October Roundup 2013

It always seems to be autumn when the best tunes all start to come out at once. October's yield has been bountiful, and here WN collects the best of the best new releases. Kicking off with our favourite jam of the month, Palms Trax's pitch-perfect Equation, this playlist will take you through blistering euphoria and deeper house meditations, analogue experiments and icy electro, locked-machinery techno and vocal-fed experimental abstraction. It's all here, so why wait? Enjoy!

Tracklist:

Palms Trax - Equation [EP Review]

R-Zone - Rebecca In The Hall [EP Review]

Crystal & S. Koshi - Break The Dawn

Greymatter & KRL - A World Without Love

Doc Daneeka - Walk On In feat. Ratcatcher

Borrowed Identity - Leave Your Life

Raw M.T. - Walkman Is Dead
Marquis Hawkes - Get Yo Ass Off My Grass

SE62 - True Force

Owiny Sigoma Band - Nyiduonge Drums

Lumigraph - Yacht Cruiser

Dopplereffekt - Gene Silencing [EP Review]

Randomer - Bring

Joe - Slope

Objekt - Agnes Demise

Special Request - Soundboy Killer [LP Review]

Tessela - Horizon [EP Review]

DJ Rashad - Every Day Of My Life feat. DJ Phil

Dense & Pika - Colt

Mala - Como Como (Theo Parrish Remix)

Roly Porter - Cloud

And here are a few of our other monthly picks that couldn't be found on Youtube:

Simoncino - Tape I (EP Review) [Second clip]

Alden Tyrell - Somehouse (Single Review) [First Clip]

Tuff Sherm - Followfarming

Til next month, enjoy the tunes!

Doc Daneeka – Sketches Of You

Label: 2020 Midnight Vision

Mial Watkins, who many will know as UK producer Doc Daneeka and labelhead of Ten Thousand Yen, marks his debut on 2020’s Midnight Visions sub-imprint after a successful 2012. Last year his collaboration with Benjamin Damage, the They!Live album, was a standout LP,  and a share of interesting singles including the stripped-back vocal 12” Tobyjug with Abigail Wyles marked Watkins as a rarer breed than his early singles had suggested. For the Sketches of You EP, Daneeka’s got a glossy new style in toe, entering the bass fray, and the result is a light and lively selection of tunes which, while certainly pleasant, doesn’t ultimately feel as distinctive as some of hisc past output.

Day By Day / Just Say The Words / Everyday / Sunset To Neath

The brighter textures are crafted with taste on opener Day By Day, where a careening synth wipe soars above a bright selection of plucked guitar notes, loved-up vocal snips and spare percussive touches. The success of the opener’s change of style is unfortunately undermined, however, by an inability to keep the stylistic shifts coming across the course of the release. The light touch turns tropical on second cut Just Say The Words, where the notable lack of the opener’s urgency renders the pretty synthwork and polished production more than a little unremarkable. Given the drum-heavy approach of Watkins’ early output, the low-key percussion of this whole release is a bit of a surprise, and more often than not results in tunes that sound nice and airy but lack the grit required to get bodies moving on the dancefloor.

The flipside offers another pair of solid tunes that fail to really excite the ears. While Everyday comes across as rather familiar given the similar sonic makeup of the preceding tracks, final cut Sunset To Neath’s acceptance of chilled, sunny vibes results in a more palatable closer where the focus on mood doesn’t seem to come at the cost of the groove. It’s great to hear Daneeka try something different on Sketches Of You, but the delicacy and lightness of touch mean that none of these tracks really stay with you after first listen. The individual elements cohere pleasantly but never surprise, resulting in a four-tracker which lacks either the muscle to please the club or the sonic sophistry to delight the headphone crowd.

4/10

15 Best Albums of 2012

Year End Coverage

* Best Albums of 2012

* Best EPs of 2012

* Best Labels of 2012

* Best Breakthrough Artists of 2012

* Best Tracks of 2012 - 101-76
* Best Tracks of 2012 - 75-51
* Best Tracks of 2012 - 50-26
* Best Tracks of 2012 - 25-1

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So many great albums come out in a year, and it’s all too easy to be listening to one thing and feel sure that nothing else could possibly beat it. That is, until you start listening to the next record. On White Noise’s year-end roundup, we pay special homage to those albums which challenged the way you think about music while still delivering quality tunes, those that stretched their concepts a little bit further than the dancefloor. More than anything, these are albums with real longevity- that we’re still listening to months after the hype died down.

As a treat, I've included White Noise's 5 Best Non-Dance Albums at the bottom of the post.

Just missed out: 

Austin Cesear - Cruise Forever

Flying Lotus - Until The Quiet Comes

Daphni - Jiaolong

Session Victim - The Haunted House of House

  

15 - Gerry Read – Jummy [Fourth Wave]

 

Let's Make It Deeper

With the UK House scene becoming ever more densely populated, Read's unique lofi approach stood out from the crowd on his great debut LP. Rough DIY beats and syrupy textures lent the record a hazy feel that stood as a loud statement against the over-polished productions of so many scenesters.

14 - Darling Farah – Body [Civil]

Body

2012 was an uncommonly fine year for Techno albums, which often stood out for their precision and propulsive drive. What Farah really nailed on his debut LP, as well as these things, was atmosphere. The music of Body felt like a contingent world surrounding the listener, and his minimal approach to layering meant that every sound really counted.

13 - Holy Other – Held [Tri Angle]

 

Held

The publicity-shy Holy Other made good on the promise of 2011's With U EP by expanding his sonic palette and increasingly the emotive scope of his sounds. Drenched in moody atmospherics, his crunchy Hip Hop beats and soaring synths spoke of an emotional desolation rarely conjured on electronic records.

12 - Juju & Jordash – Techno Primitivism [Dekmantel]

Stoplight Loosejam / Diatoms / Backwash 

This Amsterdam-based pair have been a Techno secret for two long, and with this outstanding LP they finally stepped into the limelight. Fusing an embarrassment of genres and styles into a muscular Techno framework, the details and pure grooves on offer throughout this album kept us coming back for more and more.

11 - Andy Stott – Luxury Problems [Modern Love]

 

Numb

Notching up his second superb LP in as many years, Stott returned to his weary industrial House sounds with a fresh eye on Luxuruy Problems. Warping the vocals of his former piano teacher Alison Skidmore into the mix, Stott's detailed atmospheric productions still stand without equal.

10 - Donato Dozzy & Neel – Voices From The Lake [Prologue]

Album Clips

Italian Techno legend Donato Dozzy returned to long-time collaborator Neel to conjure one of the year’s quietest and best surprises. The tracks here work as a continuous whole, always impressing while never insisting, conjuring an organic sonic landscape in which the listener will want to get lost again and again.

9 - Recondite – On Acid [Acid Test]

Tie In

Just when you thought you'd heard everything that could be done with a 303, in came Recondite. These cerebral and meditative tracks are not Acid as you'd expect it, unravelling and building as long constructions which carefully conjure mood and feeling. It was a remarkable thing in itself to hear those pure crystalline notes eked from the famous squelching synthesizer, and this LP was one of the year’s most thoughtful and delicate successes.

8 - Cooly G – Playin Me [Hyperdub]

 

Come Into My Room

After a sporadic series of releases delving into the UK dance tradition, Londoner Cooly G took us by surprise with her exploratory and sensuous debut album. The tracks here feel remarkably free of genre convention, fusing dance tropes with treated acoustic instruments and frequently the producer's own warped vocals. The thrill of structural exploration is matched only by a surprising emotive punch beneath the ghosts of UK Funky drum patterns, resulting in a moody and powerful post-RnB epic.

7 - Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland – Black Is Beautiful [Hyperdub]

 

2

The duo also known as Hype Williams turn out a lot of material, and to date little has stood up to the excellence of their Untitled LP. But here on their Hyperdub debut they've conjured another slice of warped brilliance. You'll recognize the syrupy synths and hollow drum patterns, but with more structural and sonic experimentation and the prominence of Copeland's sensual vocals, these fractured soundscapes start to give way to something confusing, profound, and often beautiful.

6 - LHF – Keepers of the Light [Keysound]

Chamber Of Light

A dance album that clocks in over two hours is almost never a good idea, but shadowy London collective LHF exploded onto the scene with this thrilling and atmospheric collection. Each producer has his own distinctive voice and impressive production chops, crafting an epic homage to London's dance lineage that never tires despite its ambitious runtime.

5 - Actress – RIP [Honest Jon’s]

IWAAD

With his challenging and genre-defying follow up to Splazsh, Actress stepped even further away from convention to serve up a fragmentary narrative of meditations on death. The heavy subject matter did nothing to take away from Actress’ production prowess, and with repeated listens this album opened up like a dream, letting you in, little by little, to his devastating, perplexing, and utterly unique world.

4 - Benjamin Damage & Doc Daneeka – They!Live [50Weapons]

 

No One feat. Abigail Wyles

They!Live won’t turn any heads for radical innovation or experimentalism. It was simply a very, very good dance album. Perfecting the fusion of moodier pieces (greatly helped by the lovely vocals of Abigail Wyles) and nuanced dancefloor bangers, the whole thing just worked perfectly. Each track was impeccably polished, the pair producing a diverse and engaging collection of tracks that amazed just as much on headphones as it did on the dancefloor.

3 - Jimmy Edgar – Majenta [Hotflush]

 

Sex Drive

It would be easy to brush off Majenta. There’s something undeniably filthy about it all; an electro-funk odyssey drenched in sleaze and neon lights. But beneath the 80’s backroom vibes there is one of the most engaging, diverse, and flat-out fun albums that came out all year. Every track sizzles with energy; Edgar’s pairing of razor-sharp IDM beats and big Funk basslines is pulled off without a single error, creating a lurid musical world that we returned to more than any other this year.

2 - Vessel – Order of Noise [Tri Angle]

 

Court of Lions

There was an unusually high quality in the LP debuts put out this year, and a lot of this had to do with the Post-Dubstep search for a new deconstruction, a new fluid melding of genres that defied easy labels. Sebastian Gainsborough’s debut for Tri Angle proudly wore the tropes of Dub, Techno and Ambient on his sleeve but created something utterly unique. Order of Noise is a true journey; enticing and mysterious, dusty and religious. Here is a rare confidence, a complete journey with myriad details to return to, a piece of music that will stay with you long after the final track fades into the distance.

1 - Jam City – Classical Curves [Night Slugs]

How We Relate To The Body

A lot of the albums on this list worked to reconstitute Dance music’s rich past, bringing a range of styles up to date with canny production and new technology. But Jam City’s phenomenal debut album was the record on which these historical tropes truly felt as if they were envisioning a new future for the scene. This polished collection of tunes embodied the ubiquitous conflict of contemporary culture- in turns funky and dark, soft and abrasive, ambient and propulsive. The best albums pull the listener into the producer’s world, and from the first note of Classical Curves we were right there: amongst the blood, the oil and the chrome, and all of the dangerous beauty lurking within.

White Noise’s 5 Best Non-Dance Albums

For the hell of it, here are the five albums that have got the most play here at White Noise HQ outside the constraints of the Dance spectrum.

5 - Jessie Ware – Devotion

Sweet Talk

Ware took on a host of talented Dance producers to put out the best thing that happened to Pop all year. Catchy while remaining impeccably produced throughout, Devotion soared above all the competition.

4 - Julia Holter – Ekstasis

 

In The Same Room

How do you follow up an album as universally adored as Tragedy? Holter tackled her sophomore release admirably, crafting a more accessible but just as brilliant album that gave us a lot to chew on. Complex compositions vied with Pop sensibilities, resulting in another slice of brilliance from one of the music world’s most fascinating and unique contemporary voices.

3 - Beach House – Bloom

 

Myth

We’ll be the first to say it: Bloom doesn’t really sound that different from Beach House’s phenomenal third album, Teen Dream. But we didn’t need it to. The Baltimore duo have captured the hearts of many with their gauzy textures, cheap drum machines and Victoria Legrand’s phenomenal honeyed vocals. If they keep putting out albums of this quality and never change an iota, we’ll keep buying them.

2 - Chromatics – Kill For Love

Back From The Grave

Johnny Jewel finally delivered on a follow-up to 2007’s glorious Night Drive with stellar double-album Kill For Love. The return of those 80s synths and Ruth Radelet’s anaesthetized vocals couldn’t hide a new compositional prowess and the killer pop sensibilities that made so many of these tracks absolutely essential.

1 - Kendrick Lamar – Good Kid M.A.A.D City

Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst

Lamar’s surprising and fantastic new album is probably one of the year’s most critically revered releases. But this isn’t a case of the hype machine working at full pelt. Good Kid M.A.A.D City showed a rapper with a rare focus on emotional experience and honesty, a brave move in the face of mainstream Hip Hop’s caricature of thug life. Lamar went a step further, parodying Gangsta Rap by deftly manipulating an array of personas that attempted to show just where Hip Hop went wrong in the evolutionary process. But this wasn't just about the lyrics, a keen ear for production means the tracks never sound less than brilliant, complimenting the layered narrative which you’ll come back to long after the year is out.

March Roundup

It’s been 2012’s biggest month yet, so here’s a selection of March’s finest tunes for anyone who missed a few or needs a catch-up.

We kick off on the brighter end of Dance tracks, with some warm House and Bass courtesy of Krystal Klear, Lorca and DJ Q, as well as Aaron “Fit” Siegel’s stunning House epic Tonite. Next up Pearson Sound delivers a predictably brilliant new single and we move to darker Bass tracks from the likes of Duct and Trikk. Things get a bit frantic with Machinedrum and Om Unit’s Dream Continuum collaboration, fusing Jungle with Footwork, and Boddika keeps up the pace with his thrilling Acid Jackson. Akkord and 2562 offer a couple of deep, dark percussive workouts before Romare and Midland slow the pace with some fresh and intriguing tunes from the brilliant EPs both released last month. The final few tracks are less dance-orientated, with some excellent vocal workouts from Bondax and Doc Daneeka, all topped off by Anenon’s achingly beautiful Acquiescence.

Tracklist:

Krystal Klear – From The Start

Omar S Presents Aaron “Fit” Siegel feat. L’Renee – Tonite (Detroit Mix)

DJ Q – Brandy & Coke

Lorca – Can’t See Higher

October – String Theory

Pearson Sound – Untitled

Duct – Love Crazy

Trikk – Jointly

Dream Continuum – Giv A Lil Luv

Boddika – Acid Jackson

Akkord – The Drum

2562 – Jerash Hekwerken

Romare – Down The Line (It Takes A Number)

Midland – Tape Burn

Burial & Four Tet – Nova

Bondax – All Inside

Airhead – Wait

Doc Daneeka & Abigail Wyles – Tobyjug

Anenon - Acquiescence

Feature: Vocal Exercises

Vocal sampling. The act of cutting a human voice from source audio and repurposing it in a new piece of music. It’s become fairly normal to hear a vocal sample adding an edge of humanity to a dance or electronic track at the moment, but how did vocal sampling become what it is today? And what exactly is it today? In this feature I want to examine what different producers are doing with vocals at the moment and why, but in order to do that we need to start at the beginning.

Royal House – Can You Party (1988)

I’m not going to get into discussing breakbeats or sampling itself, because there has already been plenty of interesting discourse on the subject. The first examples of vocal sampling in dance music seem to be in the Acid and Chicago House tracks of the late 80s. Once hardware had become complex enough to sample voices, songs started to emerge where vocals were sampled and manipulated rather than a vocalist having to physically record their voice for each track. These tended to be in the stuttered, repetitive vocal phrases that populated the genre, look at any of Todd Terry’s classic productions for reference points.

Youngbloods – Got Me Burnin’ Up (1991)

This technique was taken further in the East-coast sound of the early 90s, with the emergence of what we now know as Garage. By this point the actual words sampled tended to be an exciting or catchy line that would ramp up anticipation and enjoyment on the dancefloor, but at the same time the samples started to become used more and more as hooks and percussive elements as we recognise them today, removed from their original context and meaning. On Nightcrawlers’ Push The Feeling On (The Dub Of Doom) we can hear and early example of a vocal that has lost all meaning, used purely as a catchy melodic element. Although this sounds fairly average by today’s standards, one can imagine how it might be strange to have a human voice there that was manipulated into a form where it is impossible to discern the words, in what can essentially be seen as a levelling of the human voice into a base musical element. Of course this was nothing new considering the amount of wordless song that have existed throughout the ages, from pagan chants to choirs, but it was the first time that a vocal that once had meaning was deliberately manipulated through electronics to lose that meaning, and then repurposed as just another instrument.

Nightcrawlers – Push The Feeling On (The Dub of Doom) (1992)

From the beginning of sampling in the US, I now want to move on and focus this feature on the UK dance scene. The root of vocal sampling as we now know it in the Bass music scene is most clearly grounded in UK Garage, which took the aforementioned sounds of Todd Terry and co and gave them a hard UK edge, as well as pushing vocal manipulation a lot further than it had ever gone before. Artists like Todd Edwards and Tuff Jam cut up multiple vocal samples and laced them together to form the melodic core of their tracks, retaining the warmth of the human voice (especially important in their dark Garage soundscapes) while stripping away any meaning whatsoever, and letting the sample work just as another element in the sound.

Tuff Jam – Key Dub (1999)

As UK Garage charted a slow shift towards Dubstep in the British underground, use of vocals diminished. Excepting occasional use of brooding voices, early Dubstep was characterised by the space and darkness of its sound, and although UK Garage-style sampling continued in some respects, the technique was not furthered in a major way for several years.

Burial - Archangel (2007)

The next producer to really hit the Electronic mainstream with innovative sampling was Burial, a producer I’m sure you all know well. Although his sources were nothing new, he used his samples to evoke a melancholy and darkness rather than a catchy hook, which was unusual at the time. Added to this, he expressed a fondness for pitching male voices up and female voices down to create “sexy vibe” and an ambiguity of gender, another technique that is fairly commonplace by now. Burial  stated while discussing the early UK Garage scene in a 2007 interview with The Wire, “I’d love these vocals that would come in, not proper singing but cut-up and repeating, and executed coldly. It was like a forbidden siren.” It’s a simple description for a musical technique that has accelerated Burial to Electronic stardom, where he introduced samples just as much to highlight absence as their presence, as can be seen in a 2009 interview with Fact; “That’s the sound I love…like embers in the tune…little glowing bits of vocals…they appear for a second, then fade away and you’re left with an empty, sort of air-duct sound…something that’s eerie and empty.”

XI - Squeeze (2012)

Fast forward to the last few years, and vocal sampling is everywhere. There are more producers than you can count who wield their samples to achieve the same effect as Burial, as well as a few others who have taken his style even further into the dark. See for example XI’s recent single Squeeze, in which a super-clipped vocal sample is treated and "de-oxygenated” (as RA described it) in a fashion that highlights a humanity and warmth that has been stripped away, strengthening the menacing, inhuman feel to its tough percussive workout. XI further dehumanizes the voice by pitching it up and down to form a skipping melodic variation, proving how far a voice can be taken from its original meaning and humanity. It is curious to imagine that a producer would choose to add a person’s voice which makes a song feel less human, but it is a potent tool which adds to the paranoid power of the track.

Brenmar - Temperature Rising (2011)

Producers are now using cut-up vocals not just to express a human touch to contrast a moody soundfield, as Burial did, but to other purposes. In Temperature Rising Brenmar was just one of many producers who twinned choppy RnB vocals with fast-tempo Bass production to demonstrate a silky, overt sex appeal, while in the second You on Gold Panda’s Lucky Shiner album, a single-word vocal sample repeats to a powerfully mournful effect. It’s clear this particular style of vocal sampling can be manipulated to evoke almost any emotion the producer wants.

Gold Panda – You (2010)

Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo (2009)

Nowadays the current Bass scene is saturated with artists cutting up RnB and Funk vocals to varying degrees of success, but it begs the question of why an artist would prefer to chop up their vocals than leave them as whole phrases. Two plausible answers occur to me, the first musical and the second more based in meaning. Some producers use cut up vocals almost as a human alternative to a synth, as merely another musical tool to be manipulated and sequenced into the melody of a track. In a song like Disclosure’s i love...that you know or Joy Orbison's classic Hyph Mngo, a heavily treated vocal line, with the actual words often  (or completelyindiscernible, forms the central hook of the track. It’s an interesting idea to remove meaning from words to just hear the melody of language, and a producer’s willingness to just let a manipulated vocal line be the core of a track is intriguing, trading the meaning of words for their musicality.

Benjamin Damage & Doc Daneeka – Halo feat. Abigail Wyles (2012)

The second reason I can think of to chop vocals in this way is to do with the meaning and emotion evoked by the words in the listener. Simply put, if a vocal is treated so the words are difficult to make out, then it’s likely that the listener will attribute their own language and meaning to the song. The result of this is that the song forces no specific emotion on the listener, more a general mood, to which the listener can attribute the words and sentiment that personally suit them at the time. It is irrelevant to consider whether this is a case of the listener subconsciously ‘hearing what they’re feeling’ in terms of language or if it’s a more conscious process of application, because either way by becoming linguistically ambiguous, a song actually increases its emotive scope. Benjamin Damage and Doc Daneeka’s Halo is a perfect example of this, with Abigail Wyles’ muffled vocals freely interpretable by the listener as long as their chosen meaning suits the subdued vibes of the song. It seems almost paradoxical that by making a voice less recognisably human you can actually increase its emotional appeal, but this is the intriguing effect of a lot of contemporary electronic music.

Wolfgang Voigt – Kafkatrax 2.1 (2011)

With the rapid development of audio manipulation tools, the use of vocal samples is now only really limited by the producer’s imagination. There are only two ways to push the use of these samples; forward and backward, and there are great contemporary producers pursuing the path in both directions. For an example of someone pushing use of vocals forward into more extreme territory, one need look no further than legendary German producer Wolfgang Voigt, who many of you will know as Ambient Techno producer Gas and the head of Cologne-based label Kompakt. In his recent Kafkatrax series, Voigt producer a series of tracks comprised solely of vocals cut and treated from a Kafka audiobook excepting the inclusion of a single kick drum. The result is as cerebral and successful as any of Voigt’s work, the vocals assembled into deep, hypnotic Techno with some sounds still recognisable as human voice and others so far removed as to sound like they were recorded entirely from a synthesiser.  This is, in some ways, the upper limit of that trade-off between musicality and meaning, the press release states that the use of Kafka, “is entirely meaningless to the final musical product – Voigt is only interested in the sound of recited vocal text.”

Doc Daneeka & Abigail Wyles – Tobyjug (2012)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are producers who traditionally used samples that are now drafting in vocalists to sing original vocal tracks for their Electronic productions. Doc Daneeka, who built his reputation on hard-bodied UK Funky and Bass music, reigned in the force of his productions and once more collaborated with vocalist Abigail Wyles to produce the Electronic soul ballad Tobyjug, in which he allows her voice to take centre-stage, lyrics and all. There is certainly a trend emerging of vocalists being called in for Dance and Electronic productions, from the poppier end of the spectrum with Jessie Ware (recently produced for by Julio Bashmore), to Funky muse Fatima, to SBTRKT favourite Sampha.

SBTRKT – Hold On (feat. Sampha) (2011)

So on one side we now have experimental tracks entirely made of vocals, and on the other producers are returning to the historic technique of inviting original vocalists to feature in tracks, not to mention the thousands of producers working and sampling somewhere between the two extremes. It’s important to realise that those that feature vocalists shouldn’t be seen as regressive in any way, Dance music has always run in cycles with techniques going in and out of fashion, and furthermore the application of new styles of Electronic production mean the results sound nothing like the 20-year old songs that used live vocals in a similar fashion. It’s impossible to predict where vocal sampling can go from here, but considering the resourcefulness of producers in using the human voice as a tool so far in Electronic music, it’s probably best to not have any specific expectations. The world of Electronic music moves so fast and offers so many surprises that you probably won’t have to wait too long to find out anyway.

First Choice – Let No Man Put Asunder (1977) 

Before the playlist, I'll leave you with this First Choice classic, almost every single line of which has been sampled in one dance track or another. See how many you can recognise. Also, listen out for a very early example of vocal manipulation at the end of the track.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion on vocal sampling, included below is a selection of a few tracks from the last few months that have used vocals in particularly interesting or gratifying ways. Enjoy!

Tracklist:

Bondax – All Inside

Arthur Beatrice – Midland (Bwana Remix)

Shlohmo – Wen Uuu

Airhead – Wait

Lianne La Havas – Forget (Shlohmo Remix)

Above & Beyond – Love Is Not Enough (Synkro Remix)

Burial – Ashtray Wasp