of glitch-hop, acacapellas seem to be just a booster to amazing beats and bleeps churned out by the big community of fantastic producers hailing from US. Lorn is definitely in the fore-front of this movement.
Around the end of October, Lorn will release his full-length Nothing Else on Brainfeeder (also in vinyl format). I have no doubts it will be one of the albums of the year! GRIEF MACHINE EP - Buy it for mere US$ 6 from bandcamp, a bargain price for such a beautiful music.
I did not need to consider too long what release should I review for my debut on mighty Glitch.FM. Mochipet's Godzilla New Year Single with a set of absolutely smashing remixes seemed to be a natural choice. This record is top-notch glitch bass and fans of this music must not miss it. What better place for unleashing this stuff than this website :)
Last year Mochipet released an entire series of remixes off his Microphonepet full-length album. He continues the same pattern with Master P on Atari with even better results. Godzilla New Year single is definitely the most consistent and top quality compilation I’ve heard this year. It is simply a MUST for any glitch hop fan. Mochipet collected an outstanding group of remixers, practically all of them “hot” names on the scene. Pretty diverse in vibe and quite interesting individually, all the edits add up to an extremely coherent release, glitched and crunked to the max, yet full of fantastic melodies and surprising synths, bleeps and of course Chinese gongs. From the first original track till the mesmerizing and ‘raw energy’ remix by David Starfire the listener is confronted with a thick wall of heavy sound built on a properly distorted and twisted foundation with straight-in-yer face bassline. All the artists preserved the basis and added their own diverse and contagious interpretations thus creating a killing tool for converting infidels into glitch bass. I call on you, take this record and preach Glitch Hop to the masses!
Godzilla New Year Single is an ESSENTIAL PURCHASE. 9 out of 10****
Mimosa is an integral part of the underground electronic music movement in San Francisco, an area whose thick history of artistic and technological innovation has made it a fertile land for the exploration of experimental street bass future sound.
With Flux For Life, Mimosa takes a quick trip around the unknown universe, solidifying his important place in West Coast Sound by delivering a unique take on the crunchy, twisted basslines, sick-man samples and enveloping breath of the back space. Deep yet soaring sounds combine with grinding bass and face-slapping vocals to make for an engaging, zero gravity experience.
Flux for Life takes your hand and starts of unassumingly with “Dead Like Me.” Like a man with no soul, this track is shadowy and unobtrusive as it leads you to the water’s edge. Filled with negative space and empty breath, it lies with wide wings over the earth and then backs out of the room.
The title track, “Flux for Life,” sends a shot of electricity down the spine with its buzzing beat layers and feeling of rich expanse. If this track were a photo, it would be panoramic. Just as you sense your body floating off into oblivion, the slicing vocal samples jerk you back to right now with a ‘woot woot!” A short leap takes you to the next track, “F.T.A.M.F.”, and after a light-as-air intro, heavy drums thunder in with a chewy bassline to pull you further into another world, like a froggy fat man dragging you away while his young cousin skips along beside with a funny look on his face saying, “Yep I’m a muh-fuhhah…” You laugh as you are being hauled off through the dirt, unconcerned as to where you might be going.
“ETG” brings back trippy lasers on a space-plane and injects the album with a juice-shot of energy. The bass sounds almost cubed, so deep and horizontal and heavy that it inhabits you. Crispy sounds of an unknown alien language and sharpening swords pick up the vibe; this music would be equally at home in a dark forgotten forest or on a slick silver moon station. “Serious” unrolls like a multicolored staircase from a childhood dream, existing only for you to climb. Where it ends, no one knows- except for the crawling creatures that poke their heads through the smoky haze to watch you ascend.
The album closes with a gallop and a distinct dubstep feel with “The Unseen.” Childlike vocals add a layer of creep to the filth, and with a clean bounce Flux for Life flies off into the ethersphere, bound for the next listener, the next party, and the next planet.
Despite having an undying fetish for glitchy sounds, I still have a love for anything electronic in general, and things like progressive house and tech-house are no exception (though I do tend to be a bit pickier in those departments). Having been into prog station Proton Radio for quite a while, two of these acts I've followed off and on for some time are Derek Howell (Houston talent represent!) and Royal Sapien (who runs Olaris Records).
Anyways, when I received wind from his Sapien highness via twitter about this new release from Derek called "Cheer Up," I had to take a gander and was excessively pleased and surprised to see a TWISTED worrbly housey remix from San Francisco trio Pance Party. I will admit that it's definitely electro-housey and quite reminiscent of acts like Twocker, but if it's got chopped up synth worbles and bit-depth crushing with a dash of broken beats, I'm sold. Peep the breakdown at 2:12... positively scrumptious:
