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Dig This! School of Seven Bells

FREE DOWNLOAD: School of Seven Bells, "Connjur"

Rhythm and harmony! They’re the first things you hear on “Iamundernodisguise,” the opening track on School of Seven Bells’ debut, Alpinisms: a rolling drumbeat marshals a hint of rhumba in the bassline, while sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza speak-sing the word-sounds like a two-part Eastern Orthodox choir. Soon enough, the chorus brings the hook and the result is left-field electronic pop; but it’s the confident mix of beats and voices that defines the song.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Concentric Pleasures? Wonky, U Call It?

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Ever since U.K. garage began splintering in the late '90s, its followers have spun off subgenre after subgenre. Dubstep and grime were the first to peel off from UKG, along with short-lived variants like nu dark swing, sub-low and Eski-beat. In the past year and a half, more names have blossomed and spread like Morning Glory vines: bassline house, niche, even the confusingly named "funky." Short for "funky house," it's a post-garage brand of 4/4 dance music that, nevertheless, has little to do with the American dance-music strain widely known as funky house. (In U.K. house music, meanwhile, you also get fidget house and "donk," another head-scratcher of a name that, likewise, refers neither to Soulja Boy's "Donk" nor to minimal house duo Donk Boys.)

Dig This! Curumin

FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD: Curumin, "Compacto"

Curumin is the Quannum artist who shouldn't be. On a Bay Area label of underground rappers, the young man born Luciano Nakata Albuquerque is a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist who doesn't rap and is, in many ways, an old-fashioned songwriter. But when Quannum co-founders Blackalicious toured Brazil in 2004, Curumin's manager slipped his first album, Achados e Perdidos, into their hands, and the group listened. What they heard seriously impressed them: a young man who had Stevie Wonder on the brain, James Brown in the beats and Jorge Ben in the melodies. Shortly after, they signed him.

Two things drive Curumin: a powerful nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood and a voracious appetite for new sounds. JapanPopShow, his second album, is a vintage-era masterpiece. But, for all its diverse influences -- Brazilian pop, soul, funk and reggae  -- it's also a complete musical universe. There are no loose threads. And given how beautifully textured the album is, perhaps it's not surprising he's a Quannum artist -- any hip-hop producer would want to sample these songs. (In fact, several rappers guest on the album.) We caught up with Rhapsody's Dig This! artist in early November, and asked him about all the usual stuff -- the album's name, his inspirations -- but we got a lot more: meditations on youth, our modern world, and what tradition means in the age of globalization.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Concentric Pleasures: New Order's Timely Renewals

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Despite my many obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my fandom has never been particularly fanatical. If I were going to become unhealthily fixated on a single band, though, New Order probably would have been the one, which makes the arrival of double-disc collectors' editions of their five classic '80s albums—Movement, Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, Brotherhood and Technique—particularly welcome. (More obsessive fans than I have complained about audio fidelity problems with the set, but I haven't noticed anything amiss, even playing through what, on my budget, is a rather obscenely expensive pair of Genelec monitors.) Each album is presented in its entirety, subtly remastered, along with rare sides and alternate versions. Some of these, granted, aren't as rare as you might wish; 1987's double-disc Substance did a good job of collecting singles and B-sides like "Shellshock" and "Everything's Gone Green." Still, there's plenty to sink your teeth into, even for semi-completists like myself. And listeners who didn't spend the latter half of the '80s converting their allowance to black wax may find even more surprises. Here's a look at some of the best bits.

Dig This! School of Seven Bells, Curumin, San Quinn

Welcome to the November 2008 version of Dig This! Every month, Rhapsody’s editorial staff will introduce you to a few artists you may not know, give you a chance to check out their music, and present them in their own words -- watch this space for upcoming features on the individual artists. Oh, and we’ll throw you some free downloads from them, too.

This month in Dig This!:
Curumin, a Brazilian of Spanish-Japanese descent who fell in love with American hip-hop and Jorge Ben at the same time.

San Quinn, an underground rap legend in the Bay Area, prolific and celebrated locally, but only now starting to break out on the national stage.

School of Seven Bells, a Brooklyn trio that combines gorgeous harmonies, a world of rhythms and some ecstatic studio sense to create beautiful psychedelic pop jams.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Concentric Pleasures: Peacefrog

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic dance music: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

I've been in the mood for a certain strain of '90s electronic music lately. The records I'm thinking of were often considered "home-listening electronica," though they were firmly grounded in the club culture of their day: deep and sensuous, they privileged harmony and melody as much as rhythm, and no matter the techniques they employed—sampling, breakbeats, drum machine sequences, analog synthesizers, digital sound design—they always let the sound itself dictate the final form. If we're going to have a revival of this stuff—and I hope we do—we could do worse by way of preparing than to dig out some of the classics of Peacefrog's catalog. The U.K. label has roamed far and wide since its founding in 1991, moving from acid house to hard techno and on through a range of Detroit and Chicago styles; these days, it's putting out José González and Nouvelle Vague. But there was a moment in the mid-'90s where Peacefrog, along with R&S Apollo, essentially set the standard for deep, emotive techno—to borrow a Black Dog title I cited last week, you could call it "ambiance with teeth."

John Norris Interviews ... Ratatat

MTV Shows

In the latest installment of John Norris Interviews ... our intrepid reporter talks to the electro-rock duo Ratatat. The group, made up of Mike Stroud and Evan Mast, talk about their recent touring, their recording set-up and their affection for analogue instruments like Mellotrons and harpsichords.

Further Viewing:
Additional installments of John Norris Interviews...

Concentric Pleasures: The Black Dog

Concentric Pleasures is a blog column dedicated to the best in electronic singles: house, techno, their cousins and offspring. Named in honor of vinyl's grooves, it's a weekly roundup of new releases and back-catalog finds.

Also known as Black Dog Productions, the Black Dog came up amidst the crazily productive musical chaos of Sheffield in the early days of rave. Beginning in 1989, they crafted a handful of ambitious, wide-ranging EPs (mostly for GPR and their own eponymous imprint) that incorporated breakbeats and electro-funk into gorgeous, streamlined house and techno in clear debt to Chicago and Detroit. Working with a tidy toolbox, they forged analog synths, drum machines and samplers into a powerful, emotive sound by turns tender and tenacious. (Their track title "Ambience With Teeth" just about sums it up.) By 1993's The Cost EP for GPR and the Bytes album for Warp, their increasingly variable tempos and time signatures would move away from straight techno toward a more fractured, abstract sound. Their approach would eventually come to be known as IDM, or "intelligent dance music"; it's fair to say that along with Autechre and Aphex Twin, the Black Dog round out IDM's Holy Trinity. But they're also the genre's most direct link to another, earlier pantheon: Detroit's first generation of techno producers, whose augmented chords and steely sequences directly informed the Black Dog's melodic sensibilities.