Boca 45 — Pitch Sounds

The Bristol fun continues. Boca 45 (a.k.a. Scott Hendy) has a new album out on Grand Central. From the sound of things, Pitch Sounds is an eclectic mix of hip-hop breaks, cheerfully corny funk samples, and a couple of moody downtempo loops.

One of the standout tracks is “In The City”, originally released as a 7” on High Noon earlier this year. It features New York vocalist Stephanie Mckay, whose astounding debut album, Mckay, was one of the highlights of 2003. Hendy co-wrote “Thinking Of You” on that album, which was produced by Geoff Barrow (Portishead) and Tim Saul (Earthling).

Juno have some audio clips; it’s also available from Amazon.co.uk.

For those trying to follow the plot, Scott Hendy is one half of Dynamo Productions, along with Portishead’s DJ Andy Smith. Before that, he was half of Purple Penguin, which was on the sorely-missed Cup Of Tea Records, along with long-standing Bristol acts like Grantby, Statik Sound System and Monk & Canatella.

Boca 45, Pitch Sounds

(Grand Central, 2004)

Gotan Project — Inspiración-Espiración

Gotan Project’s La Revancha Del Tango came out in 2001, with a small fanfare of publicity about its blend of Argentinian tango and dub-lite hip-hop beats. It was a little too conservative to be as innovative as billed, but that made it a natural match for the downtempo coffee-table market. After a thorough amount of licensing it was everywhere, as viewers of the BBC’s slickly stylized crime series Hustle can attest. We’re not talking about Moby levels of saturation marketing, but there was a certain point at which it seemed to become part of London’s collective mental furniture.

Inspiración-Espiración is a mix by Philippe Cohen Solal, one of the three French musicians-DJs at the heart of Gotan Project (along with a number of Argentinean musicians in Paris). On one level, it’s more of the same, with the new Gotan tracks and assorted tangos fitting the mould. The reworking of Chet Baker’s “Round About Midnight” remains tidy and tasteful, eschewing even the bendy crispness of the Sarah Vaughan remix that they contributed to the Verve Remixed series.

But it does include a handful of remixes that were on some editions of La Revancha Del Tango. Those by Pepe and Bradock and Peter Kruder (in solo and Peace Orchestra guise) club things up a bit; Antipop Consortium’s “El Capitalismo Foraneo” and Al-Shid’s “M.A.T.H.” (produced by J-Zone around a classical sample) put some edge on the mix. But there’s not much to disrupt the easily-accessible vibe. If you liked the tastefulness and sedate pace of La Revancha Del Tango, there’s probably something here for you.

Gotan Project, Inspiración-Espiración

(XL, 2004)

Diplo — Florida

The debut album from US hip-hop producer Diplo is just out on Ninja Tune’s Big Dada imprint. There are plenty of comparisons to DJ Shadow flying around, mostly because of big mellow soundpieces like “Summer’s Gonna Hurt You”. Like Shadow’s Endtroducing…, it relies on full, rounded organ riffs, which lend a thick and syrupy feel to even the most frenetic breakbeats. But there’s also an obvious Timbaland influence, with the drum programming shimmying along in crisp little packets. “Indian Thick Jawns” recalls Timbaland’s recent production for Bubba Sparxxx, and features Freestyle Fellowship’s P.E.A.C.E.

“Into The Sun” features Martina Topley-Bird; the production track is played entirely in reverse, and teases out the contrast between intimacy and distance that made her early collaborations with Tricky so entrancing. There’s some very good stuff here.

The three tracks at BBC’s always-worthwhile Collective site don’t really do the album justice, but there is a brief interview there. Aurgasm has an excellent sample of the album. Alternatively, of course, there’s audio clips of the whole thing at Big Dada.

Diplo, Florida

(Big Dada, 2004)

Dynamo Productions — Get It Together

Continuing this week’s Bristol theme: Dynamo Productions have a remix album coming out. Dynamo Productions are Andy Smith, Portishead’s DJ, and Scott Hendy (a.k.a. Boca 45), formerly of Purple Penguin. Both Bristol alumni. Their debut LP, Analogue, was released last year on Australia’s Invada Records.

Dynamo’s Showtime EPs contained some fine Lessons-style cut-up hip-hop. A few of these tracks are on Analogue, which is grounded in a crisp and funky old-school feel. But there’s an unusually rich density to it. There’s also the hypnotically languid melange of Al Green samples on “Airwaves”, and the tone of confident loss that pervades “We’re Through”. It’s classy stuff. Audio samples here.

Get It Together is a collection of remixes of Analogue tracks.  It’s been available in Australia since the end of August, and it becomes available elsewhere next Monday. Invada is the label established by Ashley Anderson (a.k.a. Katalyst), engineer Fraser Stuart, and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Remixers predictably include Katalyst and The Jimi Entley Sound — which is yet another Geoff Barrow pseudonym.

Invada releases are distributed by Inertia Music in the UK. They have a shop.

Dynamo Productions, Analogue

(Invada/Inertia, 2003)

Dynamo Productions, Get It Together

(Invada/Inertia, 2004)

Earthling — Humandust

As noted here, Earthling’s long-awaited second album has been released on the French Discograph label. The album was recorded in 1997 but went unissued after they were dropped by EMI.

There are audio clips at Amazon.fr, which along with Soul Seduction appears to be one of the few places at which it is currently available.

There is also a 12” of the first single, Saturated, which features remixes by Kid Loco and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow (under the pseudonym D.R.U.N.K.).

The sleeve design looks rather like Rjd2’s Since We Last Spoke, no?

Earthling, Humandust

(Discograph, 2004)

Jazz for fans of DJ Cam’s Substances

… or, at least, for fans of the piano samples.

Cam’s 1996 Substances opens with a sample from Gang Starr’s “Mass Appeal”, and proceeds through a range of faux-Mid-Eastern stylings, toned-down drum ‘n’ bass moments and Interview With A Vampire excerpts.

But it’s the jazz piano samples that dominate the album.

More specifically, it’s the sound of Herbie Hancock and Mccoy Tyner adapting the idioms of bebop piano to the restless development of Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis and — in the case of Tyner — John Coltrane.

“Friends and Enemies”, the opening track, is built around a wistful McCoy Tyner introduction. A range of samples follow throughout the album, all pervaded by an air of autumnal melancholy. They are often cut across the beat so that the soft drumwork is brought to the front like light rain.

There’s a tendency to underestimate the importance of Hancock and Tyner in Davis’ mid-sixties quintet and Coltrane’s quartet. Certainly the firebrand drummers — Tony Williams and Elvin Jones — have always received a great deal of attention, as has Ron Carter’s amazing prolificacy. Richard Cook and Brian Morton have suggested that, by the mid-sixties, Hancock “may also, as McCoy Tyner was to do at almost exactly the same time, have realized that he was to some extent external to the real drama of this extraordinary music.”

But it’s hard to fault the artistic approaches taken by either pianist. Tyner’s willowy romanticism is the perfect foil to Coltrane’s sometimes impatient — and logically exhaustive — bluster. Hancock’s wide, open voicings create the perfect space for Davis’ quick probings, not to mention Shorter’s angular melodies and feather-light nostalgia. The crispness of Hancock’s timing offsets the tendency of both Shorter and Davis to whimsical meandering, and unerringly finds the kinks in the meter that provide a bridge between Carter and William on the one hand, Davis and Shorter on the other.

What’s more, the feeling that Hancock could be “diffident and detached” (as Cook and Morton put it) is exactly the feeling of disconnect that lends itself to the emotional piquancy of the jazz of this period.

There’s more to it than that, of course. While the compositions became ever more sparse and mercurial, Hancock and Tyner were obliged to provide a harmonic outline, and therefore to remain to some extent within a traditional bebop vocabulary. With the piano recorded in pristine accuracy at the front of the mix, the result is some of the essential restlessness (and glittering isolation) that inhabits this music.

There are countless recordings on which to hear Hancock and Tyner reinventing jazz piano in this period, any of which might have been sampled by Cam to much the same effect. Coltrane’s Crescent (1964) is the obvious choice for Tyner, since “Wise One” is the basis of the track which opens Substances and returns later. Crescent is often seen as a dark sister of A Love Supreme, recorded six months later, though it remains far more accessible to the newcomer. There’s certainly something uncompromising about “Crescent”, a bleakness at the edges. But it is offset by an implicit optimism that emerges from the lonely balladry of “Wise One” and “Lonnie’s Lament”, much of it down to Tyner’s playing. “The Drum Thing”, despite Tyner’s absense and a centreless theme from Coltrane, retains a balmy warmth that buoys Jones’ playing.

Apparently the album was recorded in fraught circumstances, though no one appears to know what they were. Cook and Morton speculate some erratic behaviour on Jones’ part. In any case, a master tape containing longer versions of “Crescent” and “Bessie’s Blues” was at some stage destroyed.

Coltrane’s ferocious restlessness means that the sustained languid melancholy of Crescent is something of a one-off. Yet the serious of albums Coltrane recorded for Impulse in 1962-63, when he was recovering from painful dental problems, have some of the same qualities, in particular Ballads (1962).

Both Hancock and Tyner appeared on the extraordinary run of albums that Wayne Shorter headlined for Blue Note between 1964 and 1967. Of these, Adam’s Apple probably offers the best mix of quality compositions and accessibility. It certainly has its fair share of drifting melancholy — the bleary-eyed cool of “502 Blues (Drinkin’ And Drivin’)”, Shorter’s tone piquant but noncommittal; the gorgeous modal classic “Footprints”. And “Teru”, which is one of Shorter’s perfect ballads, its accents always falling at unexpected moments and seeming heartbreakingly throwaway.

Beyond the swaying lock of “Footprints”, the album also delivers its share of funk. The title track bolsters Shorter’s laid-back sidewinding theme with one of Hancock’s tightly rolling piano riffs. On “El Gaucho”, Joe Chambers’ crisp rim-shots keep balance between the opening phrases and the cooler bridge. Adam’s Apple is probably Shorter’s most well-rounded album of the period, if not (quite) the best.

The core Davis studio albums in this period are E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1966), Sorcerer and Nefertiti (both 1967). Hancock’s playing on the live album that immediately preceded Shorter’s joining the group (issued in various combinations as My Funny Valentine, Four & More, and The Complete Concert, 1964), and on his own extraordinary Maiden Voyage has the same desolate yet nostalgic qualities.

For more of the same from DJ Cam, check out 1995’s Underground Vibes, issued as part of the Mad Blunted Jazz double-CD set. This year’s Liquid Hip-Hop is said to be a return to the same territory. He is apparently at work Substances Two.

DJ Cam, Substances

(Inflammable Records, 1996)

John Coltrane, Crescent

(Impulse, 1964)

Wayne Shorter, Adam’s Apple

(Blue Note, 1966)

DJ Rels

Some mp3s at New(ish) from DJ Rels’ forthcoming Theme For A Broken Soul, which apparently is released August 10. Stone’s Throw has one of their oblique is-he-or-isn’t-he-Madlib biographies, though everybody seems to be taking it for granted that he is.

Anyway, these sound interesting. And relatively devoid of the aimlessly washy electric piano noodlings that have characterized Madlib’s most recent avalanche of work. If indeed it be he.

Nice to see that the “September 13” break can still get a good working-over.

New Earthling album

An email from Tim Saul confirms that Human Dust, the long-finished second Earthling album, will see a release this year, on the French Discograph label. The slated date is September 13th.

I’ll be posting some material about Earthling later, but suffice to say that 1995’s Radar was one of the classic albums in the first rush of trip-hop (when it was still — controversially — called that). Their second album stands alongside Fresh Four’s Smith & Mighty-produced debut as one of the lost Bristol sound albums.

There is also, apparently, the possibility of some live shows in the autumn. Which is exciting indeed.

The site that had housed a tracklisting and audio samples for some time appears to be down at the moment.

Update: more information here.

Waiwan — Distraction

A gem from 1998, which was not a vintage year for downtempo. The Bristol sound was mostly spent, despite a valedictory coda in Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. Ninja Tune was changing direction to take in the likes of Chocolate Weasel’s kitsch-funk. And the trip-hop template was fast becoming coffee-table music turned out by insipid second-raters like Thievery Corporation and Morcheeba.

But this is a cracking album from Waiwan, in part because it outlines the state of the art thus far. The thunderous timpani that open “The Deep” flag the genre’s cinematic influences. What follows — the well-tempered vocal snatches, washy electric piano and clipped wah-wah — inaugurate an album of uncrowded dubby trip-hop, which wears its influences on its sleeve. “Ain’t Easy” consciously apes Massive Attack’s “Better Things”, with it’s almost identical bass figure and reverb-swallowed drums. “Yesterday”, with a clipped snyth anticipating the backbeat, echoes the somnolent mood of Coldcut’s “Eine Kleine Hed Musick”. The album’s closer, “Revenge”, finishes out the cinematic feel, setting angular string progressions against ominous bells, metallic clangs and distant sirens.

There’s a sunny feel to it, too, with occasional clipped sax riffs recalling Pete Rock’s early-90s horn riffs. Brittle, jangled piano figures on “The Deep” and “Ain’t Easy” suggest the dusky vibe of the Isley’s “Summer Breeze” or Kool & The Gang’s “Summer Madness” (a reference more explicit in the rising snyth sounds of “Filtered Funk”).

The jazzy stretch in the middle of the album may be a little too smooth, though “Goddess” is hailed as an early classic of the Nu-Jazz scene. But “Nightmare”, its booming double bass figure amid drum & bass-influenced breakbeats, treads a path being taken at the same time by Red Snapper (and later tarmaced with bus lanes and parking bays by The Cinematic Orchestra).

Waiwan was apparently part of the Common Ground project that released one album on Ultimate Dilemma. A new Waiwan album is apparently imminent from Earth Project, though the audio clips suggest that his jazz-funk-fusion roots may have got the better of him. I suppose that means his old site at Autonomy isn’t going to get updated (so much for the five-album deal, huh?), but you can still catch plenty of audio clips there.

ZEN RMX Highlights

Among the many high points of ZEN RMX, the recent Ninjatune remix compilation:

Mr. Scruff’s version of Manitoba’s “Sweetsmoke”, which sounds like Kruder & Dorfmeister scoring Heart Of Darkness.

Luke Vibert’s version of “Turtle Soup”, which couples a quirky stringy melody — and a lush summery interlude — to the classic (and curiously unbalanced) bass-and-strings loop of the original.

Cornelius’ everything-especially-the-kitchen-sink rendition of “Atomic Moog”.

The Herbaliser’s campy Bossa mix of the already-plenty-campy “Something Wicked” (is that a lift from Jimi Tenor’s “Outta Space” at the end?).

But the real highlight is Fourtet’s calamitous remix of Bonobo’s “Pick Up”, a great reminder of the strengths of 1999’s Dialogue, namely a taste for measured cacophony that Fourtet’s last two releases have sidestepped somewhat.

The first two minutes accumulate around a wonderful rounded bass tone: bits of clipped horns, brittle percussion, reversed radio interference, a shimmering guitar chord. Then there’s two minutes of free range breakbeat mayhem, while Bonobo’s synth and flute riffs are smuggled in underneath. And finally the original’s strident bass line enters to hammer home the fact that we’ve been listening to it all along. It’s a trick that Keith Jarrett specializes in: tricking you into listening to a familiar melody in an unfamiliar way, and then suddenly — quietly — restoring the original context. Except here there’s amps and breakbeats. Glorious.

There’s a stream available here, for the curious. And plenty more Ninja samples via this flyer.