pocketsnacks

In other news…

The Ozric Tentacles have moved to the US. Well, Ed and Brandi at least, but I guess that is the Ozrics these days. They have a new album, the Yum Yum Tree, due out soon and have a free single for download if you sign up for their email list, or the labels email list or whatever.
The single is called Mooncalf, and I have to say I am pretty pleasantly surprised by it. It is one of those jammy dub-style Ozric tunes, which is nothing new. What does stand out really is the drumming. It is really good!
I have been pretty dismayed with some of the programmed drumming on the recent albums. It just felt sterile and without any life or heart, which in turn makes the whole track feel that way. And what I always loved about Ozrics was while it was very electronic and techy, it still felt very very organic and alive and warm.
This new track seems to be in that vein.
The production on it also seems pretty tight and clean.

Oh and the album is available for pre-order as well.

Last night I snuck outside the warehouse and hit Mezzanine to catch Jon Hopkins & Four Tet.
Man oh man it was gooood! First off, let me say the Four Tet was fine… Enjoyable. Yes he was headlining and all the hipster kids were there to see him (probably because Pitchfork told them to go), but he was no where near as impressive as Mr. Hopkins.

I was grinning from ear to ear most of his set. It started off with the long every building wave of pretty vibrating electronic goodness that just washed over you. As the set progressed it just keep swapping layers for layers and building into deep bone massaging techno with this super nice glitched out IDM twitch.

It was great how it went from this warm, slowly moving ear soup, over into piano-tinged melodies, into finally just heavy, gotta move your feet, where the hell did this come from, electronic madness!

I loved it… it was way more than I had hoped it would be. Oh and it was gear! Ot at least gear manipulated. He had a laptop running, but was twiddling knobs and slammin pads the whole time. Twas brilliant! My only two regrets were that A) they had no merch table for which to buy more of his stuff (I already purchased his 1st two albums in a heartbeat, online) and B) absolutely NO ONE I knew went. I was all by myself… which is fine. I’ll go to shows by myself if I wanna see someone and no one I know is interested.
But this was one of those shows where you kinda wish you had someone there to share the experience.
Oh well…

After that I was feeling pretty damn good, just because it was such an uplifting thing… So I walked thru the rain over to 103 Harriet (aka part of 1015) to hit the Space Cowboys Finger Lickin Anniversary party. There, I actually knew some people, which was not exactly a surprise. That was also a damn fine show in it’s own right. REALLY good breaks. Like, really good. Wasn’t some dub steppy bullshit or whatever the newest trend is, it was really hard clean super fun breaks.  I had actually forgot what good breaks sound like… now I remember.

Good music on a solo Saturday night adventure!

Over the past few years, I used to catch bits of a radio show on NPR that always caught my attention and would suck me in, but I never knew when it was on or exactly what it was. I finally did some investigating a while back and discovered it was WNYC’s Radiolab.

Since then I think I haven listened to every episode from all 5 seasons. It is kind of sciencey, but really more just about curiosity. Every episode they pose a question, sometimes a very seemingly simple and obvious one, and then explore it. Usually revealing that it was not such a simple question after all.
Questions like, why do we sleep? Why do we laugh? What is music?

They attempt to answer these question with interviews and sort of, audio collages and stories. And they employ some really nice audio editing, sounds and music. It is really just great radio, and it feels very new and fresh and smart.

They have every episode available to listen to online, or download at their website, as well as extras that didn’t make it into the show (which is an hour long). You can also grab it at iTunes for free, but they don’t have as many episodes.