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Alek Biotic Presents: Funkin

September 4, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

We’re going way back to 1999 for one of the first Alek Biotic live mixes: Funkin. A disco house set, Funkin features a few classics from the period, most notably Knights of The Jaguar by Aztec Mystic (aka DJ Rolando). A flurry of remixes followed the release of Jaguar, but Funkin features the original which I’m happy to stay I still have on vinyl (2 copies, in fact). Also present is one of my favorite Basement Jaxx jams, Miracles Keep On Playin’ (Red Alert Remix), often heard in my sets around this time.

The mood of the mix toughens up in the second half with a couple of tracks from Timo Maas, Joey Beltran’s Arena and ending up with Adam Beyer’s remix of The Real Jazz – a sick crossover track and a personal favorite. (The original version of Krome and Dahlback’s The Real Jazz appears on the mix The Hook Up Service, completed in early 2009 and featured on this blog.)

There were lots of copies of this CD going around and it actually got quite a few plays. According to unconfirmed reports it even reached cafes on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts. I worked on a follow-up tentatively titled Stylin which followed the same vibe but was never officially released. I’ll see if I can dig it up and make it available here in the future.

Download: Funkin (mp3)

Track List:
Ramon Lafour & Tim J – Pluck Funkin’
Techhouse Phenomena – Pure Science
Aztec Mystic – Knights of the Jaguar
Funky Derrick – Keep It Up (Third Earth Mix)
Mile High Club – Pill Pipeline
Mastermind – Free To Do Whatever
Basement Jaxx – Miracles Keep On Playin’ (Red Alert Mix)
Mr. Spring – Blax Trax 1
Armin Van Buuren – Free (Olav Basoski’s Bodycheck Mix)
Funk Function – Empress Zero
Timo Maas – Eclipse
Jan Driver – Drive By
Joey Beltram – Arena
Timo Maas – Riding On The Storm
Thomas Krome – Real Jazz (Adam Beyer Remix)

Ghost

September 2, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

Produced ages ago, Ghost is the first officially signed Alek Biotic track! It appeared on the German label Bazooka 10‘s first release, oddly titled Erectional Thoughts. A sublabel of Hadshot (one of the first and most respected psy-trance labels), Bazooka 10 offered a different sound and to kick things off the label’s founder, Israeli DJ Yaniv Tal, assembled this compilation. The album was available on both vinyl and CD and featured a variety of international artists including Cortex Thrill.

My discography with Bazooka 10 would include two follow-up EPs, but Ghost still stands out as it was the first ever signed record deal.

Ghost was inspired by the industrial sound of acts like Nine Inch Nails as well as a few popular Underworld tracks from the period. It was arranged using the Akai MPC2000 workstation and recorded to DAT. All of the sounds (drums, synths, samples) were played through the Nord Lead keyboard and the Quasimidi Polymorph module, and no loops were used. Ghost is a personal favorite and I’ve wanted to do a remix of it for a long time, however having sold most of the gear used to produce it and left with just the summed master the effort of recreating it from scratch didn’t seem particularly appealing. Maybe someday…

Lastly, this is the first track featured on trak.fm which has been previously released. So, no WAV download available, but you can get yourself a copy of the full album at online stores like Psyshop.com.

Download: Ghost (mp3)

Atera

August 31, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

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.

Download: Atera (mp3)Download: Atera (wav)Download: Atera Bass Line (midi)

Exclusive: Upstanding Citizens present Funkadelic Sexy

August 28, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

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.

Eat it up. Yum, yum.

Download: Funkadelic Sexy (mp3)Download: Funkadelic Sexy (wav)

Goliath (part 1)

August 25, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

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.

Download: Goliath [part 1] (mp3)Download: Goliath [part 1] (wav)

Tori Amos – Iieee (Montaz remix)

August 21, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

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.

Enjoy.

Download: Iieee [Montaz Remix] (mp3)

Panic Relapse

August 18, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

We’re going way back to year 2000 for this one. Its one of the very early Alek Biotic productions, in fact, its number 11. But of well over a hundred tracks this one stands out since its the one and only progressive trance track.

Since this genre wasn’t really my style this track was never shopped and subsequently never released. Until now.

This track also features the awesome Nord Lead keyboard, as well as the Quasimidi Polymorph module, now long discontinued (the company folded around the time this track was made). Drum programming and sequencing on the track was done on the legendary Akai MPC-2000 sampler workstation, and the track was recorded to DAT before mastering on the PC.

Here’s Panic Relapse.

Download: Panic Relapse (mp3)Download: Panic Relapse (wav)

Exclusive: Kill By Inches – D.N.A. (Down To 3hree Bonus Track!)

August 9, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

Kill By Inches released Down To 3hree exactly 10 years ago, and while the disc is available on Amazon, iTunes and elsewhere, the song D.N.A. recorded for this release never made it to the disc. I have to admit that listening to it now I’m not exactly sure why we left it off since it was one of my favorite KBI tracks, but we did nonetheless. So, guess what? We’re making it available here so you can listen to and download it right now!

The song, along with the rest of the songs from Down To 3hree was recorded in March and April of 1999 at Multisound Studios and produced/mixed by Dave Weiner. This was a particularly difficult time for me since my hometown Belgrade was being bombed by NATO.

Like most other KBI recordings, the music was recorded live with no overdubs and vocals were recorded separately. So here it is: D.N.A. presented unmastered, unedited, straight-from-the-DAT. Let us know how you like it.

Kevin Oriol – Bass, Vocals (left channel)
Steve Papa – Drums
Alex Kolundzija – Guitars, Vocals (right channel)

Download: D.N.A. (mp3)

Madness

August 8, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

This track was my submission for a CLR (Chris Liebing’s awesome label) remix competition. Chris had released his Evolution LP around this time (2004) and the challenge was to remix the track American Madness. My remix didn’t make the cut but since its completely different from the original I dropped the first word from the title and it was officially a track of its own.

Aside from it being produced for a specific (though, unmet) purpose, the track’s beat always stood out from the bunch and it was one of the rare tracks that featured the FM7 synth (the legato stab in the breaks). I meant to use this synth more since I really liked the sound, but it never ended up anywhere else.

Once again, the original, mastered .wav file is available for your listening (and mixing!) pleasure.

Its Madness.

Download: Madness (mp3)Download: Madness (wav)

Decade Of Dissonance

August 6, 2009 / admin / Comments Off

Decade Of Dissonance started out as a remix of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. That idea was quickly dropped and the track took a direction of its own. However, things kept getting in the way and it would take more than a year before it was done. Its another relatively long track and it takes a bit of turn around the 5th minute before getting back on, well… track.

The main line is played through Native Instruments’ insane modular software studio (to put it mildly), Reaktor, which allows you to create your own instruments and ensembles by literally drawing out the components (generators, knobs, faders, etc.) and connecting them into the signal flow as you see fit. NI produces some of my favorite software based instruments including Absynth (also used on this track), Battery and the newer Massive. To beef up the tone and give it some air I usually run the digital sounds through an analog device, preferably a preamp and/or a compressor, which was the case here.

(Speaking of preamps and compressors, I’ve gone through a few over the years and some of the highlights were a JoeMeek box, a Focusrite compressor (which I still have), and FMR Audio’s RNC 1773. Nowadays, I find that the Universal Audio’s UAD powered plugins provide accurate emulations of the favorite analog hardware while allowing project-related presets.)

Yet another NI plugin, Guitar Rig was used on the guitar which meanders in the background and is more prominent in the break. Guitar Rig does a decent job of simulating classic guitar amps and sounds, but it also offers some weird effects such as the one used here.

Exclusive: As you’ll see below, this post features the original (wav) format file for download. This the mastered version of the original mixdown available here with no compression. Enjoy.

Download: Decade Of Dissonance (mp3)Download: Decade Of Dissonance (wav)