Nautilus
BD1982 is at the top of my criminally slept on list. Representing the Seclusiasis camp from Tokyo, where he moved from NYC a few years ago, dudes managed to get in with Goth-Trad and the infamous Back to Chill crew while simultaneously cooking up some of my absolute favorite tracks. He’s got a new 12″ that is dripping Xenon.

A. side is Dutty family 77Klash on the gunman tip over the crushing Water Faucet Riddim. The flip is the skittering Space Boots with remixes from some of the the biggest up and comers on the scene the U.K’s Slugabed and Montreal’s Hovatron. It’s hard to describe what happened in Vancouver last month when I dropped the Slugabed mix (Dev79 call it “hyper color style”) since the combination of howling low end fiends and gorgeous writhing Canadians basically led to sensory overload and total black out. If this is the sort of thing your interested in….cop the rest of the tracks @ Beatport Bleep Juno Download iTunes

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/BD1982_Space_Boots_(Slugabed_Remix).mp3]

BD1982 “Space Boots (Slugabed Remix)

More soon from the infatiguable Seclusiasis!

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Anti-Pop_5_minute_mix.mp3]

Antipop Consortium – Fluorescent Black 5 Minute Teaser Mix

…followed by Buffie The Body and two symphonies

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Volcano.mp3]

I love this album. It drops next Tuesday. Anti-Pop Consortium will be joining us for a live broadcast Monday, the eve of the album’s release, on Mudd Up! with DJ Rupture on WFMU 91.1 fm. Rupture and I will talk with Beans, HPrizm, M. Sayyid, and E. Blaize about their music, influences, history, lyricism, technology, afrofuturism, their insane live sets, etc. plus we’ll be playing some exclusive selections from the group. It should be tremendous!

Subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast if you want downloadable versions: , Mudd Up! RSS. Listen, get involved, throw in comments, questions. Again, Mondays @ 7PM.

For those outside our FM broadcast range, WFMU offers live streaming and even has its own free iPhone app!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gi7VcP4yt4[/youtube]

Melodic Wonkster

Waer Rock dropped another excellent mix last week over at Culture System, Melodic Wonkster – a collection of euphonic wobble sickness for those tired of the standard wubstep “wub wub”. Waer moved away from the downbeat treaty (or what we called “noir noir”) to a sonically harsher territory; a relentless attack of wobble/wonk that is not only tolerable but very enjoyable, simply because of the constant change up of styles in the mix and the interesting “design forms”/wobble structures the selected producers invested in the tracks.

dexplicit

It is very, very rare that you will see me posting anyone else’s fliers on here besides DA family. Trouble + Bass is extended family tree though and I am just personally excited about this event. I am a big big fan of Dexplicit‘s Bassline/Niche House output in the past few years, bringing the energy and colors of grime into a 4×4 format.  If you are in NYC you are a FOOL to miss this.  I also have no qualms promoting this because Dex himself is such a nice friendly dude.  We’ve only spoken over the internet but his niceness comes through.  I like people like that and want them to win.  The world is so full of assholes, the people who aren’t deserve singling out.

Also check /Ruptures WFMU radio show Jan. 23rd for an exclusive mix by Dexplicit full up with unreleased dubs, as well as (I think) an interview.

mobb deep purple vision

I remember the first time I heard slowed down, or screwed music. I
was in an old lincoln towncar, driving through Orlando, FL with a dude
named Cleon. It was hot as hell, and me and some guys from NY were
down there shooting a no budget gangster flick. We shot in the hotel
we were sleeping two to a bed in and used real guns for ‘props’.
Driving around during the day in the heat Cleon would play these
slowed down CDs that this dude Pookie Duke (who was also acting in the
film) would make using a cassette machine and a CD burner. Anything
was fair game, erika badu (sounding like a man talking about tyrone
slowed down, yikes), michael jackson, and lots and lots of southern
rap that I had never heard of. Usually just bare drum machine beats
and people saying violence. Slowed down, high out of my mind as I was
most of that week, in that heat, it sounded absolutely satanic. I
asked Cleon about it and he explained: “Well, during the day, when
you’re driving, you listen to the slowed down one. Then at night at
the club you listen to the fast one. But boy, if that DJ in the club
played the slowed down, he would have a riot. People would just get
TOO crunk.” I went to that club (still cant remember the name) and I
could see what he meant. Certain songs couldn’t get played halfway
through, even at regular speed. People would get too hype and start
fighting. Sort of like grime raves in the UK, and why they banned
“Pow”. But after hearing that stuff, and how demonic it was, I
couldn’t get the slowed down idea out of my head. Afterwards I
learned about DJ Screw and the whole codeinated Houston slowed down
scene, and got pretty into that. My two favorite from that style if
you’re looking for something to check are the S.L.A.B. – The Anthem
album slowed down, and David Banner’s first album slowed down by Michael 5000 Watts (jpeg on link is wrong but tracklist is right).

The slowed down hook has now become a staple of American commercial
rap, and lately some American Dubstep producers have started using
slowed down voices in their tracks too. I was out at Dub War and
heard some of these played and decided to make one of my own. I
picked one of my most favorite songs of all time, Mobb Deep’s “Shook
Ones”. I originally just wanted to use the acapella phrase that my track starts with.

“I’m only 19 but my mind is old and when things get for real my warm
heart turns cold”

I was gonna take that, make that a hook and give it to one of my 19
year old grime mc friends in London. But then I got bored with that
idea and felt that the drop wasn’t quite hard or deep enough and just
decided to sample the whole chorus, slowed down, with the beat in
there, and give the track a bit more of a opiated houston vibe. The results
are here, in 320 mp3 format.

Download it, play it, voice on it, do whatever you want with it.

It’s a big bait illegal sample so you’ll have a hard time making money with it, plus I just don’t care that much.

Lately I’ve been pretty down on the whole music industry, and
especially making money inside it. It’s kind of pathetic. Some
people I know fight and struggle so hard to make a living from music,
and I did that for a few years too. Now that I’m back in NYC though I
make non-music money, and it’s so easy compared to music it’s like a
bad joke. And because I’m not putting economic pressure on my music,
I’ve been enjoying making music again. It’s kind of a fucked up. The
most fucked up part about it is, considering the amount of money most
people I know make selling copies of their music (cd, vinyl, mp3,
whatever), it’s basically not even worth it. The only money worth
making is performance money, and the occasional license to TV or a
video game, and for those reasons it may actually turn out that giving
away all your music for free on the internet will actually make you
MORE money. Hopefully the whole industry will collapse in one final
fit of coked up executive self-defeatery very soon and we, the
artists, will be able to figure out some new way that actually works
for us economically. My best idea so far is something like the TV
tax in the UK. Everything is free on the internet (like it already
is) and iff you own a computer or mp3 player you pay a yearly tax to
the government and they pay publishing money to the artists. Either
that or build that tax into mp3 players and internet service charges.
iPods for example, have been making Apple a SHITLOAD of money based on
the non-advertised idea that the player is expensive, but the music is
free. I want some of that money Steve Jobbs.

darth vader
This pic has nothing to do with Dubstep, I just saw it on a news site but HELLO, how can you be flying in some multi-million dollar piece of killing hardware wearing one of these guyver anime darth vader helmets blowing up rebel ‘insurgents’, women and children in the desert like you’re in a video game and not know that YOU (aka WE if you’re UK or US) are the bad guys.

I just got around to reading this excellent ‘how to make dubstep bass’ tutorial from Mashit Records’ DJ C and thought it worth reposting here.

The knowledge he’s sharing is good and useful and with a little thinking applicable to whatever synth/software you use. One of the best ideas I find in it is the idea of LAYERING. This is an idea it took me literally years to figure out as a producer, dumb though that may sound. The simplest form of this is simply taking whatever notes you have, copying them to another channel in your sequencer exactly the same (or an octave up or down) and assigning a different sound to them. It’s important the notes are exactly the same so that there is no rhythmic difference between the two so that the two sounds mesh together to create a new, thicker sound.

Actually I have to give full credit to Jammer for really showing me the value of this, and how to do it really well with Logic. They don’t call that dude Top Producer for nothing, he really knows what he’s talking about, so all credit where it’s due. This idea is especially useful when it comes to producing the type of bass that so many of us love that’s found in drum & bass, grime, and dubstep records.

You know the kind I mean: bass that is simultaneously in-your-face, loud and blaring, practically taking up the whole track, but still feels like a punch in the stomach when it hits. I remember spending literally hours and hours and hours trying to get a synth to make these sounds but never could find the right balance between that mid-range growl, or shininess or blare that I wanted and the appropriate down low chest rattling bass heaviness. This is because, in fact, it’s not ONE synth making these sounds, but at least two, and often more. The mid- and high-range detail that provides a lot of character of the sound is one synth going through its own EQ, distortion, reverb, compression, whatever, and the bottom subwoofer sound of pure bass weight is usually just a very simple, non-descript sounding sine wave (write that down SINE WAVE, very important).

An easy way to make a sine wave in Logic is to use the EXS24 sampler with no sample in it, it defaults to a sine wave cycle, go down to the lowest octaves on your keyboard and try not to blow your speakers. Other waveforms can be used but a very low pure sine I find is one of the most sure-fire ways to make people’s hair blow back like they’re in a hurricane in the club.

And as Gervase from LDN’s excellent Heatwave sound points out in the blog’s comments, the tutorial he’s given provides basically all you need to know to make some pretty familiar sounding ‘dubstep by numbers’ type shit. Why do I mention this? Well, I like dubstep. I think it’s interesting and I like the fact that there’s a genre of music that’s around thats focused on pushing the limits of pure physical sound and what you can do with that. However, I don’t like a lot of the way that a lot of the people in dubstep act. Like they’re on some holy quest to make the deepest, purest, most whatever whatever sound, that they’re ‘smarter than grime’ or ‘more complex’ etc, when in fact they are just another branch on the same tree that started decades ago in Jamaica and mutated into Rap, Jungle and soon enough is gonna be mutated into something else. Especially now that Dubstep is starting to have the type of commercial success that drum & bass had in a certain era and go international I feel like some of the people near the heart of that scene are trying to do what a lot of top dnb heads did, which is to lock the doors behind them and say ‘this is ok, this is real dubstep, and this isn’t and only we get to say so, and blah blah blah’.

I have no time for those type of people as I have always been a mutant genre nomad and am never happy sitting in ANY little genre fishpond. To me the moment a style sits still I’m bored and looking for something else. That’s why I like dancehall so much, every month not only are there new tunes and riddims but new tempos, beats, sounds, everything. So my point here is, take this knowledge, do what you want with it, flood the market with derivative dubstep records, make bassline house out of their favorite tunes, put wobble bass in tv jingles, generally make it hard for everyone sitting still. Me, I’m moving, so I absolutely don’t care. By the time you catch up to me I will be somewhere far far away.