Steady Tremor is a relatively recent track (given my studio drought of the last few years). It was produced in January of 2005, a time of year (fall/winter) when I am generally most productive in the studio. (I not a fan of sitting in a studio during the hot summer, and air-conditioners tend to interfere with the sound/air flow).
Anyhow, the track has a nice tribalesque groove and a choppy synth line bouncing over it. It also has a sibling, a jam titled The Ploy, which is a different idea dropped over the same beats. We’ll cover that one later, but for now, catch the tremor.
New Predicament is a smooth acid flavored track from 2001. While a straight forward track, it does have a breaky West Coast feel which makes it fun to play. Aside from the percussion and airy samples, most of the sounds were produced by the mighty Virus synth, some sampled and morphed further in the DAW, others recorded straight from the box and tweaked in real-time.
Listening to it after all these years I decided to slow it down a bit as the original was too fast by today’s standards. So I brought it down to 135bpm, and actually prefer it at this rate.
Once again, the wav download is available and recommended.
If you are familiar with the track Hide And Seek, you know that its a voice-only track, vocoded and layered to perfection by the one and only Imogen Heap. This little missy just released her new album Ellipse and while I’m still trying to get into it, I remembered that a while ago I tried dropping some beats on Hide And Seek to see how that would sound. I quickly realized that the tempo of the track is very free-form and unless I busted out a real drumset and mics, getting this to work in a digital domain was going to require some heavy time adjustments.
Enter Ableton Live‘s sick Warp feature. (Time) warp works automatically by assessing the nature of the track and figuring out where stuff fits on its timeline as well as whether it should create a loop or sections that it attempts to play quantized (in time). It does a decent job but usually requires manual adjustments even for very straight-forward and repetitive dance tracks. But as expected, it had no idea how to deal with Imogen Heap’s beat-less jam. After manually tweaking words into time for a while without totally ruining the the vibe of the song, I dropped a few drum hits under it. (Admittedly, the first few verses could use further adjustments, but I got lazy.) The plan was to add other orchestration but that never happened (well, not yet). So I’m posting this here for you to listen to, drop in your editor and mess with further, or whatever. The BPM is 120.
I hope I don’t get in trouble with IH’s label or the miss directly. It might be wise to pull this one off asap since it may not last long.
Look for the updated remix at some point in the future, but for now here’s the first draft tagged as in progress.
In the short list of my most favorite techno labels has to be Luxus, a short lived German imprint known for intelligent arrangements built on crispy, groovy beats and superbly put together. A few records by Plasmatics and Lower Level released on this label were frequently heard in my mixes, as well as of other New York based techno DJs including my boys DJ Eleven and Preston Space.
I bring up this label here since its sound, and the sound of Plasmatics and Lower Level in particular, was the inspiration for the track Decoy, available for download here. Decoy is another personal favorite – a raw, loopy track with a tribal feel and a thick revolving bass laid over polished drum sounds. The bass was (once again) played through the Virus B synth and processed with the RNC 1773 compressor. The sound is deep enough to sit alongside the kick drum even without side-chaining and ducking, though this technique could have perhaps given the track more of a pump. But it rolls nicely without it and the spotlight is on the sounds in the top end, of which the core is the highly compressed clap. I used this sample on a few tracks and, if I remember correctly, it came from a Luxus record! Aside from the percussion samples, present are a couple of other classic Techno elements – the TR909 snare drum and ride cymbal.
Fake House is a rare house track of the bunch. It sort of caught me by surprise and took all of about 4 hours to arrange. It has a very raw, sample-based vibe which makes it a fun track to play (and play with) in an early or late set.
The creamy bass line was played on the Nord Lead keyboard, and is joined by a reversed electric piano riff and a couple of other mangled samples. The main beat was summed and reversed in a couple of breaks to add to the odd feel.
Produced 6 years ago (almost to the day), Battery is an alternate version of Alkaline, a track released in 2003 on one of New York’s premier techno labels: Gotham Grooves. Alkaline was a B-side on the Funk Matter EP, which featured remixes of the title track by Agent Orange and Valentino Kanzyani and will be covered here more directly later, but for now we’ll just focus on the Alkaline‘s gentler sibling.
Unlike the released version which has a darker, mangled vibe, Battery is a funkier jam with a free style bassline. Until now, only a couple of select few DJs had access to this rare mix. Now you do too.
Atera is a Techno House track from 2006. Like many Biotic tracks, it features a driving, tribal beat with lots of percussion, vocal stabs and a thick bass line. What balances is out is the gentler sound of the Rhodes keys which give it a splash of a down-tempo vibe. The track took a while to complete and went through a few revisions, partly to fine tune the crowded low-end, but also due to the marriage the softer and harsher elements which also made it difficult to market. Subsequently, the track wasn’t shopped much and ended up rotting on some disc.
Aside from the drums, the foundation of the track is the simple pulsating bass played by the Photone Synth (see screenshot), a child of the previously mentioned Reaktor software. Interestingly, the sound used for this part was not a tweaked sound or a preset, but the raw generator tone with no filters or processing applied. I’ve always liked the basic sound of this synth and have used it on a few occasions. Reaktor and Absynth were used for the remaining synth sounds. The TubeVST plugin was used to fatten up some of the sounds and give them a more airy tone. The Focusrite ComPounder was used for this purpose as well.
In addition to the MP3 and WAV versions of the completed track, included is the midi file for the main bass line, if you’d like to use it for something or simply get a kick out of playing it in your midi player. Lastly, I’ll be adding the BPM field for all tracks shortly. For now, this one is at 135 beats per minute, a common tempo for Biotic tracks.
August 28, 2009 / admin / Comments Off on Exclusive: Upstanding Citizens present Funkadelic Sexy
Unless you’re really in-the-know, it may come as a surprise that Upstanding Citizens is a project of old buddies Rus Deep (Mr. Preverted Groove himself) and Alek Biotic. But even if you were familiar with the duo and their track Cannibal Carnival featured on Rus and David Sambor’s 2003 CD Sounds Under New York, the only way you could have heard the follow up Funkadelic Sexy would have been during a Rus Deep or Alek Biotic live set. But even then you wouldn’t have known it.
Well, here it is now, to set things straight.
Recorded in Alek’s Brooklyn studio in late 2003 and mastered shortly after, the track features the vintage Rus Deep tear-down and re-build, with the classic NYC Progressive House vibe. Once again, original Wav file is included.
Goliath is a tech-trance jam from 2002. The title comes from the sample used in it, taken from the 1997 Sci-fi flick Event Horizon. If you haven’t seen this movie and you’re into the genre I recommend it, though Sam Neill’s annoying character (and his lame lines) ruined the ending for me.
I am generally not a fan of sampling stuff from movies, but I made an exception here since the track was inspired by the movie and the line (delivered by Laurence Fishburne) fit the bill. The sound of thunder in the background also came from the movie and I always wondered what it was doing there since (unless the thunder was somehow on the space ship) it wouldn’t have been heard in space. Hollywood… whatever.
Another interesting production note is that the bass is not played by a synth but is a heavily filtered sample of an Autechre track Rae from LP5, a sick album which I was heavily into around this time. Rae remains one of my Autechre faves.
Initially, the track was not a Part anything. It was just a track of its own. But a few months later I wrote a different track based largely on it (sans the Fishbourne sample) and that became Part 2, making this one its prequel. Look for the follow-up here in the future.
Tori Amos rules. There’s absolutely no need to mess with her work but I decided to do it anyway as an exercise and the result is this remix of her song (a favorite) Iieee, released on her 1998 album From the Choirgirl Hotel. Working with only the original track and wanting to keep her voice present as much as possible I had to apply pretty heavy filtering to drown out the rest of the original track and make room for my own music tracks. A fun challenge.
The remix ended up having a weird IDM/Drum’n’Bass vibe and includes an improv break about 2.5 minutes into it before returning to the chorus.
Around this time (year 2004) I stepped away from the dance productions and experimented with a different sound under the handle Montaz, the Serbian word for “montage”. This remix is the second Montaz effort, preceded by a track called Ego Programme, also featured on this blog.