Archive for the "Music" Category
S.I.M.H: Heart
Posted: Tuesday - Mar 2nd, 2010
One of the most over-the-top 80’s hard rock choruses ever? Yep. Is it still amazing? Yep.
Heart – Alone
Album: Bad Animals (1987)
S.I.M.H: April Wine
Posted: Sunday - Jan 31st, 2010
This has been stuck in my head for 3 days now.
April Wine – Just Between You and Me
Album: Nature of the Beast
Year: 1981
Mr. Scruff: A Review
Posted: Thursday - Jan 21st, 2010
Good nights out have a natural progression to them. They start out nice and chill as the first attendees get into the spot, grab a drink, grab themselves an area in the nightclub and make themselves comfortable. Once the venue starts thickening up with people, the tone of the night should get a bit less chill and a bit more fun, with the vibe feeding off the latent energy of the people in the venue. If the crowd’s really up for the event the room will be buzzing with conversation and laughs at this point. Little chunks of the crowd will hit the main area of the club and start dancing a bit, limbering up for primetime. Eventually enough of the people who are still getting into the club will start feeling the same mood of the people that are already on the dancefloor… and once this happens, the spaces between the pockets of people on the dancefloor fill up and suddenly the party everybody has been waiting weeks for is happening all around them.
It’s rare when an event goes through all these stages without anybody really noticing. It’s even more rare when only one deejay is responsible for making it happen, and it’s rarer still when that one deejay is playing fourteen different genres of music and they’re all meshing like puzzle pieces. Mr. Scruff was that one deejay last Thursday. He was awesome.
He played dub, disco, funk, latin flavors, house, reggae, breaks, hip hop, jazz… as long as it had soul, he put it through Ritual’s soundsystem. He kept the energy up and the dance floor full throughout the night without ever having to play hard or aggressive. Instead he played a set I could only characterize as “playful”: tons of fun tunes put together with smart programming and tight mixing. As far as I can remember, the only truly hard tune he played was this one tune with a huge bassline we later found out was “Cyclotron” by Harmonic 313… and despite its robotic, synthetic feel he still made it fit into his set without any noticeable change in the mood he’d been building all night long.
Harmonic 313 – Cyclotron
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Out of everything he played at the show, my favorite tune of the night was definitely “Let Me Change Your Mind”, a Zed Bias/Jenna G collaboration that Scruff played in the Essential Mix I mentioned in my last post. He also did a little self-promotion session of tunes he’s made over the years towards the end of the night; “Chicken In A Box” and “Get A Move On” were two of them.
Zed Bias & Jenna G – Let Me Change Your Mind
(excerpt from Scruff’s Essential Mix)
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Mr. Scruff – Chicken In A Box
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Mr. Scruff – Get A Move On
On top of all the excellent music he played, Scruff provided a couple of nice touches to the night. When we first got into the venue, we were given download vouchers. It seems that Mr. Scruff records every set he plays and then gives out vouchers with an access code so people can snag a big chunk of the night’s set from his downloads site. As a promoter myself, getting this voucher at the very start of the night before we’d even heard a single track definitely put me in a good mood; I knew that a deejay who was that interested in providing extras for his audience was going to care about putting on a good show.
Secondly, his touring VJ did a bang-up job. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the visuals of a show, but the stuff they had on screen that night was great. Like all of his album art and some of his videos, Scruff drew all the animations that popped up on the VJ’s screen. The night started out slow, with music notes flying towards the audience like that old starfield screensaver you’d see on PCs back in the day. Then when there was enough buzz in the venue and he’d stepped up the music a notch, the notes disappeared and a little man showed up with a talk bubble that said “I think it’s time we had a dance”. It was a pretty saucy thing for a VJ to do, telling people to stop yapping and start dancing, but within a few minutes the dancefloor started to fill up. Right before that Harmonic 313 track came on the screen flashed a caution sign that said “Incoming Bass Alert”; every time that warning popped up the tune immediately after was super thick on the low end. Throughout the night a bunch of odd things would pop on screen, like tea kettles (Scruff’s a big tea drinker… he even has his own line of tea products), fish, and hundreds of odd people milling about, riding buses or chattering about whatever. It seems that all the videos that Ninja Tune assembled to promote Scruff’s “Ninja Tuna” LP were make by using the same material the VJ displayed at the show…
Totally odd visual content for your average night out, but it worked well and kept the vibe fun.
What impressed me almost more than Scruff himself was the crowd that went out to see him. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dancefloor that was mostly full at 11.30 but the people out on that night made it happen. Better yet was the crowd’s attitude; there was zero pretentious behavior, no bullshit attitudes, and it seemed that they were down with whatever sounds Scruff threw at them. It was maybe one of the most open-minded crowds I’d seen in a long time. The whole show reminded me a lot of how raves used to feel way back in the day, but without the ridiculous costumes and heavy drug use.
All in all it was an excellent show, and it was well worth the wait.
Download Mr. Scruff’s Ottawa set here! (access code: rir9GD)
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Birthday No. 33
Posted: Monday - Jan 11th, 2010
Today is January 11th. This is my 33rd birthday. It’s strange thinking that I’ve lived (almost) a third of a century.
Usually when Jan 11th comes around on the calendar I tend to get a bit morbid, thinking about my own mortality and whatnot… and this year was no exception. I was amused when the first tune I got SIMH (stuck in my head) in my 33rd year was “Struggle To The Grave” by Random Movement.
A few weeks ago I started thinking about age and how it changes you when it comes to music. I’ve been pretty disengaged from what’s happening in popular music for a while now, but in the last few weeks the realization at how out of touch I am with current trends in music really sunk in. I imagine if I was asked to deejay at a high school dance I’d probably get booed out of the gym after the first 15 minutes.
I have no idea what kids listen to anymore, and I’m getting increasingly comfortable with that. I chalk a lot of that comfort up to generational shift, that moment where an adult’s taste in music begins to set like cement and slowly becomes invulnerable to the newest hits that are flooding nightclub dance floors with teenagers. The way I see it, generational shift is somewhat hard-coded into human DNA and it’s only a matter of time before it kicks in.
I think the rest of that comfort comes with the fact that I’ve been disengaged from trends in pop music for a long time now. I’ve never been a big fan of pop, I haven’t watched MuchMusic in years and I don’t remember the last time I tuned the radio to anything that wasn’t the CBC or Team 1200. When I worked at the Ottawa Sun this one girl used to play Hot 89.9 all the time and after the first half an hour I got the nagging feeling that my brain cells were dying at a much faster rate than normal.
Am I babbling? Whoops. What was I talking about? Oh yeah; pop music blows and today’s my birthday.
After that “one year closer to the grave” bit of morbidity died down, my mood improved and I got a cheerier tune SIMH, “Birthday” by The Sugarcubes from 1987.
Bjork’s awesome. No matter what she’s sounding like or what style/genre her albums take on she’s always managed to make an interesting spectacle of herself. She also dated Goldie for a little bit… I can’t imagine what sort of music their kids would have made if they’d had any.
The rest of my day was fine. It was nice and warm out so I went for a drive and played Hudson Mohawke’s Essential Mix real loud with the windows down. Then I came home, had dinner with my fam and here I am.
Thanks to everybody who left me a note on Facebook today. If you’d like to give me some birthday props in person, come out Thursday, I’ll be hitting up Mr. Scruff @ Ritual. If you don’t know him, he’s a pretty amazing DJ who plays pretty much whatever he likes, be it jazz, soul, house, hip-hop, funk or whatever… as long as it’s got soul. He’s well-known for playing marathon sets of 8 hours or more, so he’ll be playing *all night long*. Yes!
If you still aren’t sure, check out his Essential Mix from last year and/or a recent 5+ hour set of his recorded from Keep It Unreal, his Manchester-based 12 year residency (!). Hope to see you out there!
Download: Mr. Scruff – Essential Mix (2009.02.07)
Stream: Mr Scruff – Keep It Unreal, Live @ Band On The Wall, Manchester
Pull Up To The Bumper
Posted: Thursday - Dec 31st, 2009
I get tunes stuck in my head all the time. Sometimes they’re brand new tracks that I’ve listened to twenty times that day, and sometimes they’re songs I haven’t heard aloud in months or years. Given that this site’s about a) music, and b) me, I figured I’d put up a post every time I have one of those Stuck In My Head (S.I.M.H. from now on) moments.
Here’s the first one, Grace Jones’ “Pull Up to the Bumper”.
Grace Jones kills it. Despite some weaker efforts here and there, she’s got a string of great releases. If you want to grab some of her strongest material, snag her LPs from the early 80’s, Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing and Living My Life.
If you’re just looking for singles, check these ones out for starters:
My Jamaican Guy (sampled for “Doin’ It” by LL Cool J)
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Private Life
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Given that Grace Jones has been involved with dance music ever since her first disco albums came out in the 70’s, there are tons of remixes of her material out there. (Apparently) Danny Tenaglia did one of “Hurricane”, a track she put together with Tricky in 1997.
Maybe the craziest thing about Grace Jones (other than the various fashion styles she’s been costumed in over the years) is that she’s still going… at 61. She put out the original Tricky collaboration along with other material last year on an album called “Hurricane”. The LP showcases a bunch of Jones’ different sounds from over the years, from dub and reggae to big ballads to Massive Attackish trip-hop.
The album’s a curious creature, but considering the artist… that can’t be much of a surprise.
