Fellow Earthlings,
Tonight at sidereal time 24.303.00:00 we will finally make contact with the planetary spirit of artistic recycling!
For this purpose we are opening a radio station with the functional name P.A.N. [Planetary Autonomous Network].
In addition, we will gather in our home probe “Bermuda” for the launch of the interstellar transmitter to initiate the first contact together.
Presence is essential.
Well…let’s have some pre new years breaks, shall we?! I actually recorded the set for this episode of Octobird Salad a few weeks back while preparing for a gig I just played for the wonderful people from Eddy Breaks. They’re running a regular party series with some good old Drum’n’Bass vibes, ranging from the classic uptempo thing to Jungle styles and Dub stuff. This was quite a nice challenge, as I haven’t been playing these kind of tunes for quite some times but rather been swaying underneath 140bpm. But with the ongoing release trend of mixing house tunes with breaks I already had some tunes on my harddisk waiting to be played.
One thing said before you push that red button: if you rather prefer to listen to the original set I played at Eddy Breaks – The Darkest Days, you have the option to do so at:
https://hearthis.at/eddybreaksmusik/221225-ebkvu-octobird/
There are a whole lot Sets from this and recent events, I highly recomment. It’s just a bit tricky to embed stuff from hearthis.at here, which is why I decided to tease this as a new Octobird Salad Episode.
I’ve always maintained a very moody relationship with dub influenced music. I deeply admire all the ingredients: The circulating, stumbling drum patterns, the all-consuming tape echos and of course….bass! But the final implementation always carries the risk of ending up in cultural or musical cliches. With Dub Techno there often seems to be a far to narrow defined set of tools of echos and comb filters mixed with minimal techno put together somewhere in the late 90s. That’s why I felt much more successful discovering influences of dub in all kinds of musical directions.
The following collection of tracks is a rather weird one. I would totally agree with someone arguing that this isn’t really dub music. It’s not. But it carries a lot of the mindset of dub music as a ritual, hypnotizing art form. Less researched, more recovered from different corners of my music collection.
TRACKLIST
Tribe of Colin – Alasallmenhathbeencreatedequal
Vladislav Delay – Avanne
Move D & Pete Namlook – Footer
Stefan Goldmann – Streams
Marcellis – Hopeless
Roger 23 – Future State
Simon Haydo – Parade of Unhappy
Peter Graf York – Jahlette Sensor Excel
Al Wootton – Wychwood Dub
Павел Миляков – Silent E
Madteo – Same Way (Interior Paramours Mix)
Aybee – Moon’s Whisper
Efdemin – A Land Unknown
Oh how I miss these dirty club nights! Plunging into a muddy sludge of sweat and adrenaline, floating on the far-reaching waves of kick drums. Even in a city like Berlin there hasn’t been much going on in the last 2 years apart from one or two pub discos and private raves on trashy improvised sound systems. Anyway, we’ll still mark this one as a hope-inspiring warm-up exercise. Keep the dream alive!
TRACKLISZT:
Phew! It’s already been 6 months since my last appereance on Pr0gramma with my Bimstein EP and obviously I went back into the ethernet shadows after that. Not really – I rather went into the shadows of my studio racks, taking a recent mixture of changes and chances as an inducement to rebuild my studio setup. And as a result of some quite drastic setup changes there also went quite some time into learning new machines and software and teach them to communicate with each other.
So let’s take a few steps back and remember where we took off, shall we?! Back in April I had my last appearence on Austin Cassels radio show. And while it’s rather unlikely…maybe some of you missed that one. If that’s you…or if you just wanna listen back to some Octobird stuff, here is the set I played on Austin’s show:
TRACKLIST:
Andreas Grosser – Rhythmic Desert
UFOCUS – Fun With Fractals
Octobird – Desert Hall (unreleased track)
Dona – Vrs 2
D’Marc Cantu – Another Number
DJ Spider & Franklin De Costa – F Planet
Simon Haydo – The Territories Marked
S Olbricht – Asterid
oxvac – 7
Octobird – Monowai
DJ Spider – Inner Earth Existance
Israel Vines – Rage Appropriate
Container – Peppered
Don’t DJ – Hexentrix (Jordan GCZ Remix)
So much for the warmup and hopefully I’ll be back soon with some actual “news” 😉
A silent evolution is taking place between pixel-flooded landscapes and rhythmic clacking wood emulations. An Euclidean alternation between melody and texture, structure and color. And while hype addicts are still looking for the perfect hookline, the free spirits have long been researching new parameters of expression. And so this episode of Octobird Salad is intended to pay tribute to those free spirits who are looking for new parameters of composition in a mixture of club functionality and emotional expression. And by the way, a sneak peek into my own attempts in this field, which will see the light of day in the very near future. But you have to stay until the end of the party.
It is probably the hidden merit of Jan Jelinek (who is represented here with his Farben project) to have pushed the deconstruction of melody and rhythm. For almost twenty years now, he has been busy blurring the familiar patterns and levels in music and thus lovingly freeing us from our cherished bonds. Always deeply experimental in his musical approaches, somehow he never wanted to scare us. He was rewarded with all kinds of attempts to put him in some kind of genre. Yet he was minimalist before Minimal became a short-lived club trend. Was too conceptual for Ambient and Lounge.
While Jelinek seems to have long since arrived in the academic quarter of his existence, there are plenty of descendants who are striving for structural changes on the dance floor. On Firecracker Recordings all varieties of house music are doused with liters of paint. Dauwd just nailed the Theory of Colours with their eponymous album and 1080p Records owe their independent character in the LoFi corner primarily to their color spectrum. Instead of releasing anyone who can run an R’n’B sample through a tape plug-in, they mainly stood out for their selection of independent sound spectra (which was then run trough a tape plug-in).
So this isn’t all big news and some might even legitimately doubt my brave claim to set Jan Jelinek on the throne here. Let me be honest and reveal that this is all a frame for my own musical intentions in this science and the final track might give a glimpse in this. For me personally this is all very much connected to the art and science of sampling, of finding the hidden textural magic between the peaks of recorded sounds to give them a second birth of something the sound itself wouldn’t have imagined. So keep your ears open, either here at octobird.org or on my Bandcamp for something up-to-date…finally.
TRACKLIST:
Even if the vinyl supplies in my apartment are slowly starting to displace me, I’ve always been a fan of digital DJing. At least when I’m standing behind the wheels myself. And in this playground I’m finally in the process of replacing my totally undersized MP3s with Flac files once and for all. And again in the same process I got infected with a serious case of audiophily and catch myself diggin for all these ultra polished electro tracks to convince myself that all the effort of re-encoding and re-recording is worth the effort. So Instead of the usual insider tips, this time I simply present a best of electro on steroids.
As an old friend of trashy sizzling acid music with a constant allergy to perfection, I am still quite reluctant when basses fly by slightly over-inflated. But there are a few who have mastered the double game of knocking out perfectly produced tracks that stand the ravages of time without getting tired.
Morphology have been part of this group since their very first releases on Zyntax Motorcity in the early 2010s. And my good friend Vertical67 with his label Vortex Traks was lucky enough to get some of their great pieces a few years ago.
Also part of the immediate vicinity are Mechatronica, who have set a well-guarded milestone in Electro when they released their “I Am Mensch” 12 “inch by Zeta Reticula and Helga Neuer.
Marco Bernardi is one of my absolute favorites next to D’Marc Cantu (who for once does not appear here). His efforts to produce club tracks in which he explores the rhythmic fringes, exposes us to dystopias and at the same time puts us into a deep trance, are unparalleled.
And from that point it gets dirty again with circulating, endless loops of drooling acid by Boris Divider, Isabella and Clatterbox. Including the title track of the Murder-Capital full length masterpiece by Gesloten Cirkel “Submit-X”.
TRACKLIST:
Ahhh … it’s been a while since the last time I gave these virtual turntables a physically modeled spin. Pretty busy grinding down home made rhythm exercises so that they could see the light of the ether as soon as possible. And of course vacation. In dream states around the globe. I wished myself everywhere. As a lively, vibrating disembodied being that flows unabashedly through the bars of the present. Dancing, dreaming, slowly fading.
With their debut EP Seasick in Salts, uh just recently built a wonderfully suitable runway for these dream trips. Somewhere between trippy Acid Ambient spheres of the Orb and free-spirited pop designs of the late Roisin Murphy, uh embark on a journey that never ends in just 30 minutes. Located somewhere between 1990 and infinity.
Klasse Wrecks also brilliantly mastered the art of lifting genres everyone knows and has never heard before from the depths of our subconscious . Their recent releases are basically the blueprint for everything that buzzes around in this OS episode. Endlessly reverberant hooks, tripping breakbeats and sprinkles of classic rave vocals. And with their latest (and for some inexplicable reason purely digital) Homeboys EP, the two Klasse Wrecks masterminds Luca Lozano and Mr Ho simply nailed it (…to the point where describing words become totally redundant).
In order not to slide into oblivion of interwoven dream sequences, a special magic is required. Lesinge, who already made a lot of promises on his Acid Waxa debut in 2017, has now set up his own acid hit list with Plic Ploc. The melodies play ping pong, the bass runs bowl and the beats make cricket. If he continues to grow so steeply, we urgently need an initiative against home sports.
#staysave dream dancers, headphone ravers, virtual snake creatures…
TRACKLISZT:
ARTIST
uh
B12
The Boys From Chariss
Route 8
Jay Ka
Cliff Lothar
Alphonse
Luca Lozano
Justin Cudmore
Lesinge
Luca Lozano
Innerspace Halflife
Horsepower Productions
Ex-Terrestrial
TRACK
Contact
Play with Me
Bass Love
Turning Point
Dirty Earth
Devotion
Xanax 123
Bedroom Beat
New Jack the House
Une Verte Deux Blanches
Biohazard
Wind
TP
Insect Reject
LABEL
Prah Recordings
Central Processing Unit
Klasse Wrecks
Lobster Theremin
Turbo
Klasse Wrecks
Klasse Wrecks
The Bunker New York
Acid Waxa
Klasse Wrecks
M>O>S Recordings
Sneaker Social Club
Magicwire
Okay… easy, easy!
Let’s leave that headline in all its ambiguity regarding the state of the nation and devote ourselves to an extra large portion of escapism. It’s dream time, baby! Because dreaming is the only true alternative to Netflix these days. And Dream House was a genre long before Netflix was a clinically recognized addiction.
I’ve been a bit off lately from simmering velvety smooth track transitions. Instead, I was quite busy jacking up my own tracks to somehow work.
Without being among those who suddenly have a lot more time (but rather those who simply take their time) I was pretty intensely involved in expanding my own mixing and mastering skills. So why not just sprinkle one of my own compositions right at the beginning? Roughly mixed and not mastered at all, but laid back and totally unobtrusive.
With everything that follows, this seems to be more or less a Future Times Label Special. Which surprised me myself and was not on purpose at all. But I guess that’s exactly where the fine instinct of Future Times releases lies. A forward-looking sound aesthetic that uses sound colors that are already deeply rooted in our imagination. All covered with a fine digital pastel, to which we haven’t dedicated ourselves so meditatively to since New-Age Times. Rhythmically, on the other hand, these Tracks are always encouraged not to break the well-known patterns, but rather to prepare the listener patiently for some next-level experiences.
Our other companions also join this joy of playing. Among them Linkwood, who – in addition to his collaboration with Foat – recently rereleased his Disco-House masterpiece System. As well as His Master’s Voice, a fairly new pair of hands on the machines and, above all, someone who stands out in the continuing Electro trend with his excessive digressions. Not by reinventing the toolbox, but simply by completely doing his own thing. 1st class dreamer!
TRACKLIST
ARTIST
Neu Balance
Octobird
Garies
Outboxx
Linkwood & Foat
Dreems
Jeremy Hyman
Ov
His Master’s Voice
Diego
Bandhagens Musikförening
TRACK
Tread
Rubbing Fingers
Don Bongo
How You Know
Pressure
In The Jungle
Slide
Perc Song (Chords)
Taurus
Crack
Protokoll A
LABEL
1080p
unreleased
Future Times
Well Rounded Housing Project
Athens Of The North
Multi Culti
Future Times
Future Times
KCZMRK
Future Times
Northern Electronics
It’s cold and rainy outside and I’m not particularly willing to stand up against the gravity of my couch.
Instead, I slide the “Super Acid Bros” cartridge into my NES with pizza smeared paws and give the power button a kick.
The first two levels are still pretty easy. Actually a bit uncommon for a Klasse Wrecks release, who usually turn the difficulty level straight to the top stop. But from level four onwards, things really get going. Led by FRANCO.D’ , whom I’ve already praised in my last Tentacle Loot, past some absolute nobrainers from D’Marc Cantu, LFO and Ceephax until Level 8 finally gets brutal and dirty.
Im Kellar is probably more of a bonus level with David Vunk as the endboss – the owner of Moustache Records where the only two EPs by the duo Vunk and Spanish has been released. These were duly hyped and Im Kellar is probably back in the basement now. Hopefully not for too long.
Little by Little is another classic Bandcamp stumbling block. While fresh on my radar, the Frenchman already has a pretty busy portfolio, filled with wonderfully functional club standards. But with the special feature that Little by Little has a knack for letting individual elements slide through these pretty pounding tracks with unheard lightness and dynamics. A handwriting that is not only immortalized on I’m Doing My Thing, but also curls more or less through all of his tracks. Next Level Shit!
Well, and then a large portion of Unknown To The Unknown, because life isn’t hard enough yet. A little bit of 808 State, whose comeback has been celebrated properly already, because they do it right and don’t just dust off their party hats.
And last but not least, the absoloute final boss! Rude 66 – My 909 – exactly 20 years old and still a secret anthem. With such a deep rolling bass that this number doesn’t actually work too well on a home listening set, but it definitely works out there in the wild. Promised!
Ah shit, I ran out of potato chips. Now I have to get up in the end… GAME OVER
TRACKLIST
TRACK
Basical
I Dream About Acid
Let Go Of This Acid
Total
Maddance
Tan Ta Ra (Moby Remix)
South Bank
The Scene
I’m Doing My Thing (Original Mix)
Hell Is Other People (feat. Si Begg)
Tokyo Tokyo
The Black Night Is Calling My Name
Antipodean
My 909