i would listen to all these xlr8r best of the year tracks

http://www.threeland.com/cambodia-travel/images/CLAP.gif

I read this whole thread! I don't think I feel inspired to listen to anything though

i think i agreed with you ~65% of the tracks I listened to. much higher tolerance for the dreamy stuff and no tolerance for the noisey stuff. bought a bunch off itunes from this so props to you and xlr8r.

man, i hate overblown "band" names like "black jazz consortium" and "motor city drum ensemble" that make me listen to it, and then it's like "oh, it's just shitty house music."

love this song so much. i want the 12 inch if there is one. i wanna play it over and over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Un5SJ1aAGM

the track is: Heiko Voss - "I Think About You (DJ Koze Remix)". things start moving by the end, but by then it's too little too late.

― scott seward, Wednesday, December 23, 2009 9:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wtf this song is old as hell

It's on the remix comp. (And it's not very representative of the remix comp. Scott, try to hear Koze's remix of either Matthew Dear's "Elementary Lover" or Matias Aguayo's "Minimal.")

I love house but I agree black jazz consortium is boring on first listen.

^ also agree with this. and MCDE isn't mindblowing or anything but it's definitely not 'just shitty house music'

Some of these pics are totally the wrong song from right artist.

so, the stuff i liked the most was:

cos/mes

pictureplane

telepathe

maluca

2562

floating points

kode9

l-vis 1990 & bok bok

bodycode

italoboyz

luciano

mr. oizo

omar-s

don't know what that list says about me. i would buy the luciano album and the omar-s album tomorrow if i lived anywhere near a store that carried them. (i used to actually on marthas vineyard, believe it or not! they might have even had them on vinyl.)

Lol me as usual but I find the bubblin list deeply irritating as a whole.

why is that, bubblin' tim?

It's a very boring argument I've had on several threads about some critics' desire to celebrate a "smart" version of uk funky (here represented by Brackles, Cooly G, Dark Knight, Kode9, Bok Bok & L-Vis 1990, Mickey Pearce, Martin Kemp and (given track selection) Roska - XLR8R's name for all this is "funkstep") rather than normal uk funky (here represented by Donae'o only). The preponderance of the former category over and above the latter strikes me as perverse, especially in a list described as "bubblin". But it's just a pavlovian rant from me at this point so it's not worth really thrashing out.

Think you'd like the Telepathe album Scott - it's all a bit less 80s than that tracks suggests though.

I am seemingly the only person who maintains that, as far as euphoric dubstep influenced housey sounds go, Vacuum Boogie >>>>>>>>>> Hyph Mngo.

Also I'm aware I'm risking a bitchslap from RTC for this but my favourite UK funky moments of 2009 have been the dancehall-inflected ones, preferably featuring furious cartoon badgyalisms.

I think rtc's position on that is slightly more complex than it came across in his last intervention on the subject - I think his main issue was he thought of the idea first??

I'm going to feel exactly the same when big boshing lairy trancestep becomes a massive sound.

it's just fucking funny at this point to see people going on about some made-up either/or battle between "smart" and "real" uk funky when no one who goes to these nights or any of the producers actually give a toss, and it's pretty much an entirely false, non-existent binary anyway

well i'd have to find it funny in order not to get pissed off at the reynoldsian divisive bullshit, anyway - honestly seeking to create hostile divisions where NONE. ACTUALLY. EXIST. is one of my least favourite things about music talk

a clue is that if you see anywhere privileging one sort of uk funky over the other - that place is not somewhere u should be going for ur uk funky needs

also a note: k3n didn't find/ put together the actual samples used. this intern did, and he doesn't really know much about electronic music, quite honestly, which might explain some of the weird choices.

what a strange way to run a music site

Yeah that does seem pretty weird.

it's just fucking funny at this point to see people going on about some made-up either/or battle between "smart" and "real" uk funky when no one who goes to these nights or any of the producers actually give a toss, and it's pretty much an entirely false, non-existent binary anyway

― lex pretend, Thursday, December 24, 2009 12:06 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its not really 'false, nonexistent' if you read xlr8r, apparently

I had no clue Kode 9 had anything to do with funky, smart or otherwise. I do know that I jotted down the name of the Black Sun EP from the xlr8r lists and that I cannot stand most of the stuff I hear on the funky thread after trying VERY hard (and being labeled a racist in the process). Does Kode 9 get played at the nights Lex is talking about?

Anyhoo, Trippin' definitely did it best for me which is surprising since I'm much more of a Bumpin'/Jackin' type. I top fived that Health album. MBV next chapter kinda stuff.

I eagerly await Maluca's album (assuming it doesn't already exist). And I loved that "Kuff" remix from Bersa Discos #6. Good show.

I am seemingly the only person who maintains that, as far as euphoric dubstep influenced housey sounds go, Vacuum Boogie >>>>>>>>>> Hyph Mngo.

i really like Hyph Mngo, but i agree with you on this.

maybe, like, 3 less >'s

Have you heard the Donae'o album? There's quite a range of stuff on there, from tasteful/expansive/jazzy/ house to straight up bangers to gigantic walls of African drum samples.

Does Kode 9 get played at the nights Lex is talking about?

Yeah probably, there's a lot of both dubstep/post-dubstep and funky at the Night Slugs end of things. At the more flashy/bubbly end of things I'm not so sure.

that strikes me as totally wrong. how is donaeo not open to influences from 'all over the place'??

xp

I'm kind of with the Lex on this anyway, it feels like there's a critical binary being drawn up, sometimes consciously sometimes not, that doesn't really exist in real life. And funky and dubstep don't really seem that far apart when you consider a) where they both come from and b) that grime places itself somewhere in the middle now.

how do the singles not seem to have a variety of influences?

why is "variety of influences" even being used as a benchmark here?

there is more than an element, here, of: you know how lots of british critics write really cluelessly about hip-hop? well.

its not really 'false, nonexistent' if you read xlr8r, apparently

i don't read xlr8r and this thread isn't making me want to, though i love pretty much all the artists mentioned here (donae'o AND l-vis 1990! yes both!).

fwiw a lot of these producers are generally disdainful of "dubstep" and enraptured by "uk funky".

A lot of which producers?

these

XLR8R always seems like the american version of FACT. Minus the podcasts, I guess.

Or rather minus the endless podcasts (seems like there is a new one every day on FACT's site whereas a XLR8R has like one a week, I think.)

Actually it was XLR8R itself that set up that dichotomy.

Bok Bok & L-Vis 1990 have made some awesome tracks btw. I'm generally approving of all of these producers.

Anyway let's not talk about this as it seems to upset everyone when I acknowledge the trend.

The magazine's article on "funkstep".

some of those tracks are obviously not 2009 releases. what an out of touch website.

xlr8r is the NME of dance music

shit getting heated

xlr8r gettin called out by its real name

it seems like a really cool job, whatever people's opinions of the mag itself might be. i'm pretty sure in the 90s when i was really into electronic music and living in the middle of nowhere, this was one of those magazines that helped me stay abreast of new stuff.

oh i had no idea anyone here wrote for xlr8r. even if they set up the binary in the first place, why run with something so obviously wrong-headed? labelling cooly g, bok bok et al as just "smart" funky, as if people don't play those tunes in clubs and as if they don't go down as well as - and in the same sets as - donae'o, ill blu, stush and kyla - does them as much of a disservice as anyone trying to sideline "real" funky. these are completely artificial distinctions which don't do anyone any favours.

and tbh the reason i don't really care how xlr8r are framing these tracks is because the fact that bok bok & l-vis, ikonika, guido et al are reaching an international audience in the first place is tremendously exciting to me - all i'll say is that in missing out subeena, they completely missed a trick. that girl is amazing:

i) http://www.last.fm/music/Subeena/_/Boksd (full track)

ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn7vFdhhd-g

I just re-read the XLR8R piece. The writer quotes a bunch of artists who refer to the scene splits, call it "funkstep," etc. Since it's the artists who call it that, it seems disingenuous to say that the magazine itself is making those distinctions.

is this the cooly g/roska/geeneus piece we're still talking about? first i actually heard of it was cooly g and geeneus disowning the word "funkstep" on twitter

It is, yes. Roska and Scratcha used it, Geeneus dismisses it as a joke. It just seems odd that on this thread the term seems to be discussed as something the mag made up on its own.

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