Monthly Archives: January 2007

inthemix.com.au, Music, Review, Writing

The Nextmen – Friends & Family

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The Nextmen are one of my favourite live acts and their onstage energy is infectious and fun. Friends & Family is unfortunately a mere studio mix and misses capturing some of their live vibe, but is the perfect summer album, full of funky, laid back, head bobbing sounds, great for a Sunday arvo recovery.

Starting with a superbly edited funky intro, the album cruises along nicely as beats from Madlib, Mr Scruff, People Under The Stairs, Tipper, and more are expertly mixed together with accapella’s from artists such as Soulson and Rodney P.

The smooth sounds continue from the funk of Quantic Soul Orchestra and Kid Named Miles, to the reggae dub of Lee Perry and Bob Marley. The Nextmen also throw in some of their own material in the form of a remixed Spin It Round, plus lend their hand to remixes of Fat Freddy’s Drop and Atlantic Conveyor.

I must admit I am a teeny bit disappointed with Family & Friends. I’d like to hear something that better captures the Nextmen’s live performance, but we can’t always get what we want and I do love the smooth sounds represented on this mix, and have listened to it many times whilst relaxing in the sun after a big weekend.

inthemix.com.au, Review, Video Games, Writing

B-boy

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Sony PSP
When I was young, I remember grabbing a slab of cardboard and going up to the local shops to do a bit of breakdancing. Someone had one of those massive old school ghettoblasters, and we rolled in, set up, and started toprocking, then breaking into drops, freezes, flares, windmills and headspins. I wasn’t very good, being totally unco as I am, but I was pretty fly with my footwork. You’ll find I still am, if you get me really, really drunk. But unfortunately my mum was right, it was “just a fad”, and I never continued with it. Since the resurgence of the b-boy culture, I wish I had kept it up.

The Sony developed PSP game B-Boy attempts to help me live out my breakdance fantasies, but unfortunately, like a lot of things Sony has done lately to be seen as ‘hip’, it fails dismally. The game is presented well enough – the models and motion capture are superb, with fluid movements of the players. And they’ve nailed the b-boy culture well, featuring many brands of clothes and shoes loved by the b-boy community to be unlocked. Yet even with the authenticity granted by having Crazy Legs and some bona fide breakers and locations, the game fails to maintain interest.

It fails mainly because this rhythm game has no rhythm. This game forces you to use all the PSP’s buttons, making the game overly complicated. Tapping the shoulder buttons in time with the music, then tapping the X or Square to perform a move may not sound very involved, but when performing the moves it just doesn’t feel right. The rhythm of the button pressing isn’t in time with the music. I’m a DJ, not a great one admittedly, so I know how to tap in time with a beat, and in B-Boy the tapping isn’t synchronous. There’s a delay, caused in part by the move animations and this makes the whole thing seem slow, out of time, and unresponsive.

More bothersome is the stop start feel of the game. You battle, you wait whilst the computer does its routine, and then win and go into the next round (suffering an agonising load time) or re-do the battle. There isn’t a great flow to the game, and it feels like a mini-game that’s been stretched into a full game. It may suit the ‘portable’ nature of the game, but you need to be drawn back to it, and there’s nothing here keeping you wanting to play.

Another annoying problem is the music. I love my oldschool hiphop and funk, but, because the PSP has less storage space and memory than consoles, the music tracks are cut shorter. Thus, when doing routine after routine, even though you continually unlock new tracks, you tend to hear the same music over, and over, and over. I’m not sure that custom soundtracks are available for PSP games, but given the multi-media functionality which is thoroughly unutilised on the PSP, this could have been a massive selling point.

B-Boy is a game that looks and sounds pretty good and is kind of fun to begin with. It’s authentic to the B-Boy culture – the developers understand it and pay a nice homage to it without being too condescending. However, it quickly loses its initial appeal because of the poor controls, stop-start nature and terrible loading times, and the far too repetitive nature of the gameplay.

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

Digital Primate

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Techno is a funny term. Many use it in place of “dance music” as a general descriptive term when talking with people who don’t know much about music. However, ‘Techno’ as a term has a very distinct meaning in the dance music industry, and when used in a press release I automatically have a sound in my head and pretty much know what I’m in for. So imagine my surprise when I fire up Digital Primates MySpace webpage and am instantly assaulted by a phat bass and dub breaks on the tune “I Don’t Give a Fuck”. Instantly all assumption had to be thrown out the window. Yes, this was “techno”, but Digital Primate, aka Christopher Coe wasn’t precious about the techno sound, which is quite refreshing for someone in the techno scene. The term “techno nazi” didn’t arise because people “goosestep” dance, after all.

“We’re driving down to Phillip Island for the Pyramid Rock Festival”, Coe apologises. “The traffic last year was so bad I heard there were 8 hour delays getting onto the island, but apparently this year they’ve done a whole load of stuff to work it better.” I can imagine him crossing his fingers as he’s speeding along talking to me, hands free of course.

I ask him about the set up of his show. “These gigs are basically me DJing with the girls doing live vocals. I’ve got Demilition B-Girl and Queen K who are based out of Melbourne and they perform the songs they did on the album Siege Mentality, plus some which haven’t appeared anywhere. And they’re also amazing breakdancers,” he begins, and almost instantly we are attacked by aliens. Well, that’s what it sounded like. I’ve sent the audio to NASA to have it analysed.

A few hurried phone calls and a truck stop later, we’re chatting again, this time without interruption. “I’ve always been into reggae,” Coe states when I ask about his influences. “And as most electronic DJs would attest, reggae is probably where they first listened to music. I always thought reggae producers, and dub producers especially, were the start of electronic music, in the way they used technology in the studios to produce new sounds and so on. I just feel it fits naturally with me.”

“It’s also the swing to it. My favourite techno is techno with a swing, and Ragga and Dancehall is about as swingy as you can get!” he snickers “Even though I’m a white Irish guy, coming from the UK and hearing that sound, being in that scene, it’s natural… I feel as though I’m black on the inside,” he laughs again. “And I don’t see a real demarcation between reggae, dancehall, electronica,” he continues. “If you look at people like the Orb, Massive Attack, they all had reggae and dub influences in their music.”

Also instrumental in the sound of his new album is the infamous producer, the Mad Professor. You can hear the reverence as he talks about “Mad”, as Coe affectionately refers to him. “The greatest thing about working with Mad is the incredible sense of musical history he brought. One day he goes ‘yeah, you need some bass on this tune’ and next thing I know he’s on the phone saying ‘Hey Robbie, would you like to come in’ and I’m saying ‘that’s not Robbie Shakespeare’ (as in Sly & Robbie) and he’s like ‘yeah’. And I’ve fallen to my knees, my legs can’t hold me any more because I’m so excited.”

“And the other thing was he is so amazing as an engineer and a producer. He’d mix a track in half an hour, and I’d say ‘don’t we need to spend two days mixing this?’ and he’d be like ‘Tune mixed man, next!’” Coe laughs. “I was really freaked out by this but I’d take the 3 or 4 tunes he mixed in a day and listen to them and think ‘oh fuck! These are great mixes!’ That freaked me out for the first two days because I had never worked with someone so quickly and who was so not precious about their work. He’s all about capturing the vibe, and if you haven’t caught it in 3 or 4 takes of a mix he just moves on.”

The album is also steeped with political messages. Macromantics talks about turning off the television. Queen K talks about the objectification of women in hiphop. Karmelody (who is also the Mad Professor’s son) sings about South London. And of course, the outstanding My Bush Would Make A Better President is probably the least sophisticated political statement on the album. “I think too many people shy away from politics, and fuck that I say!” exclaims Coe.

“Life is politics, and of course it’s important to forget about it all and have a good time, but that in itself is a political statement. My decision with this album was to take a step outside of what I normally do, which is the techno stuff; work with vocal artists because it’s easier to literally say things, it adds to the creative possibilities, and also increases your chances of acceptability; and to make some political statements I felt strongly about. I think as artists we have a responsibility to say what we feel, and if it’s political then don’t be afraid to show it.”

dB Magazine, Interview, Music, Writing

MC Frontalot

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It seems that throughout the latter 20th Century all disenfranchised youth have fought the power with music. They changed not only the musical landscape, but social and cultural ones too. In the 30s we had the Afro American with Jazz and Blues, the 50s it was time for white kids with their Rock and Roll. In the 60s it was Protest music and the hippies, whilst the 70s had Hiphop for the Afro-Americans and Heavy Metal for the English. The 80s Punk and 90s Grunge and Dance seems to include everyone. Each group influenced the other, they weren’t ever socially exclusive. But there’s a group missing from this cacophony of social rebels. There’s one group that was excluded, although they’ve had the greatest impact on music, particularly modern music, which the world has ever seen. They are, of course, the nerds.

Yes, Nerds. You may dismiss my claim, but without nerds there would be no amplifiers. There would be no samplers or computers. There would be no internet. These tools are essential to making modern music, and it’s all because of geeky kids with glasses, pocket protectors and slide rules. But now the nerds do have a form of expression, and it’s on the rise. It’s called Nerdcore, and one of its principle players is Damian Hess, aka MC Frontalot.

Nerdcore was coined by Hess at the turn of the 21st Century. “At first it felt silly,” Hess says of the term “and now I feel lucky to have coined it. It turned out to be the type of phrase that a group of people could latch on to and repeat and take part in somehow.” Its popularity can be seen through the simultaneous growth of the internet. Participating in Song Fight! (www.songfight.org) Hess gained fame. Song fight! is a website that posts a title online, and artists compete for fame (no prizes are offered) by writing a song with that title.

Although Hess has only posted 7 songs, his popularity blitzed all other contenders. His song, ‘Yellow Lasers’, about finding love at a Star Wars convention, garnered him more fame than he could imagine. “The first night I heard about song fight was the night “Yellow Lasers” was due the next morning, so I stayed up late and I made that song. Somebody emailed it to Penny Arcade (one of the webs’ most popular webcomic with over a million hits per day) and they started talking about it in their news post, then they decided I was their official rapper. I emailed them and said I’d write their theme song for them.”

Not only did MC Frontalot write the Penny Arcade theme song, he was invited to play at the Penny Arcade Expo, a massive gathering of nerds now attracting over 70,000 people per year. That’s as big as our Big Day Out! He’s toured the USA and has now had a film made about the experience called ‘Nerdcore Rising’. “The film makers (Negin Farsad and Kimmy Gatewood) are these two lovely women from New York. They’re both stand up comedians and they heard about nerdcore hiphop and thought that it would make a good topic. To me it sounded very silly, but they were very serious about it and have been getting a lot of attention for the whole nerdcore scene.” The film features the likes of Weird Al Yankovic, MC Lars, Jello Biafra, the Daily Show crew and more talking about the nerdcore phenomenon.

As to the longevity of nerdcore, Hess believes “the logical thing for nerdcore would be for it to peak and suddenly disappear and just be a cute little fad that had a couple of articles written about it, but who knows? I keep thinking that every year and keep getting surprised by it continuing to have legs. Certainly there’s endless staying power for being a nerd; it is part of the human condition,” he laughs, “but in terms of prominence and being on view in public, it doesn’t seem logical. People would certainly think it was funny to make nerds cool for a little while and then go back shunning us as they have always done.”

“Maybe the world did change a tiny little bit after the dotcom boom and maybe now technology doesn’t seem quite as that thing for kids with glasses,” he continues. “Notice that two of the most loved zombie film directors of every nerd I ever knew have gone from these obscure filmmakers loved by weirdos to Hollywood A-List directors – Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. They’re two of the highest paid directors in Hollywood and maybe that is emblematic of something that is happening. But if I have to put bets on it I have to keep betting that it’s all going to crash down around us – it’s the only logical conclusion,” he chuckles again.

MC Frontalot’s next album ‘Secrets From The Future’ is due out in April, and Nerdcore Rising will be seen in independent movie theatres soon.