Who isn't a Lee Perry fan? This is probably my favourite straight up Lee Perry tune. If I was to include all the stuff he produced then the list would be huge: The Meditations 'No Peace', Mikey Dread 'Dread at the Mantrols', The Congos 'Don't Blame on I', the list goes on.
'Secret Laboratory (Scientific Dancehall)' from which this track is taken, was released in 1999 and thus qualifies as late Perry material. The album is pretty so so - in fact, its actually quite shit, but the artwork is amazing. Remember Perry lives in Switzerland, shacked up with an old brothel Madam, and thus we get this pastoral Alpine scene with Perry surveying his mountainous kingdom gracing the front cover. Isn't it amazing?
I'd just like to give the briefest of shout outs to DJ Rupture. I wrote on Cumbia for one of my first ever posts on this blog, and as predicted, it really seems to be exploding. XLR8R in particular can't seem to get enough of it. Fair enough I say, but having grown up with it, and its various offshoots (Vallenato, and even to a certain extent Champeta), I feel particulalrly smug.
DJ Rupture is probably the biggest cumbia head on the scene (apart from maybe Zizek and/or Carlos Tevez - yes that's right), and he works closely with Matt Shadetek's Dutty Artz label. Shadetek and Rupture have just finished producing Jahdan Blakkamoore's new album entitled Buzzrock Warrior, and I for one am very excited about it. Interesting also to see that one of the tracks features on Diplo and Switch's much-fabled dancehall Major Lazer album. Anyone know when that is actually coming out?
Having never seen Rupture play, I can't really get a sense of the man, but I really quite dig his blog. It's pitched quite nicely, and although he gives himself quite a lot of props, he has also included some nice pieces, particularly this one on the weird Hackintosh cult. A giant fuck you to Mac djs around the world, these guys chop up their shiny Macbooks, carefully hybridising the components with older bits of gear and housing them in beaten up old Toshiba notebooks from 2002. It seems like a lot of effort, but I totally respect it. Check it out here. In other news, Mos Def has a new album out, 'The Ecstatic', and it sounds like it's quite good. I for one could not get 'Black on Both Sides' out of my head for, like, ever, ('Hip Hop' and 'Ms Fat Booty' were too too gully, and how could I forget when he mentions Heathrow airport in 'Mr Nigga': 'They stay on Nigga patrol on american roads/And when you travel abroad they got world Nigga laws/Some folks get on a plane go as they please/But I go over seas and I get over seized/London-Heathrow, me and my people/They think that illegal's a synonym for Negro'!) and I still have time for the odd Blackstar tune. Pitchfork are feeling it, and I'm looking forward to giving it a listen, especially if all the tracks are as good as this Madlib produced monster. Lovely beat.
There was a time just after 'Who's Afraid of Detroit' first dropped that Claude von Stroke was everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The San Francisco producer had everyone salivating and I could never understand why. I always thought his brand of bastardised minimal was called Wonky, but having been brushing up on the musical zeitgeist columns it seems wonky is the new breed of hip hop/bashment/electro/electroclash/house that Italians (Crookers, The Bloody Beetroots) and East London hipsters (Count of Montecristal/Sinden, Switch, even occasionally Diplo) were so into during the early summer of 2008.
Racking me brains, I believe it may have been called fidget house (what a shit name, and I mean really really really shit - is it only in the UK that there seems to be this neverending Quixotic quest to unearth barmier and less relevant names for "new" types of dance music?).
Anyway, from what I can tell, von Stroke has only really stood the test of time in the way Fedde le Grand has stood the test of time (ie. hosting a hugely lucrative if uninspiring residency in Ibiza), and that's not just because their two most famous tunes have Detroit in the name, although I could go on ad nauseam at the mindless appropraitions of Detroit over the years. I saw Justin Martin, signed to von Stroke's label Dirty Bird, at Exit in 2007 and he was fine. Housey tech-house I suppose, which is fine, but not anything to really set your pecker alight.
Having said that, Deep Throat is the sort of tune that (almost) makes me forgive all. I first heard it on Audion's Fabric mix (OK, but if you really want to see where minimal was from 2005-2007, head for Marco Carola's oft-ignored, but in my opinion essential Fabric mix) and was blown away, not so much by the beat, but by the incredible morph of the inhaled clickety breath turning into a really slow, deep, minimal beat.
I listened to the track again last night for the first time in ages, and was still really impressed with it. I could do without the "what are you having for dinner" section, but that morph really is something else. It reminds me of when I was a little kid, and used to do that exact same noise, pretending to be a rickety old door opening, to scare the shit out of my brother at night. Maybe that's why I like it , who knows, but it is cool I think.
Less cool is the fact that its got one of those MTV Dance music videos, but hey you can't win 'em all, and I did warn you about von Stroke.
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