afro techno/house

M

mms

sometimes
watching a few trends in techno and house at the moment
villalobos doing a rhythm and sound remix with lite horns which seem to link the reggae with chile, luciano remixing salif keita, very quality, strategy's world house of last year all bringing strange links and practices to techno, stuff like portable with it 's strong african feel, (he's south African), osulande, all that stuff that u r talked about global techno, african, genuine mixing of the traditional and super modern seems to be arriving now oddly.
However it's not from ur who recently remade galaxy to galaxy stuff as noodly 80's synthy jazz :(
 
B

borderpolice

Well-known member
mms said:
portable with it 's strong african feel, (he's south African)
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i find it difficult to detect that african feel in portable. don't you think it's just the biographical clue that make you interprete his material as african? [NB i don't know all of his material]
 
M

mms

sometimes
borderpolice said:
i find it difficult to detect that african feel in portable. don't you think it's just the biographical clue that make you interprete his material as african? [NB i don't know all of his material]
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nah its the drum sounds chants and polyrhythmic feeling esp on the last lp - i mean i thought that b4 i read the biog ...
he lives in london now ..
 
B

borderpolice

Well-known member
mms said:
nah its the drum sounds chants and polyrhythmic feeling esp on the last lp - i mean i thought that b4 i read the biog ...
he lives in london now ..
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I love his 2005 album, but the influences seem to be more detroit and berlin than africa. I don't think it's more polyrhythmic than other glitch/IDM stuff. As an aside, african music is more often than not particularly polyrhythmic either. there are so many different styles.
 
A

AshRa

Well-known member
mms said:
However it's not from ur who recently remade galaxy to galaxy stuff as noodly 80's synthy jazz :(
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I saw that they reissued "A moment in time" on the Galaxy 2 Galaxy thing - the noodliest synth jazz record in the world - and one of my favourite UR things ever!
 
M

mms

sometimes
borderpolice said:
I. As an aside, african music is more often than not particularly polyrhythmic either. there are so many different styles.
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just forget i ever tried to open up an interesting discussion and let's just get down to personal nit picking and individual taste .
ffs.
 
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M

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
AshRa said:
I saw that they reissued "A moment in time" on the Galaxy 2 Galaxy thing - the noodliest synth jazz record in the world - and one of my favourite UR things ever!
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Was chatting about UR last night, I like a lot of the new stuff, loads of Sunday morning plays but my mate reckons they are trapped in the myth of Detroit...
 
M

mms

sometimes
Martin Dust said:
Was chatting about UR last night, I like a lot of the new stuff, loads of Sunday morning plays but my mate reckons they are trapped in the myth of Detroit...
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some of the stuff like slide etc is great -other bits like aquanauts etc isn't so some of the 12"S but this big legacy galaxyto galaxy re-doing their classics as jazz is grim, lite sax is rarely needed - one track at the end though that's unnamed kills it !
 
G

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
Techno went through a latin/african phase around 96-97 too - largely centred on Lost, cos Bicknell & Mills were dropping a lot of african drumming stuff and techno inspired by that.

Unfortunately a lot of the records were a bit shite - just percussive loops layered over a kickdrum (and doubly unfortunatly, this is the aspect of the sound that survived). But the better stuff typically had very dense shifting drum patterns that played games with groove's rhythmic emphasis as the tracks progressed - something i always thought of (rather fancifully perhaps) as a response to the developments in drum & bass in 93-95.

The sound died a bit eventually because DJs were taking thier sets into pure trance dance rhythm and eliminating all emotive aspects of the music - vocals, riffs, basslines, chords, etc. Derrick May used to do really great stuff, dropping disco tracks & cutting up vocals over the top of rhythm loops, but no-one else had the balls to offend the purist massive in this way, which with hindsight was a shame. Then the stuff like Samual L Sessions started coming out, which sounded superficially similar but was structured much more conservatively - the rhythms didnt move around the way they did in the top late 90s tracks. And so on into dull loopy techno.

I'll post more recs if people are interested but here's one peeps might not know about:

Dark Star - Afropean EP

..not for the B-sides but the track Afropean is one of my favorite techno tracks ever, well worth tracking down.
 
M

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
mms said:
some of the stuff like slide etc is great -other bits like aquanauts etc isn't so some of the 12"S but this big legacy galaxyto galaxy re-doing their classics as jazz is grim, lite sax is rarely needed - one track at the end though that's unnamed kills it !
Click to expand...

True, true - I find myself liking the B-sides more, although why people always see doing Jazz as some kind of progression is beyond me - must be like punk bands going metal - look we can play :) But I also think that a lot of techno people want things to be the same forever - bit of a paradox really.

Got a lot of time of Mike and the boys tho, so I always dip into what they are doing. DJ Bone been doing a lot of interesting stuff, his first 4 12"s are a must...

Oliver Ho and James Ruskin are also doing interest stuff with tribal beats, well worth checking.
 
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M

mms

sometimes
Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
Techno went through a latin/african phase around 96-97 too - largely centred on Lost, cos Bicknell & Mills were dropping a lot of african drumming stuff and techno inspired by that.

Unfortunately a lot of the records were a bit shite - just percussive loops layered over a kickdrum (and doubly unfortunatly, this is the aspect of the sound that survived). But the better stuff typically had very dense shifting drum patterns that played games with groove's rhythmic emphasis as the tracks progressed - something i always thought of (rather fancifully perhaps) as a response to the developments in drum & bass in 93-95.

The sound died a bit eventually because DJs were taking thier sets into pure trance dance rhythm and eliminating all emotive aspects of the music - vocals, riffs, basslines, chords, etc. Derrick May used to do really great stuff, dropping disco tracks & cutting up vocals over the top of rhythm loops, but no-one else had the balls to offend the purist massive in this way, which with hindsight was a shame. Then the stuff like Samual L Sessions started coming out, which sounded superficially similar but was structured much more conservatively - the rhythms didnt move around the way they did in the top late 90s tracks. And so on into dull loopy techno.

I'll post more recs if people are interested but here's one peeps might not know about:

Dark Star - Afropean EP

..not for the B-sides but the track Afropean is one of my favorite techno tracks ever, well worth tracking down.
Click to expand...


yeah there is rhythmic emphasis on 2nd beat of the bar here or not in a straight 4/4 pattern - esp with portable - with other elements floating around it, some instrumentation, drum timbres etc, guitars, a kind of drum circle sound.. certainly more 'organic' than alot of the otherwise synthetic microhouse people except maybe villalobos..
villalobos uses the horns in a way they sound neither reggae or technoish but older - with a groundation vocal, but with a big bass drum sound dropping like a burru drum in the first part, there is a kind of use of rhythm and instrumentation, not just for rhythm but in a wider more experimental way too, which is an interesting thing, maybe as producers get further outside europe the music picks up these influences tics etc..


that's colin dale isn't it that record, i recall his show and all the debates that went on there, techno was so weirdly purist for a while, knowledge club etc, wearing army gear...
 
G

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
mms said:
that's colin dale isn't it that record, i recall his show and all the debates that went on there, techno was so weirdly purist for a while, knowledge club etc, wearing army gear...
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Certainly on his label: he's listed as the producer on discogs but i doubt he did it on his own - it's not very representitive of his DJing for sure. There's no info on the record.

Never went to knowledge - Lost was the one for me, tried things like final frontier & eurobeat 2000 but it never really clicked.

I've been well out of the techno loop for a few years now but names like villalobos & portable keep coming up on this board, gonna have to check their stuff out. What do you recommend?
 
B

borderpolice

Well-known member
Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
I've been well out of the techno loop for a few years now but names like villalobos & portable keep coming up on this board, gonna have to check their stuff out. What do you recommend?
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Portable - Version
Villalobos - Alcachofa

[The new Rhythm & Sound SMY Remixes also has a nice VIllalobos track, though the vlad Delay shines more]
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
new Luciano goes beyond the coy percussive hints of Africa well known of his Cadenza label, and features straight up mashup style center piece "Africa Sweat" on his new album, which adds beats to Senegal's Ali Boulo Santo (who is the nephew of legendary "King of the Kora" Soundioulou Cissoko).

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