Weekly Roundup: what we’ve had on repeat
Image by Hollie Fernando
From infectiously groovy modern house to an experimental reworking of a hip hop legend’s song, we roundup our favourite releases of the week. In no particular order, here’s what we’ve had on repeat:
Innellea / Stephan Bodzin – Boavista (Innellea Remix)
German DJ and performance artist Stephan Bodzin is known as one of techno’s definitive tastemakers, with his recent work finding itself at the forefront of the melodic techno movement. It makes sense that Munich’s Innellea would be able to resonate with the deft, introspective spiritualism of Bodzin’s work, with his own being rooted in a love for cinematic soundscapes and melodic abstraction. His remix of Bodzin’s latest offering, Boavista, extract’s the original’s kinetic brooding quality and expands it by way of a dark, beat driven tech-house approach. Innellea finds himself encapsulated by Bodzin’s deep, melancholic arp phrases and builds his remix around interpolations of these. Innellea also explores Boavista’s potential for progression, ascension and descension by allowing the arps to create dynamic moments of tension as the beat recedes and then comes crashing back, more urgent than before. The remix is released via Afterlife Recordings. Download it here.
bad tuner – self care
The debut EP from the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist is a collection of ridiculously infectious modern and melodic house music. Across its four tracks, bad tuner displays on self care an affinity for funk and an innate understanding of groove, producing what could easily be the soundtrack to any insanely cool Fashion Week party. Come Down opens the set with a throbbing deep house bassline and cockney-tinged spoken word, while De Tecidos deceives you with an obnoxiously pitched down vocal and dynamic percussion before morphing into a squelchy synth led techno banger. Back To Me is a poppy take on slow burning UK garage and self care’s most down-key moment, ending what is mostly a non-stop rager that combines some of the most riotous parts of house music into a single, potently funky concoction. self care is released by Virgin UK’s LG105 division. Download it here.
Disclosure – In My Arms
Disclosure return after last year’s Energy with the first single taken off their forthcoming EP, Happening. In My Arms sees the UK duo hang up the deep house finery we last saw them in, trading it instead for disco inflected tech house. It’s a new look, though much of the fabric stays the same. The rolling bass modulations are distinctly Disclosure, and In My Arms presents us with the next phase of their sonic evolution. Opening with cow-bell clanging percussion and featuring a vocal hook that will be yowling in your brain for days after listening, it’s a slightly kitsch take that pays off in downright grooviness. Expect to hear this one a whole lot in the coming months. Download it here.
Joel Corry, Jax Jones, Charli XCX & Saweetie – OUT OUT
English EDM producer Joel Corry made a wise choice to tap Charli XCX for his latest single OUT OUT, a sort of love letter to the excess of 2010’s EDM which fits XCX’s band of premature GenZ nostalgia pretty well. Together with Jax Jones, Corry constructs the track around a sample of the iconic saxophone riff from Stromae’s seminal 2010 hit, Alors On Danse. XCX speak-sings about going out on a Friday night to some naughty tech house bass and Stromae’s signature melody, recalling the best of that era’s EDM pop. It’s even complete with a feature from a future big deal in pop music; a guest verse from rapper Saweetie. With this annoyingly infectious nostalgia factor and its liberal reliance on “the drop,” OUT OUT is the best kind of guilty pleasure, a formulation of some questionable choices that would definitely make you get up and dance if it came on in the club on a Friday night. Download it here.
Thom Yorke / MF DOOM – GAZILLION EAR (Man On Fire Remix)
Thom Yorke’s love affair with late hip hop maverick MF DOOM is well documented. “Ultimately to me it’s not rapping at all, it’s poetry” he once said fondly of DOOM. The admiration would carry over into collaboration in 2011, when Yorke along with Jonny Greenwood lent the beat to DOOM’s 2011 track Retarded Fren. Before that, back in 2009 Yorke remixed DOOM’s track GAZILLION EAR as a bonus track for the Born Like This album. Now, Lex Records have revealed there were two versions of this remix and twelve years later, they’ve shared the second. While the officially released version placed a quintessentially Yorke alt-aesthetic under DOOM’s bars, the Man On Fire Remix is immediately more erratic. The squeal of taught plucked strings adds a simmering tension to the rough, industrial ambience that Yorke uses to underscore DOOM. DOOM’s vocals are never touched, rather enshrined by Yorke’s atmospherics, like a sonic conversation between the two by way of their respective mediums. Download it here.
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