Tag: Nicky DePaul

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Music

Oliver – Light Years Away

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My music taste lately has been skewing old. Lot’s of New Orleans blues, 60’s live rock recordings, and of course Cambodian surf rock from the Vietnam era. Friends and family, who constantly ask me for new music, have been disappointed of late when I weakly shrug.

So thank goodness for my favorite radio DJs spinning late night on KCRW. Friday nights with Travis Holcombe are a crash course in the newest bangers from across electronic genres, and after attending an intimate Chris Smither concert, I needed a dose of upbeat happy.

Mr. Holcombe obliged. I’d heard of Oliver before, but hadn’t delved into the duo’s discography. They are leading electro away from nu-disco and into a post-nu-disco era (only half facetious…) I compare them to Fake Blood, but able to reach the pop sound that he never did (or never wanted to), and group them with producers like Breakbot and Aeroplane. However, their latest EP, “Light Years Away,” throws in a hefty dose of Gestaffelstein for good measure, bringing a much-needed grit to the often sugary nu-disco formula.

And who can say no to a diva vocal disco bridge?!

“Light Years Away,” the song, is an all-timer at first listen. It is tonally dark, while maintaining an uplifting twinkle in its eye. The grimy snap bass tears a wormhole in the space time continuum, the sparkling diva break exposes us to the ecstatic gamma rays within. Both a militant, industrial shredder and a funky shoulderroller, this track will undoubtably worm its way into your rotation, and boom over dance floors around the world this holiday season.

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Music

Alaska in Winter – Berlin

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Calling Alaska in Winter, the musical project fronted by Brandon Bethancourt, elusive would be selling it short. I probably found “Berlin” when it bubbled to the top of early Hype Machine for a day. And though Bethancourt’s debut album, “Dance Party in the Balkans,” is a brilliant mélange of pop sensibility, anguish and bloggy-electo, the band seemingly dropped off the earth after 2008.

They didn’t, not really. Aside from a dissipated sophomore effort that same year, the rest of their releases have been either extremely limited issue or sold only in nu-vintage format ie. micro-cassette. I guess theirs an argument to be made that releasing your music in such an inaccessible format maintains a level of credibility and alliance to your true fans…oh wait, no there isn’t.

Music press has a strange obsession with forgotten acts or rare recordings. I get it, especially in the case of total unknown geniuses who recorded in third world countries decades ago. The rock music of pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, for instance, or the genius William Onyeabor, who was recording funk fusion in the vein Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem circa 1970s Nigeria. In other cases, (I’m thinking of Pitchfork’s recent love affair with Lewis) the narrative centers entirely on the fact that “you haven’t heard of this guy” rather than “this music will change your life.”

You’d hope that the press would take their (our?) soapbox seriously. I’d guess that any of you who’ve read this far are actually interested in what writers have to say about music, and that you can see through bullshit. Have I written some bullshit posts? Sure, and I honestly regret that. But when you’re writing for Pitchfork, you just can’t. I get that the corporations need their clicks and shares, and that writers need to pay the bills, but journalistic integrity does still mean something to many who ply the trade. If I were paid for these posts, there would be no bullshit, ever.

But artists don’t share that responsibility. Though there is no argument I can make in favor of restrictive releases, I say do art your way. If Alaska in Winter doesn’t want me to hear their music, so be it. At least I’ve got Berlin and the entire first album (which you should really listen to, it’s great autumn/winter music). And now you do too.

Alaska in Winter – Berlin

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Music

Manu Dibango – Soul Makossa

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Trance music isn’t just for ravers. The past two decades have seen that term attached to a specific type of electronic music, but you can’t deny that other types of music serve the same purpose. I recently saw Omar Souleyman perform, and damn, the entire crowd was undeniably in a trance – eyes rolling back, arms waving wildly, feet flying – the whole shebang.

The concept of “the trance” goes way back. Ancient shamanic figures assumed such states, as did the famed Oracle at Delphi, to predict the future or commune with spirits. Warriors, including the Viking Berserkers, threw themselves into a blind frenzy in which they could feel no pain and see nothing but rage. Each and every one of us drifts into daydreams, losing touch with the present moment and settling into the unconscious.

Music was born with humanity. The earliest thumping beat inspired movement. A few million years later, we aren’t so different. Sonic repetition and tonal consistency still bring us out of our shells and into a freer state. Consider vedic chanting: the voices of one or many, looping rhythmic and sonorous. After a while, you cease to hear yourself or the others, and the concept of time that controls our lives fades to unimportance. After a time, you wake up, without ever sleeping.

One of my favorite types of trance music is Afrobeat, popularized by Fela Kuti but practiced by many others, including the Cameroonian Manu Dibango. “Soul Makossa” feels over before starting, even though it runs over six minutes. The key to trance, I think, is a steady beat paired with an uncommon treble (in this case, the group chanting and plucky horns). The electronic version offers the 4×4 beat with synthesized sounds that our brains force into a natural order. The Afrobeat strain, however, offers a more human element, a wild desire that brings sweat to the brow of any listener.

Embrace that humanity, join your primate ancestors, and step into the trance.

Manu Dibango – Soul Makossa 

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Music

Kaytranada – Leave Me Alone ft. Shay Lia

Foggy city from Bernal Heights

He’s been hot for a minute already, but if you haven’t yet booked your ticket on the overnight bus to the netherworld that is the Kaytranada bandwagon, step right up. It isn’t that the songs are downers – in fact, they all feature an inignorable positivity – but rather that they are down. They don’t take you soaring through the clouds, blasting towards the stars in blinding flashed of energy; they slither you through the settled fog, close to the wet, living earth. The bass is organic, the samples (his music is heavily sample centric) soulful. It’s as if an ancient griot stumbled across RZA’s EPS16+.

One thing Kaytranada is not, at least in my eyes, is an EDM artist. EDM has come to connote a specific type of electronic music, and in many ways has become a super-subgenre that no one applies correctly. I’m not saying I know what it is, but this isn’t it. In interviews, Kaytranada cites Flying Lotus as a contemporary influence, and you can really hear it: the jazzy undertones, unsyncopated drums and late-nite vocals. If he’d been performing in the 30’s, Kevin would have been one cool cat.

And not only because of his music. This guy is clearly very cool and original. Born in Haiti and raised in Montreal, he had this to say about living in Canada: “I usually chill around at the part or I’ll just go to bars because I don’t really go to clubs. The bars play the best music. I see finer girls in there. Clubs aren’t that cool but bars are awesome.” And this to say on “trap music”: “I think it’s kinda corny…all of that kind of cliché trap stuff is so annoying. But, I ain’t gonna lie, I was hot on that shit before, but now it’s turned out to be corny.” (both quotes from an interview with Noisey)

Voice of a generation? I’m kidding, but seriously, who doesn’t agree with both of those statements.

“Leave Me Alone” is a fair representation of his music. It is both dense and spatial, allowing the listener to breath but not catch a breath. As we transition into the autumn, it’s songs like this that begin to take hold, leading us away from the sunny skies and into a contemplative realm.

 

Kaytranada – Leave Me Alone ft. Shay Lia

 

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Music

Freestylers – Signs ft. Tenor Fly and Spanner Banner

Hunter Thompson on the beach

The wonders of the Internet mean you’re reading this even though I’m far away, deep in the woods with no connection. It’s about fucking time. I really wish someone would have told me as a kid that vacation isn’t a right.

There’s a difference between a vacation and a trip. On a trip, you’re waking up early and going hard all day – hiking, sightseeing, eating food that may or may not make you sick as a dog. On a vacation, you’re sleeping in, kicking back and hopefully sipping a mixed drink at 2pm.

Trips usually make the best memories, and are definitely my personal preference. But right now, I’m on vacation, chowing on lobster and picking blueberries and not thinking about work or traffic or blogging.

I hope you all get a chance to get away this summer, because we all need a break from the usual (hence this Freestylers song, an unusual choice for EMPT but an instant chilla classic)

Ahhhhhh.

Freestylers – Signs ft. Tenor Fly and Spanner Banner

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Music Writing

Flying Lotus – Parisian Goldfish

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Having your feet set squarely on the ground is underrated.  After schooling ends, our toes lift, hover, preparing for the rapid zig zags and about faces that are inherent in the lives of twenty-somethings (and thirty-somethings lets be real). The flexibility is imperative; it takes time to figure out who you are and what you don’t want to do. The percentage of people whose first job is their career is miniscule.

After while, though, the earth looks mighty attractive. To have some security in knowing what’s next and let out the breath of anticipation. Constantly hopping from paid job to freelance to internship to unpaid blogging every week takes a psychic toll. It starts to seem that everyone else is settled into a salaried gig at Google or some New York financial titan.

There are days when steadiness is all I want. Next year, this time, I’ll still be right here.

But then I snap out of it. Ours is the zero-gravity generation, feet off the ground but floating higher than our predecessors could have imagined. Some pundits paint us as lazy or entitled, when we’re really just turning flips in the space station as they look on with envy from behind their white picket fences, infested with termites and crumbling under broken pension systems after all these years.

With the world pried open like a succulent oyster, wriggling slowly in a bath of salt water, what else to do but consume it and savor the slight discomfort that comes with a taste that lasts a lifetime. Fly for 14 hours, Skype your mom like you were down the street. Or jump into the startup game, throwing financial security to the wind for a chance at originality and responsibility so rarely afforded the associates and coordinators of the capitalist structure.

The earth isn’t going anywhere. Don’t force an early anchorage. Join me and the EMPT family as we orbit the solar system, mindful of the future but living in the moment, searching for meaning in every day experience and making sure to breathe it all in.

 

Flying Lotus – Parisian Goldfish

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Music

La Femme – Sur La Planche

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Vive l’été!

Quand je suis sur la planche, tout est bon.

Et quand nous sommes sur la planche ensemble, alors…c’est comme nous sommes le monde, et rien d’autre existe.

La Femme – Sur La Planche

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Music Writing

Flying Lotus – Parisian Goldfish

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Another brushfire belches acrid smoke
into our lungs.
The city stained with ash,
gray as the sky.

Last time fourteen young men were swept up
in the blaze and killed in an instant.
The town held a candle light vigil.
Oxygen, in the end.

Red sun setting, mirrored in flames
that creep up, floor by glass-paneled floor.
From the top of the hill, the city burns,
before night’s coolness fades all to silhouette.

Poignant films are planned,
imbued with misplaced resonance
that no one is looking for.
Based on a true story.

These are the facts, or, most of the facts.
The rest we enhanced for entertainments sake.
What really happened, guess we’ll never know.
Just appreciate the artistry.

From pulp to press to printout,
curling waves of bleached wood
cut fresh from the soil
some miles away.

Clouds hang mixed with residue,
a roiling mass, a vortex turning.
In the eye of the storm a woman dances.
Doesn’t she know?

Careless how quick we forget
after the darkness has passed.

Infinite sky, space;
Hurtling out into blackness expanding
and disappearing over the event horizon,
lit by flares of gas and dust.//

Flying Lotus – Parisian Goldfish

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Music

KRS One – Sound of Da Police

Law enforcement has existed for thousands of years. From the Prefects of ancient China, Athenian public slaves, and Roman vigils, to today’s beat cops, highway patrol and paramilitary police, these bodies have occupied a cultural niche unlike any other. Both required and reviled, the law is ever present across the world.

In the USA and most “developed” countries, citizens are accustomed to a professional policing force that, for better or worse, exists to protect and serve the population on a day-to-day, community-to-community basis. But in much of the world, state power barely projects a few hundred meters surrounding government buildings or institutions. The void is filled by a range of power structures: warlords, religious leaders, citizens brigades and more. Clearly, the innate desire for protection is shared by all people, and yet that desire often allows for the rise of corrupt and unequal structures that prioritize the human rights of some groups over others.

A recent episode of the Vice television show explored the advanced policing tactics in Camden, New Jersey. Entitled “Surveillance City,” the program explored and exposed the technology intenseive pilot program implemented in the city over the past few years. Cameras on every block, monitored around the clock. Facial recognition software, license plate tracking, and ground forces on constant patrol. As you can imagine, the residents of Camden are not happy about the arrangement. Most of the interviewees were from underrepresented ethnicities, but a number were white, including a wealthy non-Camden resident who had apparently come to the city to buy drugs. He was noticed on camera, deemed to be an outsider, and apprehended before the deal went down. If that doesn’t remind you of “Minority Report,” you haven’t seen the movie.

Even more frightening and incredible was a report on a demo program conducted in (or should I say, over) Compton, California by Persistence Surveillance Systems, a military contractor. They worked with the LA County Sheriff Department to track the entire city in real time using high-flying drone aircraft, which generated footage of daily life below. The police were then able to take this footage and zoom to an unbelieveable degree of specificity, rewinding and fast-forwarding to track crimes in the buildup and aftermath. As in, they knew a crime had happened, so they checked the tape, and were able to follow the crimminal’s getaway car to its final destination. Will Singapore use this tech to catch litterers? What are the limits?

That technology is here, make no mistake, but it has not been implemented at scale yet. This week, residents of Gaza City and Donetsk, are facing far more immediate law enforcement crises. In both cases, there is serious disagreement as to who is making and enforcing the laws of life, with deadly consequences. These examples are representative of the limbo faced by a massive proportion of the world’s population. When one cop says yes and one says no, and the consequence will be meted out violenty, with no trial, by both sides, how do you figure out what to do?

KRS One gave us one of the most memorable lines in musical history with his comparison of “officer” and “overseer”:

Take the word “overseer,” like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crude voice sample
Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer
Officer, officer, officer, officer
Yeah, officer from overseer
Need a little clarity? Check the similarity.”
Law enforcement is by definition a type of overseer. And, though the comparison is reprehensible, overseer’s on slave plantations (the one’s KRS is rapping about) were highly valued by the dominant societal elite at the time. The same goes for law enforcement now, in many ways. The dominant social forces use law enforcement to project their ideologies. In some cases, those ideologies are progressive and aimed at protecting human rights and expanding opportunity. But in most, the ideologies are strict and anti-minority, whether ethnic, gender, religious, you name it.

I’m not trying to make an argument here, but I believe that the nature of law enforcement is changing rapidly and out of sight for most people. The NSA “revalations” are one example. As global citizens, we need to ensure that we have a voice in the process, whether our governments want to hear that voice or not. This is one reason art is so valuable. Censorship will occur, and does every day. But art speaks a universal language. Ever rebellious street tag is a reminder to the man on the street that all is not well. And every protest anthem (“Sound of Da Police” included) is a rallying cry to raise your voice and work toward the changes you want to see in the world.

KRS One – Sound of the Police

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Music

Sam and Dave – Sooth Me (Live)

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I used to be up on all the new shit.

By the time you were saying “OMG have you heard of XYZ band?” I’d have downloaded their discography, played you their best songs (though at the time you couldn’t be bothered and clearly don’t remember) and moved on to the next hot sound. I can’t tell you how many times I went to shows with under 50 people for under $20, and the next time that act came through town prices were through the roof and the rooms were packed beyond capacity.

That was then.

Now, when my friends ask me to send them good new music, I feel embarrassed and direct them to my fellow EMPT writers’ posts. I’ve lost touch. Partially this is a function of new technology, especially streaming services that offer a music discovery platform that doesn’t require any effort on my part. I can build a Spotify playlist and let those proprietary Swedish algorithms do the rest. And really, I don’t have the time anymore to “crate dig” across the blogosphere. Commute+job+pet+life.

But if a friend asks me for some “good music,” I’m never at a loss for words.

If we’re being honest, the best music ever recorded hasn’t come out in the past 10 or even 20 years, with a few notable exceptions. With the rise of studio technology and autotune-esque band-aids, much of the raw authenticity that marked early recordings has vanished.

Listen to the passion Sam and Dave exude on this recording of “Sooth Me” (which I believe was recorded in Paris, 1967). The Sultans of Sweat, as they were known, knew how to put on a show. There were no backup dancers or props. There were no illusions as to what the audience was seeing or hearing. Two men and a band, on stage, in the flesh, bringing the roof down, every night – these were the men, after all, that introduced the word “soul” into the musical lexicon of white America.

This post is for all of you who are up on the new shit. It’s cool for a while, but how much will you really remember, or will you want to pass on to your kids? Next time you go on a blog dive, take a gander at some charts from the 30s-early 70s instead. You may be surprised at the gems you never knew existed.

Sam and Dave –  Sooth Me (Live)