Showing posts with label Le Vinyl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Le Vinyl. Show all posts

Saturday, 20 October 2012

Various – Collected Works

Various Collected Works OFF Recordings
Speaking of labels you've got to hand it to… what I love about OFF Recordings is you never know quite what you're gonna get. One OFF release can be soulful/garage-y, the next tuff and techy… as long as it's good music they don't care too much for pigeonholes, which is how it should be.

It's no surprise, then, that this four-track sampler EP takes in a range of styles. The EP opens with HNQO feat Bip's As I See, a deep/tech chugger with a fat, chunky b-line and a breathy spoken female vocal. Oddly reminiscent of Superstars Of Rock's classic Orange Sunshine in places, you'll recognise it from the "D to the O to the O to the D… E.P.M.U.S.I.C… go!" refrain – though as to what 'Dood EP Music' means, your guess is as good as mine.

Javi Bora, Le Vinyl and Melohman are up next with Destruction, a low-temperature techy groove with an "annihilation… destruction" vocal hook, female wails and a tuff, no-nonsense bottom end, which is followed by Mantra from Hector Couto and S.K.A.M, a more peaktime kinda cut that sits on the deep house/nu disco borders and works a voal sample lifted from Mainline (the Jason Load version, not the Black Ivory one – as also sampled by Love Revolution's Give It To Me Baby back in the day).

Finally, Detroit Swindle's The Standard Of Dialogue is another cut that owes a great deal to classic early 90s NYC – the "hehs" in particular recalling House Of Gypsies' Samba, so much so that it MIGHT actually be a sample, though I'm not 100% sure – and that's topped with a black power/conscious rap-type (second) vocal exhorting "motherfuckers" to "realise" and "reject mediocrity" and so on.

Ageing disco dolly that I am it's Mantra that wins out for me, with Detroit Swindle coming a close second. But it's all good, as they say.

Out: This week

About: You can find OFF Recordings in all the usual places, such as… leading social network Facebook! Cloud-based audio sharing service Soundcloud! And at their very own homepage on the World Wide Web! Isn't the 21st century marvellous, eh?

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Various – Inner Circles Vol 2

Inner Circles Vol 2 Lower East
A compilation/showcase offering here from London's uber-cool Lower East label, with ten tracks split across two separate EP releases.

I'm not going into every track individually but the artists involved are (deep breath): Michael Jansons, Cozzy D, Lee Brinx, Johnny Mikes, Alexis Raphael, Rebel, Viadrina, Le Vinyl & Gelabert feat Sacha D Flame, Tom Budden and Subsonik – some of which names will be familiar to TIWWD readers, some of which will be new. And I think it's fair to say overall that if you took ten artists to one side and said, paint me a picture of the hipster house sound of London right now, it'd probably sound much like this.

Fusing influences from deep and tech house, techno and (in several places, anyway) R&B and UK garage, this is so 'now' it hurts but there are certainly gems to be discovered, such as the ominous disco-tech of Budden's All I Know, Le Vinyl & Gelabert's jackin' Make It, Cozzy D's UKG-ish wobbler Bullseye or the bumpin' nu-boogie of Jansons' I Know You're Feeling OK.

So discover them, why don't you?

Out: This week

About: You can find Lower East on Soundcloud, on Facebook or their website, though again they haven't actually built the latter yet*. Still.

* Judging by the various artists' haircut (singular) maybe it's a fashion thing… is not having a website the new having a website or something? I wouldn't know, I'm old. I remember when it was all ZX81s and calculator watches round 'ere…