Author Archive for shaun bateman

07
October
2008
tags: HATE.

all the pigs, all lined up

There’s something about the name, the image up there, that conjurs up thoughts of Wish-era Nine Inch Nails adolescent angst leading, eventually, to an innate and strangely cathartic blow-up.  “Hate”. With a name like that, there’s got to be ferocity-and what period, what style, embodies that concept more than seriously backward-thinking junglist Hardcore. Think of HATE like you’d think of those gaslight Dylan tapes or the Jeanius album, only in terms of rave culture: these are lost Jungle tracks that sound like it’s warehouse in the early 90’s somewhere, which is either fortunate or not depending on what you take aural pleasure in.

Notes from Boomkat, who, on their Modern Love label, are actually releasing the HATE recordings:

 We can tell you f*ck-all about HATE, except for the following. The majority of the material on this label is previously unreleased, original junglist hardcore dating back to 1991-1994 from producers who wish to remain anonymous. A carload full of dubplates and DAT tapes full of unreleased material was handed over to the label at Sowerby bridge in Yorkshire sometime in 2008. The material (several hundred original tracks) has been gradually catalogued, with a few tracks already planned for release this year. HATE is a Modern Love project and the label might also feature occasional new versions from different producers. All HATE transmissions will be limited to 300 stamped copies. You’ve been warned…

Hate: Injustice

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Hate: Darkcore

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Both of these tracks have some serious appeal to me beyond the nostalgia factor, which, much like J.T. Leroy’s credibility, should not really alter the impact of the releases. There’s some head-scratching, jaw-dropping, mindblowing work here, particularly in “Injustice” right around the first initial drop.

You be the judge.

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26
September
2008
tags: OH FUCK YES., Telefon Tel Aviv, BPitch Control.

how we drifted away

Sometimes, I get what I want. From a press release:

Chicago by way of New Orleans duo Telefon Tel Aviv has signed to
BPitch Control, who will release the band’s third official
full-length, Immolate Yourself on January 20, 2009 - it’s the band’s
first official full-length in five years.  The band has remixed tracks
for the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Apparat and Bebel Gilberto, to name
a few.  The band’s previous albums were released via Chicago label
Hefty Records. They will also tour North America this Fall with
Ghostly artist Matthew Dear.

This is where I begin prancing about like the gross dirty southerner I actually am,  acting the fool and doing the dirty bird ’til the cows come home or the Falcons win again (no chance of either).  TTA? On BPC? Finally, after years of me bemoaning the state of electronic music in THIS VERY BLOG, something GOOD has finally happened. The TTA duo made one of my favorite electronic albums ever, the lush, R&B-storming heartbreaker Map Of What Is Effortless, almost a half-decade ago.  I wrote and wrote and wrote about them elsewhere, to the point of becoming fairly fucking obsessed, and then…then they vanished.  Now, to see them re-surface on BPC, the single most forward-thinking, cutting-edge, never-bought-into-the-fake-Justice-electro-war tech-tronic label in existence at the moment? I feel like I’m playing Fantasy League Dance Music All-Stars. This means that a conversation BETWEEN THE GUYS IN TELEFON AND ELLEN ALLIEN HAD TO OCCUR. It probably went something like this:

     Hi, is this is to be the Telefon? I am is to is the Ellen Allien.

   Sup?

  You would like to have been make a new the music with as to for being my label, no yes?

  Suhweet. That kid at that blog will effing love that.

  I am having the hooray! Now we techno party!

  Ellen? We are two dudes who make sad, heartbreaking works of staggering genius, all right?Ok. We don’t dance. No Way. We just take our Louis rags out and wave them around in the air. We take our Gucci rags out and wave them around in the air. Now we must get back to constantly breaking up with our girlfriends and being alone in dark rooms with tinkley things.

I assure  you, that’s how the conversation went.

Telefon Tel Aviv: Helen Of Troy

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Gauzy and fuzzed as hell, this is the first taster of Telefon’s forthcoming BPC debut and third full-length original album. There is a part of me that misses the operatic, aching soul stylings, but if this is the new direction I can acclimate.

 Telefon Tel Aviv: I Lied

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From the beautiful Map Of What Is Effortless album,this is Telefon then (and I can’t assume it’s them now).

Telefon Tel Aviv: Street Spirit

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A typical Telefon re-working of a Radiohead classic, into something hushed and something that walks in the realm of both dreams and nightmares.

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19
September
2008
tags: Kode 9 and Space Ape.

the mechanics of stress

Today is impossible. Yesterday was the same. I predict the same for tomorrow. My head is a bleak place, not in the way an atrocious Dickinson poem pretends to be but more like a silent space-scape: a vast void. Into that scape, then, not land but ether, comes this set from intelligent Dubstep pioneers Kode 9 and Space Ape.

Kode 9 and Space Ape: Live for Giles Peterson

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 Performed and recorded live for Giles Peterson’s BBC show on the 24th of July this year, this bleeding-from-the-cut-at-the-edge-of-beyond set from the man who is Hyperdub Records (essentially, the home for that beating-heart, pumping-blood futuretech dubstep sound that’s gaining steam every day) is the soundtrack to manic moods and paranoia. With MC/future-poet Space Ape less “rapping” than discussing, presenting, dangling the unknown and the hopeless just in front of the bleak sonic architecture, the stuttering and stammering kicks and heavy low-end that Kode 9 layers underneatth him, this set sounds like the embodiment of futureparanoia. When Space Ape breathily intones on “the mechanics of stress…”leaving a pause, an emptiness that Kode 9 fills with some of the heaviest, most world-altering shit you’ve ever heard, all I’m able to gasp is “this is what I wish Radiohead sounded like”. And it is. Though people talk about Thom Yorke being the harbinger of the future, this stuff makes him sound achingly dated and, worse yet, feeble.

This is a 27 minute trip through bleakness and brilliance.

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14
September
2008
tags: Mp3.

This song is about you. This song is about…

It could be David Foster Wallace’s suicide. It could be any number of things. I’m pensive and ponderous and have that not-wonderful ennui that involves thoughts of running. This, then, is the perfect soundtrack:

The Enemy: This Song Is About You (Rollo and Sister Bliss mix)

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There’s something about this, this post-rave post-post grime UK street-rock not-punk that rings reminiscent, to these ears, of Springsteen standing in a steel factory and pumping his fist in the air. And that’s not a bad thing. Rather, UK group The Enemy, no relation to the undies-wetting GA-based former Drum N Bass heart-throb (thankfully),  takes a Streets-esque approach to a chronicle of LDN-town and sets the bar fairly high by aiming totally low: what’s going on right *now*. Faithless’s Rollo and Sister Bliss spin spin sugar out of webs of bleakness, and it’s fitting, then, that the first time I heard this was as the proper intro to Sister Bliss’s recently-released Nightmoves mix.

There’s something about the handeling of this sense of unease, of restlessness, in it being turned into a slow-burning prog-trance anthem, that raises the hairs on the back of my neck and hands and sends chills down my spine. I raise issue with the placement of this remix on Nightmoves:this isn’t an opening-moments kind of remix. This is midway through the end of the night, raising questions that can’t be answered and causing unease, angst, that has to be remedied through movement rather than stasis.

Oh, hey, also: Be our friend on Facebook.

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12
September
2008
tags: Mp3.

From the mailbag: everybody <3s Hacks

Here at Res, we get a lot of mail. Most of it is spam or rejection letters from publicists who’d rather see us hang than send us a fucking Richie Hawtin CD. That’s cool, though, like Pac said I ain’t mad atcha. This morning, though, something came for our resident Deejay extraordinaire, aka that guy that always posts stuff with (Remix) after it, aka Hacks. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t write it. Fuller/more full disclosure: I am suspecting it was actually Alice Glass.

From: Irisha B [mailto:gifejuj@liveinteractive.net]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2008 10:43 AM
To: hacks
Subject: Re[1]: Steal My Heart Away!!!

Hello, my friend!

I am here to tell you truth, although I don’t know who you are. I have everything for happiness in my life: family, a good work, friends. But I am not happy, because I am very lonely. I miss the one thing, which will makes me happy- love. What is it? Why people look for it for many years? Somebody finds it very fast, somebody can’t find it, but doesn’t give up and look for it again and again. I am a woman who doesn’t give up and I look for my love for many years.My letter is a little ship which is swimming to you in this Big sea of Life. I hope that it will reach you and you won’t leave me without reply
If you want to be beloved and happy, I will give everything to you, because I miss love badly too.

Looking forward to get a note from you
Irisha B

 ADULT.: Inclined To Vomit

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11
September
2008
tags: Salem.

Melted by night on the cold pavement

 I’m sick today, emotionally and physically. There’s a heavy fog hazing across my vision and I want to curl up in a ball and slowly phase myself out of myself and into some sort of darkened blue-black cloud, between waking and sleeping. It’s a lovely twist of fate, then, that today’s the day I first discover Salem.

Salem: Brustreet

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I don’t know much about the duo calling themselves Salem. No one does. They have an EP, wondrously titled  Yes I Smoke Crack. This EP is mythical and pretty-much nonexistent if you don’t already own it, though, if “Brustreet” is any indication, it could also be called And I Also Inject Tussin. This song is a heady, impossible-to-penetrate swirling maze of a reinterpretation of “Streets of Philadeliphia”, possibly constructed while under the influence of the substances readily available in Philly. If not, at the very least it’s a fitting ode to said narcotics.  The vocals sound like Cocteau Twins drowning in a sea of codine, pleading and diving and giving into pleasure.

Then…the pleasure begets pain.


SALEM - DIRT from ACEPHALE on Vimeo.

The video for “Dirt”, a horrific slowed-down crunk song filtered through a gothic 4AD lens, crusted with dried blood and tear-salt, made to terrorize small children at night. This picks up where the goblin-sounds and tinny crystalline forest soundscapes of The Knife last left us, and I don’t throw that comparison around lightly. In fact, if Karin and Olof set out to make a heroin-sweating trunk-rattler of a song, it would be this. And that scares me, because I fear this song the closer it gets to night-time. It’s been forever since a song has me tense, edgy, afraid to breathe, afraid to close my eyes. This has done that, and it’s fantastic.

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09
September
2008
tags: Rex The Dog.

Getting Rex’d

Yes yes yes I said yes: finally, at long last, like two years after it was hinted at, the full-length album from our favorite ravepuppy, Rex The Dog, is out.  We’ll be running an exclusive and fairly silly interview with Rex here soon, but for now chew on this like it was a milkbone:

Rex The Dog: Bubblicious

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If we remove the moments of touching beauty and the remixes, this is my favorite song on The Rex The Dog Show. The Yaz sample fits perfectly into a genius piece of late-80s electroconfection that’s meant for pondering and workin’ it out.

 Rex The Dog: We Live In Daddy’s Car

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Not on the album, and an unfortunately way-underappreciated Bee-side Rex vintage synth freakout raveshow…raveout freakshow? Either way, this is meant for those with strong stomachs and stronger desires to hear awesomeness.

More Rex, soon.

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06
September
2008
tags: aged male lesbians, Tori Amos, Tori Amos, politics.

Oh Tori, Where Art Thou?

Dear Tori Amos:

WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, SON? No, really, I know that you were last seen sporting a trash bag on loan from Missy and signing comic books inspired by what happens when artists listen to ecstasy and take Boys For Pele…or, wait, maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, you’ve been M.I.A. in a way that only she should be, but even Maya’s been more up in my grill this election year, talking shit about “blop blop” and “pow pow” and probably something about mr plow, also, cause that’s his name, that name again is mister plow.

(L-R: some guy, some guy, a woman, Tori and her Hefty Synch-Sack, Some Guy, Baseball cap dude)
Regardless:

SARAH FUCKING PALIN. I know you’ve heard of her, Trans-Am. I know you have. She’s from a state so boring even Sufjan Stevens refuses to write a song about it, she wouldn’t let her daughter have an abortion even if the baby was conceived via rape, and, oh, yeah, she thinks doing public or community service work is for “pigeon-toed sissywhackers ( I may be misquoting).

(l-r: A bunch of guys named Njord or Thor or Thjord, Sarah Palin, more guys named Fnjord)
That’s the sort of utter and complete assbag insanity that would normally have you frothing at the mouth, Tee-Aim. Isn’t this where you hop on some platform, either Letterman or Leno or something fat dude with a lisp in a baby blue/black ringer tee three sizes too small who writes for a fanzine called “Breakfast Every Hour”** or “Civilized Syllabub”*** or “Freakish Pancake Amistad”**** clutching a voice recorder, a pen and a doll he made from scraps of your hair he gathered over the course of sneaking backstage approximately five hundred and seventy two times in the past six years (and he can tell you about each and every time-what shoes you were wearing, how many choc-o-nana-crispies he had to bribe the guards with, whether or not you played “leather”…and you always played “leather”), and start spouting complete and utter nonsense that ends up with deep, passionate truth attributed to it out of sheer and utter incoherence? Stuff like “if I was a tigress, that bitch would be a panda cub and in my safari…no, no, listen…in *my* safari, we eat the flesh. We. Eat. The. Flesh” or “It’s like the state of ketchup being met with a ice cream float on a tuesday…and I will not stand for anything less than a hamburger. We have to protect our sundaes, and our meats, before the convenience-stand vendors in power begin coleslawing through the milk chocolate.” Or something like that.

(Hey Y’all Tori Amos dressed like a sheep once)
WHERE ARE YOUR POLITICAL QUOTABLES, Tiggity-T? where is your “I would set fire to that bitch’s igloo with the pom-pom in my wampum”? I GREW UP THINKING THAT THE ONLY OPINION THAT MATTERED WAS YOURS, which is why i care SO MUCH ABOUT ICE CREAM FLAVORS, SHOES, and LED ZEPPELIN. In what could possibly be the most important, at least the most memorable, election of my generation’s lives, I want to hear you mutter completely senseless but partially and almost-epically brilliant noun/verb/wild animal/clothing store half-phrases that both empower and befuddle.

(optional caption 1: “KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY SWINE”

optional caption 2: “AMERICA FUCK YEAH”

optional caption 3: “This is a statement about the current political climate, the bush administration, and oh crap that’s areola”

optional caption 4: “it’s the economy, stupid”)

Fuck, Ori-Tay, you shoulda been a pundit. You make at least as much sense as O’Reilly, and I’m fairly sure at one point or another you compared evil drunken Grandpa Bill to “a lost goose sliding down a mountain of graham cracker pudding into a world of shitstorms and bound feet” OR SOMETHING. AND THAT IS BRILLIANT. People think “it’s the economy, stupid” is quotable til infinity? Give you a half-bottle of red wine, two lines and the opportunity to use the words “shoes”, “track-horse” and “milk-maid” in one sentence and we’d all have our new political mantra.

In the words of the great god-poet of the sky Yeezy: tori, we needja right now.

Tuna rubber a little blubber in my igloo*****, which probably means OBAMA 08 MUTHAFUCKAS,
-Shaun

**an actual tori lyric, probably not a fan-zine name

***see above

****i’m just fuckin’ with you now.

*****nope, she said that.

(Note: Tori recently went indie, so chillax)

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01
September
2008
tags: Rex The Dog.

Rex n FX

It would seem that Resonator tends to unify on a small number of things, Rex The Dog being one of ‘em. The Rex The Dog Show is still set to drop very, very soon (September 8th everywhere, I think), and we’ll have some exclusive content surrounding the release of our favorite blend of Mann/Hund/Maschine.

That said, there’s a video that just released for the first single from Rex’s forthcoming first full-length (and it is, in fact, spectacular, it’s everything you love about Rex, basically all bundled up into a big 80’s warehouse rave), “I Can See You/Can You See Me?”

The mood’s a little somber in this one, with both Rex and his human seeming to remember long-lost halcyon days of rockin’ out. It fits the way The Rex The Dog Show ends, on a pretty-but-melancholy note with a reworking of Rex’s classic mood-anthem “I Look Into Midair” (one of my favorite songs ever).

Then, however, there’s this, on the other side of the mood spectrum: Rex The Dog’s remix of “Happiness”:

She-who-must-not-be-named-for-fear-of-WebSherriff-and-RIAA-threats…PLAYED BY A F-ING MONKEY PUPPET. It’s frightening that Punk Monkey gets Cronefrapp’s mannerisms down perfectly…this is just…spec-freakin’-tacular. Especially when you’ve had the ‘frapp in question threaten you with lawsuits. WTFev, this is how the song should sound anyway.

More Rex, coming very, very soon.

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29
August
2008
tags: Mp3.

getcherself together and shake

If you’re in the U.S., a really long weekend looms ahead. I’m not sure of the origins of labor day, other than it probably has something to do with Upton Sinclair, and I’m on that number glass of wine that turns wikipedia from an amusing time-waster to a daunting prospect, and so, frankly, I’m not looking the f-ing holiday up.  That said, it seems pretty universal that dancin’ and romancin’ match with the weekend,  that platonic ideal of not wanting to work, prefering instead to bang on the cowbell all day and all of the night. It is then, and only then, that there’s  one set of hairy-bellied beer-smellin’ superdudes who can swoop in (to your unlocked abode) and rescue you from a cowbell emergency: the guys of the DFA.  The abroad-imprint of Death From Above (literally, Death From Abroad) recently released a compilation of the awesome-and-unknown (probably because there’s been no Allien/Mayer fist-bump) Berlin-based Supersoul Recordings label’s output,  called  Nobody Knows Anything and you need this for your disco-dancin’ weekend.

Plastique De Reve  ft Radical Cheerleaders: Resist

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This is an absolute rave-in-a-freakin’-bottle. Cowbells eventually die their needed fucking death, and what’s left is a hard-house bass, some chanting and a KICK YOUR ASS backbeat with some synthetic pads that want to kill your parents.

You. Me? Dancing.

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