This evening I was bombing around Hintertubes looking for clues about a new album by Burial, and was reminded of how I found this weird little bubble of sound in the first place. Rather, I was reminded how I did NOT find this artist. I didn’t find them on the radio, or a magazine, or even through a friend, it was something I faceplanted into during a dig in the databases of a record label I knew nothing about.
I think it took me about ten minutes to figure out whether Burial was the name of the song or the name of the band, ’cause there was so little information about this song (it was Archangel, from the album Untrue). What was really fun was that the person who is Burial doesn’t do interviews, and doesn’t really talk about the process, and probably doesn’t perform live very often (and if he did, I dunno if it would work).
I tend to become loyal to labels, which is odd for me, considering how I’m not really crazy about large corporations when it comes to their treatment of their lesser-known musicians. Maybe it’s the whole sellout effect. As soon as they become big, I’m like “ew, too commercial” or something, maybe.
Or maybe I just happen to like this one artist, and don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’m wandering around trying to find a way to get me from A to B, and instead of having some slick way to get me to what I really wanna talk about, I came off slightly snobby and pulled some data (or lack thereof) outta my butt.
Sorry about that.
Ignore the stuff about Burial, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Burial’s good though, and there *IS* a new album coming, so I’ll be checking that out when it drops.
Here’s what I wanted to say.
About a year ago, Duncan tipped me off to an hour-long mixed set called GlitchBitch, and I was floored. I’d never heard music like this. It was different, it was broken, it was funky, and it often had strings in it. All good things to cram into one set. After a little digging, I found a playlist, and found out that about half of this amazing set was by edIT. More digging turned up the album Certified Air Raid Material, which is a stellar piece of audio. Not quite “all killer, no filler,” but about 75% of the tracks blew the top of my head clean off.
Turned out it was something being called Glitch-Hop, and that edIT was a member of the GlitchMob in California. Crazy. That album set up camp on both my iPod and my Blackberry so I was never without those tracks. Around the same time I started trying to find more of this stuff, and found the wonderfully bent mix “Wonk Funk” by Kper, which had some edIT on it, but also had some interview talky stuff, mentioning J-Dilla, who I’d never heard of.
It’s been about four months of listening to Wonk Funk while cycling and commuting, and I’m still not sick of it, but I can feel it *finally* starting to become a little too comfortable, so it’s time to start digging into this mix, and see what bubbles to the surface.
It’s like finding the food of a new country, which at first is shocking, but once you get used to the flavours, you find that there’s one spice that you don’t recognize, so you figure out what that was, or at least what it might be, and then you try to figure out whether or not you enjoy a lot of it, or just a little. Then one day, you meet a person who knows all about that sorta food, and they whip up a whole meal of stuff you’ve never heard of, and it’s delicious.
But after a while, you start wondering what else that spice might be in, where else in the world that spice might be used, and that leads to the next step.
I think I stumbled across what’s moving me on to the next step tonight.
I’m pretty sure I’m moving backwards in the timeline on this musician, but I enjoy doing that. Figuring out how they fit into the audio cosmos is part of what’s so enjoyable for me, ’cause it means I get to find out what “country” that spice is used in, and that’ll take me to wherever’s next.
Next stop: Flying Lotus. Maybe not new to you, but certainly new to me. There’s a few albums out, but what caught my ear first was the EP “Reset.”
I’m getting on that bus. Whee!
