A friend recommended this to me. "Scotland's first chiptune festival" sounds like a laff! Don't know any of these guys yet, but I'll try to get along to at least one of the nites.
"There will be live chip music, visuals & DJing from 8pm – 3am on the Saturday and Sunday night. Age limit: 18+ due to there being a bar.
During the day on Sunday there will be workshops on chiptune composing, circuit bending & VJing (full details here). Also, there will be a Chip Market with a range of chip-related goods on sale, running 12-5pm in the main hall upstairs. Age limit: none, all ages welcome."
So bring along yer casio n a crosshead n get bendy wi that noise making equipment!
Got into the modscene and chiptune stuff as a teenager after downloading a trippy old-school mod for Doom called 8-bit deathmatch. Dark, claustro, boxy levels with eppy-inducing flashing walls, strobing lights, and a pixelated power arsenal. Best thing was the soundtrack tho - some of the modscene's best grindy and bleepy loops and tracks were also included!
So I'm hoping it will sound not completely unlike these:
This should have been posted a while ago, but it's been a busy week, what with all-day afterparties, getting a job, and moving house and such!
Animal Hospital: Minimal techno
for sick puppies and kittens
(Credit: David Lewis)
Animal Hospital was fucking awesome, as always. Every second Thursday of the month at Sneaky Pete's.
Nick Dow was first up when I arrived. This guy blew everyone away with his own material. This guy's doing really well, and I wanna hear more from him! Eerie minimal soundscapes with pleasant clicks n pops. Have a listen on his Myspace.
Course, coz it's festy time, the place was bangin' till 5am! The residents impressed as usual, and there was another guest pumping out the silky tunes too. I think I caught his name but was too busy dancing to remember.
Nick Dow
After a bit of sit-down sitar + beatbox fun while waiting for a taxi, the afterparty got underway, and did it go on its merry way! 20 hours later still spangled. The peak moment was probably sometime just before noon Friday when this balkan banger hit the deck.
And this wasn't actually played ("because it's hard to mix"), but I was pointed in the direction of this filthy obscene pounder. Makes me wanna run things over.
This nite I also met a guy who has a radio gig in the borders playing whatever alternative tracks take his fancy. These days he seems to fancy glitchy stuff and folktronica. Have a listen to the Dinner and Bass show on Soundcloud! As I write, on the second hour of the first show is available; Soundcloud might be having issues, because this guy has 2 public tracks but only 1 is visible. Dinner & Bass on TD1Radio.co.uk - The Alternative Selection(2nd Hour) by dinnerandbass by dinnerandbass
Admiral Fallow played a bouncy-flouncy, fun-fun-fun-fun-fun set at Sneaky Pete's sweat box last nite!
These guys are up-n-coming indie rock from Glasgow. Whimsical and fun, thoughtful and emotional, but not dreary and wrist-slitty like so much of this genre can be.
They played all the faves (my friends were having a great singalong), a few new ones, and even squeezed in their first ever encore at the end!
Check out their Facebook or Myspace for their tunes. 'Sqealing Pigs' is a belter. 'Old Balloons' is a singalong favorite for my friend. 'Subbuteo' is one of those "really quiet tunes... shh" that explodes with sound halfway through. When I heard it live it nearly melted my face. Good work!
Gotta run, back to Sneaky's tonite for some filthy minimal till 5am ;)
Image credit: Greig Middlemiss (Different Light Photography)
Well, maybe. I'm being a sad sack tonite and staying in, but a mate said they're playing. Can't even confirm this coz Whistle Binkie's listings page only displays upcoming shows, and it's technically tomorrow now.
Anyway, fine excuse to share some awesome ska!
"I'm So Happy" is one of my fave Bombskare tracks, but this live handycam recording is the only thing I can find on Youtube the now. The quality doesn't do them justice, and it's not the complete performance either, but it should give you an idea of their live energy!
Another fave is "Fistful of Dynamite", a soaring instrumental skankalong reminiscent of Apache. This is the promo vid so it actually sounds alrite.
Seen these guys in St Andrews last year, and more recently in Edinburgh at the Club 54-46 ska nite, 4 hours of hi-energy skankin grooves! Their mates The Big Hand were up first, and I got to mosh about to Bombskare with their trumpet player after they had finished the set!
Seeing as these two go together so well, here's a couple of Big Hand faves as well.
After Dark were awesome! More laid back style that I've heard them before, mainly coz Paul was trying out his lovely new conga drums. A bit of slidey jazz guitar and twinkling piano riffs from Felipe and David too.
They got us all dancing to "Mojo", of course. And squeezed in a bit of Credence at the end ;)
Missed little Egypt! I heard the gig started at 11pm, but when we arrived shortly after that, three bands had already played. Did discover their cunningly misspelled Myspace tho, so give it a listen! I agree with one poster who writes "drums a bit more overdrive would help this lovely fresh unpretentious pop".
The warm up for After Dark was awesome tho, a real surprising discovery! The Dark Jokes, already started when we arrived, at first sounded like country, with a good bit of fiddle. The rock vibe got harder thru the next few tracks, sounding like Pearl Jam for a bit, and then banging out hard a la Rage n having a go at the Polis. But the angry peak chilled at the end with a nice long reggae number called "Virtual Romance" about two fated MSN lovers.
St Andrews blues rock legends! More on these guys later, but for take it from me that you're in for a boozy bluesy nite. Covers of Hendix, Chilis, Snoop Dog, as well as fresh original stuff and new takes on the classic rock'n'roll blues canon. "I got my MOJO WORKIN'!"
Also playing are Little Egypt. Clever, melodic, whimsical indie rock. Enjoyed them last time I was at Henry's. Hope they have a drummer this time tho! Beware that the two Little Egypts on Myspace are not this one.
Gangstagrass is the bluegrass/gangsta rap mashup project of New York producer Rench, which my flatmate and I recently discovered while watching her new favorite show in Edinburgh.
"Justified" is a great wee drama full of good ol boys, drinkin n shootin, meth lab intrigue, religious nuttery, n a suave cop with a great smile and sure aim. Go see it on Five.tv if you can. Best thing about it tho is prob the Emmy-nominated theme tune, 'Long Hard Times To Come'.
A whole album of of this stuff was apparently released for free around 2008 on gangstagrass.com, but the site now appears to be dead. The torrent is still available on TPB.
As Rench admits in a Bluegrass Blog interview, he's not the first to combine country music and hiphop, but having been steeped in honky-tonk and bluegrass before getting into the hiphop scene makes him a good candidate to put together the two!
We get a flavor of the creative process as he explains why the rhythmically straightforward and melody-driven licks and riffs of bluegrass make it particularly rich pickins for a hiphop sample bank:
"I started experimenting with sampling pedal steel guitar licks for trip-hop songs maybe 9 years ago, which gradually grew into writing full country songs to hip-hop beats and recording live fiddle and pedal steel over them. The style drew mostly from 60′s honky-tonk, but it struck me that in some ways bluegrass was better suited for mixing with hip-hop because straight 4/4 with no swing is more common and there is much more of a choppy rhythmic drive to the style. It’s also very instrumentally driven with very little percussion, which leaves room to add beats over it when you sample it."
Rench also makes it clear that he makes no mainstream compromises despite risking alienating the hardcore fans of each genre:
"Someone doing this to make it more accessible might have watered down the hip-hop, or used more cliche blugrass riffs that would sound cartoonish and sterotypical, but I am not about to offer people MC Hammer meets Hee-Haw."
So it's for the open-minded. But isn't that the essence of the mashup? If it works, why not? And this does, very well. This is gonna fit in very well with a mix of Mos Dub and Magical Mystery Chambers, I'm sure.
