I’m breathing Carla today

? Carla’s new album.

“We can say that Quieter began when Carla lost her hearing “completely (temporarily) in 1 year” on tour in 2014. She describes the state as “strange,” “every nite like falling,” “and boy, it was freaky,” “QUIETER,” “very like thrashing through the air.” Quieter, for instance, than her own sound, but so as to be closer to it; quieter is then the sound of distance erased in soft, intimate touch. Quieter is the blurring of sound with its source.” Evan Coral for tinymixtapes
my, i feel this. sudden hearing loss is quite an experience. i had it once as a child and once again after my mom’s unexpected death. once hearing nothing at all, once like walking through a snow landscape where every sound, every thing sounds muted, muffled, every human being sounds so far far away even when they stand next to you. world feels far away. my physical loss of the ability to understand held the mental one in a cold embrace and both didn’t want to break the hug as it felt at the same time scary and strangely safe. cold but safe. the second hearing loss changed my whole relationship with music (and people) in ways i still don’t fully understand. a dear friend that betrays you of course leaves its traces and what else is sound to me. the beauty of watching thin white cracks spread over a dark blueish green lake’s frozen surface and of course you don’t turn back because you are suddenly sure that it’s only there and when smoking that one cigarette too much at the end of a night that was filled with loud music and with people that you can breathe freely. i like this album very much.

Made a song for IVDR

I have made a track called “Hollow” for friends’ label compilation: IVDR on VERYDEEPRECORDS
Limited edition double tape.
Now I got a tape, even two tapes, and no tape player. Oh, these analog kids today, tsk.
Good that today it’s released online too! Listen here:

“Hollow” was made in and is about the shaky dark state when you slowly work your way out of a depressive phase and the repetitive work of convincing yourself that everything will be alright while you know exactly that it never will be…
Erm… enjoy!

And those of you in Nuremberg: The Verydeep boys Philipp and Steffan will be doing a little release celebration at Zentralcafé’s Rauschen tonight! Just some cozy bar djing and drinks and chats. Come over!

A little closer – a mixtape of favourite songs from January 2015

ninja_january

I first thought of it as an ironic reply to the endless year’s end best of lists: To make the ultimate best of a year list by posting a countdown of one song a day for this whole year. Soon it turned out to be not so silly at all. I find it a nice way of putting landmarks on my listening maps. At the end of the first month I felt like turning it into a mix but it doesn’t really work for a dj mix. For dj mixes I have to leave out a lot of great music that just doesn’t fit. So instead of that I have just moved the 31 songs around until their order made sense: the sweet reverb guitars and melodies of Gurr and Ô Paon followed by the cutting electro clash coolness of C.A.R., the Morr Music-like Ryan Hemsworth cute’tronica, next to which the “youth is on fire” cosmic teen angst hiphop of Sirivs Black sounds even more emo as it is, the smooth hook of Nao’s R&B pop pushing up to Temi Odeyale’s great oily sister-nancy-ish vocals on the dubby goodness that the Sherwood & Pinch track is, the Zs’ taking their time to stomp their flirring dubjazznoise/post-punk out, and as contrast: the irresistable, slurring feelgood-rock of the Deers, the riot grrl-meets-britbubblegum of Joanna Gruesome, the queer/trans hardcore smack of G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society Shit), the rites-of-spring-but-darker energy of Pretty Hurts being picked up by the new Sleater-Kinney who really got me with that breakdown in the middle of this song, the so so good indie hiphop of Dessa, handclaps, yeah, so glad Erase Errata exist again (or still?), and Pollyester with their sweet coldblooded DFA-funkiness, Phantom Winter who blew my mind with their live show, Matana Roberts breaking my heart with her sad daring beauty, then a careful return from the abyss with Noveller’s album opener that moves so wonderfully from those single guitar tones to that wall of sound, and now it’s all calm and slow enough to bring up Htrk, who have this great guitar noise shifting around below the song (I recommend headphones), now it’s darksynthy enough for Ghost Culture who don’t even need the vocals in this song, and I’m late for the alison-moyet-gone-tomboy electro-pop of Nimmo & The Gauntletts, and that’s Theo Parrish asking if you’re okay, soul brother, and if you’re not, after this song you will be, the sexy confident swinging “be in yoself” broken up with Bottoms’ “i hate my body, don’t wanna live in this body” trans acid anthem, followed by ukrainian Vakula acid fluff, and of course: Burial’s timeless uptempo hunt, smearing into Huck Farper’s noise techno beast, A.G. Cook with a big thank you to 20jfg for understanding and explaining, now not so many songs left, what to do, hm, yes: DJ Octopus’ distorted garage house with a big heart for sunshine over the smog, now hit the breaks with Emile Haynie (who has produced some horrible music, Eminem, Linkin Park, I think buuuut this tune with Charlotte Ghainsbourgh, Sampha and Dev ‘Blood Orange’ Hynes… <3 … and last but not least Miguel feat. Kurupt: sexy slow-burning funk shit.

So. Now it feels like those mixtapes I used to make for friends to share my enthusiasm about new music I found. Hope you enjoy it like I do.

P.S.: If you want a download link, feel free to ask.

One artist’s good-bye to Soundcloud (and facebook)

I have deleted my facebook artist page and my soundcloud site for good today. Both contributed to make me feel my art as something valuable only by numbers, clicks, likes and forcing you to promote your stuff – all in all: it turns it into a bland quantifiable product. For me music is more about community than about popularity and cashing in. Those channels are part of what has made me turn more and more quiet. This is not the way music works for me. It makes me sick, tbh.

Why today? This article was the final drop that made me do what I had thought of long before: “Soundcloud Boldly Releases New App, Allows Universal to Flag Your Account, and Quietly Announces Data Mining, All in One Month“.

That’s what I have (hastily) typed into the ‘tell us why you are leaving’ box:

“Because soundcloud is slowly turning into everything I have ever hated about music platforms and from which it originally was a nice harbour. Soundcloud only became that big because of a lot of small artists and djs who used it and spread the word. They did so because Soundcloud stood for a certain kind of freedom and interaction. Those are the ones driven away by new policies that are enforced now that Soundcloud has become big enough to cash in from the big players and by a mass market that is only interested in widening the gap between bigger artists/producers and listeners/fans – smaller artists who don’t bring money are no longer welcome but get threats of acccount suspension for the very same kind of dj mixes and remixes which Soundcloud still welcomes from bigger names/labels. Music industry has managed to kill the next platform. Goodbye for good.”

ORCHID + brandnew mix

I plan on making monthly mixes this year. Here’s the first one of 2014, including queer tearjerkers and feminist fist-punchers, rather sophisticated synthpop, not srsly overweight bass / beats, a hint of vaporwave, dirty pre-gentrification techno and fluffy cloud house to help you forget about troubles and help you to dance the pain away …

https://soundcloud.com/eve-massacre/we-dance-the-pain-away-mix-14
stream on mixcloud   /  download from zippy

wedancethepainaway14.1

Tracklist:

Angel Haze – Same love
Doshy – Cybergrime industries
Future Brown feat. Tink – Wanna party
Witchney Houston – Body touch
Spazzkid – Weird girl
Preditah – New York
Nguzunguzu – What dance
Visionist – Snakes
Beyoncé – Flawless
Mala – Changes (Distance remix)
Iggy Azalea – Work
The Bug feat. Flowdan – Louder
Tokimonsta – Clean slate (Nightizm remix)
Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball (Meth Dad remix)
Wantigga – Like that
M.I.A. – Warriors
Angel Haze – Same love (skit)
Mapei – Don’t wait
Bot’ox feat. Anna Jean – Blue Steel
Planningtorock – Human drama
Warpaint – Disco-Very
Naum Gabo – Galena
Vessel – Not for design
Marie Dior – Once upon a time at Panorama Bar
Bonobo – First Fires (Maya Jane Coles remix)
Jon Hopkins – Open eye signal
Factory Floor – How you say
Hackman – Blacksnake
E.M.M.A. – Shoot the curl
Mixhell – The way
Ssion – Psy-chic
Beats For Beginners – Kill DJs

If you have been there before you know that “We dance the pain away” also is a kind of motto for ORCHID, my little indiedanceriotpopelectrobass queer club night. The next edition of which is this Friday. Here’s my flyer for this:

orchid-webflyer1401x

TINKER mix for Electronic Beats + SEVEN DAVIS JR. ep

My last blog entry had 11.000+ characters so I’ll keep it extra-short in this one, just two music recommendations for the bass/hiphop/funkiness afficionada/os:

tinker

TINKER (Berlin/San Francisco) has made a really great mix for EB, incl. tracks by Cashmere Cat, Flako, Flume, Souleance et al.

I really hope we can get her to dj in Nuremberg one day – Beat Thang, I’m looking at you! Or do we need another edition of Sissy Bass to invite her to our shabby old town? ^^

The other recommendation is one of my-most enjoyed EPs of this year although it only has been released in November: SEVEN DAVIS JR.’s ‘The Lost Tapes Vol. 1’ on Kutmah’s IZWID, excellent (star)dusty sexy purple soul funkiness:

Beastie Boys sue GoldieBlox

In a slightly glasshouse/stone-move sample-happy Beastie Boys sue the makers of a parody of their song ‘Girls’ that was made for girls-empowering toys by GoldieBlox, in a quickly gone viral video:

Someone suggested on twitter last night that the reason could be that the Beasties do not want any of their songs in advertising. Not sure if that’s true? That’s something in which I usually am 100% on the artist site, as you might know. But of course it’s not that simple black/white subject.

If it comes to parody or creative remix use I’m on the parodists and remixers side though. This ad is an example of how good advertisement should be: It doesn’t feel like a commercial. It’s entertaining. It sells an empowering gender-role-crashing message just as well as its product.  The whole Rube-Goldberg-machine thing is brilliant but I actually like the use of the song even more:
The original song by the Beastie Boys is plain sexist, having lines like “Girls, to do the dishes, girls, to clean up my room, girls, to do the laundry, girls, that’s all I really want” or another nice line: “I asked her out she said, ‘No way!’, I shoulda probably guessed her gay”. It’s a sweet smart move to use that kind of song and have girls – not women (that makes it an even better reply to the original, by taking up the belittling way in which women are called girls) – and have them girls snottily shouting/singing fresh girl-empowering lyrics over that song: “Girls to build the spaceship, Girls to code the new app, Girls to grow up knowing they can engineer that, Girls, that’s all we really need.”

Hope the Beasties will think this over again.

Max Tundra, Lindsay Lowend

If a song comes to my mind these days I often am too lazy to go over to my record shelf but search for it online instead. When I listened to Lindsay Lowend’s ‘Wind Fish’ it’s effervescence and sound aesthetic reminded me of Max Tundra‘s ‘Labial’. Haven’t found it online but came across this longforgotten synth fun(k) jewel – “Jump!”. Still sooo good.

https://soundcloud.com/maxtundra/franz-ferdinand-do-you-want-to-max-tundra-remix

As for Lindsay Lowend: It’s the solo work of ghetto funk duo Dads On Display‘s Antonio Mendez from Washington DC and it is futurist hiphop goodness with a prog influence that reminds me as well of  wonky stars Rustie and Hudson Mohawke as of the synths aesthetic and humor of game music. The whole
‘Wind Fish’ EP (Symbols Rec.) is tasty. This is the track that brought ‘Labial’ to my mind:

https://soundcloud.com/lindsay-lowend/wind-fish

This one is great too and the feminist me has already planned to edit the Lil Wayne(?) sample to say ‘boys in the kitchen’ using bits of Sabrinas ‘Boys Boys Boys’ before playing it out. We’ll see how that goes.

https://soundcloud.com/lindsay-lowend/gt40

Earl Sweatshirt lyrics

Given the current climate of nixed rapper endorsements, it’s not hard to imagine a rhyme like that causing trouble for Earl down the line.” writes SPIN magazine in a bit on Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Hive’ clip.

So the only problem they see in these lyrics is that they could make Earl lose potential money from advertising? Meow.

“Come around, we gun ’em down, bodies piled, Auschwitz.” 

In the same verse Earl losely drops words like ’88’, ‘death row’, ‘gas’ and ‘jewish’ and thus somehow plants a whole semantic Nazi mine field. When he says ‘if this was ’88, I would have signed to ruthless’ it evokes a double meaning: Him signing to the side of the Nazis (= the ruthless ones) and him signing to the record label Ruthless that was active in the late 80s. Ach, I don’t even want to think any deeper into this. Wonder how others read those lyrics and the whole album’s. But I know: First rule about hiphop lyrics is we don’t talk about hiphop lyrics.

Why can’t there be one good hiphop album that I can enjoy without stumbling about cringeworthy or questionable bits?! From a pure “music as sound and songwriting”-perspective I really like ‘Doris’. Feel free to recommend me edgy hiphop with great lyrics. No tame safe stuff, just not biting those who are already kind of down.