FairiesWearBoots

Well-known member
unrelated it does seem like blawan has made quite a lot of tracks from the drums on ramadanmans blimey.

anyway i thought the main complaint with this stuff wasnt about it being a bit soft but that its not doing much thats that new - that a lot of it is idm-ish tweaks on old styles and sounds. like an idm upholstery.

ha! Like an IDM upholstery!
sounds awful
 

mms

sometimes
Since it's not really a par, can I call people out and ask what they actually have in mind when they talk about soft, emotional, melodic, sensitive, delicate tunes?

I mean, this isn't really a single scene or a single aesthetic, but when we talk about this sort of stuff I'm normally thinking of Sicko Cell or Silo Pass or Spartan or Fuk Tha 101 or Anaconda or whatever as much as James Blake and Burial. And DJs who mix in grime and 'proper' funky sufficiently well that it's not obvious where that stops and other stuff begins. Blackdown's Rinse show being a case in point.

yeah i don't think anyone's denying that some of it's pretty good.
spartan's definitely grime though no? silo pass is great - it's got some energy and its also pretty much a grime track too though? - although he builds some richer synthy keys into it.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
what are some good recent sets of this stuff? for my money the girl unit and ikonika set on rinse a few weeks back is pretty excellent imo.

silo pass is great yeah (if a bit obviously traceable to its influences) but the middle takes it way off course.
 

mms

sometimes
what are some good recent sets of this stuff? for my money the girl unit and ikonika set on rinse a few weeks back is pretty excellent imo.

silo pass is great yeah (if a bit obviously traceable to its influences) but the middle takes it way off course.

but without the middle it would be a fairly interchangable 8 bar grime track which could have been made at any period in the last 8 years - the middle is what twists it.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
unrelated it does seem like blawan has made quite a lot of tracks from the drums on ramadanmans blimey.

blimey wasn't the first tune to use hollowed out percussion sounds

gumdrops said:
she seems to like one set of synth sounds all the time

would you criticise a funky or grime producer for this in the same way? she just has her own sound, distinctive and instantly recognisable
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
yeah you could take it back to indian stomp or whatever, but the blawan tracks do make me go cor (its like) blimey. :cool:

i am bored of roska using the same sort of dry palette so much but admittedly yeah, someone like wiley, i didnt get bored of him using the same sound bank - just depends how much you like the producer i think. i was really really bored of the neptunes using the same sounds all the time in the early 00s tho.

actually it might not be the sounds that i take issue with w/r/t ikonika, but that i sometimes have difficulty telling her tunes apart (not so much those early singles but what came from the album and around that time). actually i think thats what it is, not the sounds. they all have these massive sprawling spiderweb like melodies that stretch out all over the place and never really let up - its almost virtuoso-like (proggy?) and theres not much space in her playing i think that i think she might almost be better off making her albums into suites as it could all blend into one big whole. or maybe i just need to really listen to her much more to know whats what. do still like her though.
 

joe.dfx

who knows...
her dj sets are wicked! tuned into her livestream yesterday and it was pretty sick stuff (she played a Jordan Knight tune, too)

but yeah agree on having difficulty in distinguishing her tunes. they're all mostly, really, really good. i'm always afraid to play them out though for some reason. they're so melancholy...shouldn't really be afraid to either way ; )
 

paolo

Mechanical phantoms
I dunno, the tropes that tend to get lifted are diverse enough and varied enough that it works well, particularly if you've got a DJ who knows how to build a set rather than just playing every juke influenced tune he can get his hands on or every housey tune or whatever.

I mean, the worst you can say about a good set in this kind of style is that it 'just' mashes together the best bits from a wide range of other stuff - grime strings, MCs, garage rhythms, funky rhythms, juke vocal samples, R&B vocals, dubstep bass, detroit strings etc etc etc. Which is true of early IDM as well, and is also more or less verbatim what Simon Reynolds said about UKG when it came out. Make of that what you will.

Genuine question here, though, not rhetorical - can anyone name any more-or-less new tropes that have come out of this scene?

Nope, but taking a whole bunch of elements from the last twenty years or so and putting them together in a new way isn't necessarily a bad thing (in my opinion). I think it's interesting that the biggest DJs in this scene (Ben UFO, Jackmaster, Oneman) aren't producers but they are really good at building sets with a wide range of tracks. It's all a bit Retromania
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
Nope, but taking a whole bunch of elements from the last twenty years or so and putting them together in a new way isn't necessarily a bad thing (in my opinion). I think it's interesting that the biggest DJs in this scene (Ben UFO, Jackmaster, Oneman) aren't producers but they are really good at building sets with a wide range of tracks. It's all a bit Retromania

yeah much as i do actually like a fair bit of this stuff listening even to recent oneman sets or the ikonika one i love, some of the records i dont actually know if they are new or old. :confused:
 

Littlefoot

Well-known member
I know everyone has gone all crazy for 130 "house" beats, but man, the stuff Blawan and Joy Orbison did at 135-140 in a more experimental 2steppy vibe really rocked me harder than their output from the last year.
 

e/y

Well-known member
I really like Kowton's stuff, but the previews for the Naked Lunch release sound a bit meh.

Excited for that BenUFO Rinse CD :)
 

Phaedo

Well-known member

Can see why everyone has been loving this Blawan mix so much, had it on repeat last 2 days. Definitely a bit of a fingers up at the people saying "its all too timid and not raw enough". That said, it is pretty much Techno...
 

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal

Can see why everyone has been loving this Blawan mix so much, had it on repeat last 2 days. Definitely a bit of a fingers up at the people saying "its all too timid and not raw enough". That said, it is pretty much Techno...

Yeah this is banging. Def in the techno zone. :)
 
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