Keep your eyes peeled. This blog is returning from the dead.

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If I can ever figure out how to make a post to this blog that automatically updates my Facebook status I think it’s likely I’ll start doing a lot more blogging. The painful truth though, is that I get way more comments via my FB status updates than I ever did blogging.

I’ve been poking around quite a bit with my WordPress installation lately though so hopefully I’ll be inspired to blog more often.

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News of Pete Namlook’s death reached me early Thursday morning, November 15, 2012.

Words can’t begin to explain how much his passing means to me. I’m stunned, and heartbroken. FAX was the first label I obsessively collected and I probably own more music with his name on it that any other (well, it’s probably a tie between him and Atom). I definitely own more releases on FAX label than any other, at one point I think I was one of a handful of people in the entire world with a complete FAX label collection (not counting the box sets of course, of which I have only one).

When I was first starting to play out, I DJed exclusively in chillout rooms. This was by choice, I couldn’t be bothered with all that ridiculous kiddie rave music, no, I was into SERIOUS, deep, ambient music. People would wander in, intending only to be there for a second, and then 20 minutes later, they’d pick themselves off the couch and come over and ask me WHAT IS THIS AMAZING MUSIC they were hearing. In those days, the answer more often than not was “Pete Namlook”.

I always liked Namlook’s collaborations more than his solo stuff, but the Air releases in particular were true masterpieces – complex, evolving works that gave themselves time to change and breath.

I remember when, after I finally managed to track down Shades of Orion, a collab between he and Tetsu Inoue that I’d heard so much about but never heard (this was back before you could hear any track any time) and I sat down and listened to the entire release front to back without pause, by myself, and the moment it was done I got up and wrote Peter an email and told him how special it had been to me, and how much I had appreciated it.

To my great surprise I had a response within the hour, he told me he was deeply honored by my email and that he could tell how how much it meant to me, so he wanted to tell me a story about it’s recording as sort of a reward for being so diligent in tracking down that release.

He then explained how he and Tetsu has been holed up in Tetsu’s studio at 2350 Broadway in NYC the summer of 1993 without A/C and how they’d taken a small break from the recording. He was looking out the window of Tetsu’s apartment to the street below and suddenly saw an enormous black man wearing wrap-around mirror shades step out of a car, and he thought to himself, “Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”. He got up from the window, went back to the synths, and he and Tetsu recorded the final track on that release.

I’ve always treasured that story and that he would take the time to respond. His music will take on even greater meaning to me in his passing. Goodbye, Peter, you’ll always have my infinite gratitude for your music. There are very few artists I can say changed my life, but you’re one of them.

(This was originally posted to Facebook on 11/15/2012)

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Oh, and I finally converted over to WordPress. I tried to stick it out as long as I could with MT, but ultimately, it got to be not very much fun hosting an MT blog, and this lack of fun contributed to a lack of usage, ultimately. Now that I’m on WordPress though, I’ve got all kinds of poorly-written half-ass plugins to try out! ;-)

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Not to mention the two dead batteries in 2 years (the most recent of which they’re refusing to replace), the USB male port part that pulled out when the cable was disconnected, the spider that died on the TFT LCD screen, the screws that randomly go missing and the warped bezel, and UHH, Vista, well….

I will not be buying a Sony computer for the rest of my life. I wish I would have bought a Rain LiveBook.

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All three suits proceed on essentially the same theory – that because the amendment alters the fundamental equal protection rights guaranteed by the state constitution, as they were identified by the Court last spring in the Marriage cases, it constitutes a “revision” of the constitution rather than a simple amendment. Under the California Constitution, a voter initiative can lead to a simple amendment, but not to a revision. In order for the initiative to revise the constitution, supermajorities of the legislature must propose it to the people for enactment. The idea behind this is that there should be a broad political consensus in the state before revising the fundamental charter of government, not merely a simple majority vote of the electorate as a result of a measure placed on the ballot through the petitioning process.

Let’s hope our gay brothers & sisters in California find some relief with these petitions.
And to the Mormon Church, and it’s believers I say: you are welcome to practice your religion as you so see fit, but when the free practice of your religion becomes a threat to what I believe is a fundamental right for all Americans, that’s when we must say there are limits to how you will be allowed to protect your theocracy.

That’s the bottom line: the Mormon Church’s opposition to gay marriage in one of the US’s most liberal states has nothing to do with “protecting marriage”, and everything to do with preserving their right to run Utah as a semi-theocratic state.

I doubt it will happen, but I would love to see the Mormon Church lose their tax-exempt status over this shit.

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I love me some dubstep. However, listening to speed garage, man, speed

garage was PARTY MUSIC. Dubstep can be party music too of course, but so

much of it these days is so damn serious. Speed garage, on the other hand, rarely took itself too seriously, and if it did, it wasn’t speed garage anymore, it was trancey deep house or something. What I really love about speed garage is how it fucks with your expectations. Most of the tunes would give you those gay hands-in-the-air drumlines and divas wailing about this and that and another, and right when you think OK, fuck this shit, all of sudden here comes this BIG-ASS fucking raw distorted bassline to completely contrast with everything else that came before it and make you fucking move that ass. Of course, like everything else, at some point speed garage died and nobody really noticed because they had moved onto other things.

Flash-forward to last year. Dubstep is abso-fucking-lutely huge in the

UK, starting to make some big inroads in the states, and even the locals

are starting to make dubstep tracks. Of course, with all the hugeness

came the adherence to convention, the taking it’s shit too seriously

and, like IDM and minimal techno, it fell in love with itself and

started to think it didn’t really need to keep pushing the boundaries and/or didn’t need to please the crowd – it became music for music-makers.

I’m not saying that’s what all dubstep producers are doing, but let’s

face it, a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Half-time steppers with

wobble basslines and the same snare on the same beat of every measure

throughout the song with zero variation. I myself dabbled in production

like this and while I can see the draw (it’s not rocket science to wrap

your head around the formula) it’s just a dead-end, conceptually.

Enter bassline house. As far as descriptive subgenre names go, it’s not

bad, it’s pretty accurate in fact – but really, it’s a speed garage

revival, and then some. It’s a revival that acknowledges what’s happened to UK bass music in the last 10 years and incorporates a lot of those changes into it’s conventions. A lot of those production tricks you hear with drum n bass and dubstep, that multi-band compression that just makes the basslines tear and burn, is present. However, it also brings in a lot of the quick vocal stutters and a bit of the glitch from IDM, too. Of course, the Roland analog bass drum kicks, hands-in-the-air handclaps and high-hat patterns from house/garage are what underpins it all.

The way I describe it, it sounds like a mess, musically – and it is, a

great big fun-as-hell mess. Stripped-down and minimal are not adjectives

you’d use with “bassline”. On top of all I’ve described above, it also

includes fun/clever/nasty samples, Grimist MC rapid-fire vocal science and even some nods to Miami bass and acid. I’ll be damned

though if it doesn’t work, and no doubt about it, this is not headphone

music. This is PARTY music. This is music for slappin that ass, smokin

that spleef, waving that bottle of champagne in the air. This ain’t

delicate, introspective music for being serious, for the chin-stroking

artiste with the turtleneck and the parties that use the Helvetica font

all over their “modern”-looking flyers. It’s not gonna get it’s own

night or even a DJ slot, at Mutek, EVER. It’s a great big mash-up of

convergent styles, it’s kinda st00pid, it’s totally ghetto, and I love it.

Let me quote the “lower end spasm” blog:

“…niche bassline house, is the anti-dubstep. Huge banging blines that

buzz and wobble like the best of em, but also no reserve on the drums,

no holding back, just euphoric breakneck tempo all the way….Give me

huge, “dumb” bangers over ponderous meditation music ANYDAY.“

Who knows, maybe it’ll be gone within the year, but for now, it sure is
fun to listen to, and a welcome reprieve from all that “serious” music.

Here’s a couple mixes and links to check out:



http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2007/08/faggatronix-4×4-birthday.html

http://www.i-dj.co.uk/features/featurespage.php?ID=48

http://www.rwdmag.com/articles/6487/About-To-Blow-Bassline.html

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009952.html

and of course, smugpolice, which has a shitload of downloadable mixes.

Personally, alot of it rubs me the wrong way at times. I’ll be grooving to a track and then the producer will ruin it with a completely lame vocal sample.

What I really dig about it though, is the promise that it holds. Listening to these mixes, I think, what if, instead of all this wailing diva crap, what if they turned it all darkside and shit? What if somebody started coming out with some serious rootsy dubbed-out productions? It seems like adding those 2 beats back somehow gives you another great big landscape to explore, and like with everything else, all this ghetto/party bassline stuff is just the protoplasmic form from which other, more evolved musical lifeforms will emerge (“dubline house”, “bassline techno” maybe even, yes, “minimal bassline”)

Of course, if that happens, it’s likely to follow in the footsteps of everything else, and evolve so much that it becomes “oedipal” – it takes a moment to pause for self-reflection, falls in love with itself, and never looks back from whence it came. Or maybe it doesn’t happen, who knows. In the meantime, it’s fun party music, its’ fresh, and it’s totally recommended.

(originally posted to the mtn-raves mailing list and edited slightly for clarity)

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