It’s no secret that the beat to “Miura” is basically a cover of “Funky Town.” I was using a kick and a snare, and I thought it would be nice to put a little reference in. I felt no compunction about doing it because I was using the Stars on 45 version of the song. I was ripping off the rip off. So I left this part where you can barely hear the cowbell in the break. The best part, I think, is the bassline, though. I work to get really empty basslines, and “Miura” is probably the emptiest one I’ve ever done. It’s just two of the same note in the verse.
DJ’s. Mixes. Labels. Videos. Albums. Festivals. Releases. Night Clubs. Stage Shows. Ones To Look Out For.
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DJ’s. Mixes. Labels. Videos. Albums. Festivals. Releases._______________ Night Clubs. Stage Shows. Ones To Look Out For.
RESIDENT ADVISOR PRESENTS:
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Pépé Bradock - Life [Atavisme, 2001]
Nathan Fake - Sky Is Pink (James Holden Remix) [Border Community, 2004] Remember how in 2004, you were either from Cologne or Berlin, Kompakt or Minus? Well in August of that year, you finally got a chance to be both when Border Community released James Holden’s remix of “Sky Was Pink.” There was an attention to melody, sure, but with less silliness and more pathos, even menace. There were sideways glances at minimal, those trippy lulls and scratchy warbles, but really that was all they were. This was music that was wholly of its time, without sounding like anything else out there.
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Ricardo Villalobos Easy Lee [Playhouse, 2003]
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Metro Area - Miura [Environ Records, 2001]
Throughout the ‘90s Laurent Garnier’s genre-bending DJ performances earned him a reputation as one of electronic music’s finest arbiters of taste. However, it was on “The Man with the Red Face” that Garnier really committed his unique personality to record. Mixing an incessantly funky techno backing with a quite literally breathtaking performance from jazz saxophonist Philippe Nadaud—something that’s often assumed to have inspired the track’s title—it remains one of the finest marriages of sequenced.
Laurent Garnier Man With The Red Face [F Communications, 2000]
“Deep Burnt”—released a year earlier—is more widely known but “Life,” from 2000’s 6 Millions Pintades EP, can still lay a serious claim to being Pépé Bradock’s best track. It’s epic but somehow understated, melding sampled violin (from Prince’s “Purple Rain”) with wriggly Detroit-style synths and the crisp, compressed drums that the French producer’s reputation was built upon. Beguiling and bewitching in equal measure—and with a depth and intensity that proved utterly irresistible—”Life” established Pépé Bradock as a peerless producer who would go on to contribute a significant chunk of the next decade’s most distinctive dance music.
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LCD Soundsystem Losing My Edge [DFA Records, 2002]
I still don’t exactly know what the hell that voice in Villalobos’ “Easy Lee” is saying. It hovers on the edge of sense, tantalizingly out of reach. But that’s exactly why we love Ricardo in the first place, right? Charmingly inscrutable, the minimal hippie lets the music do the talking, leaving the listener to fill in the blanks. “Easy Lee” offers plenty of them. It’s one of the producer’s sparest tracks, only revealing its remarkable complexity when you try to find something to mix it into. It’s an anthem, surely, but it’s an anthem done on Villalobos’ very particular terms.
House, techno and their myriad offshoots naturally represent the bulk of artists on the list, although disco veterans, dubstep selectors and Detroit mavericks all challenge the order. Whoever they were and wherever they came from, these were the DJs who packed dance floors, travelled the world and quite possibly changed some lives in 2010.
“Rej” definitely came out at the right time; if it came out now, I think it would be just a good selling track, but certainly not as important as it was at this time. I like techno and house, and from the beginning we wanted to do tracks that could be played by techno DJs and house DJs. Maybe there was a lack of good techno-orientated house at that time. But, for me, the most important track for this gap between house and techno around this time was “Sandcastles.” With that feeling in mind, we composed “Rej.”
Âme - Rej [Innervisions, 2006]
The first time I heard “Blackwater” was in a hotel lobby. Amongst the lounge music being pumped mercilessly on repeat, this piece graciously stood out with its elegant strings and gorgeous vocals. On my return home to New York, I started hearing the track everywhere: At a house set at Cielo, emerging from a Basic Channel track during Nikola Baytala’s set at Movement and eventually as part of Octave One’s live PA at The Bunker.
At some stage around the turn of the decade, after James Murphy had been branded “hip” for playing Can, Liquid Liquid and ESG records, the fear set in. “I was afraid that this new found coolness was going to go away and that’s where ‘Losing My Edge’ comes from,” he said of the track that simultaneously marked LCD Soundsystem’s arrival at the disco, and served as the most astute observation on elitist music snobbery ever recorded.
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Octave One feat. Ann Saunderson Blackwater [Concept Music, 2001]
Newworldaquarium Trespassers [Delsin, 2000]
The connection between Amsterdam’s Delsin Records and its spiritual home of Detroit has been documented thoroughly, so when Carl Craig came knocking in 2002 to license Jochim Peteri’s dusty, loop-driven “Trespassers”— which had received a limited vinyl pressing on Delsin two years previous—a relationship based on taking cues from the Motor City was momentarily inverted. That the track’s release on Planet E never progressed past promo status has done nothing to dampen its own folklore, though.
05 Burial - Archangel [Hyperdub, 2007] After the commercial and critical success of Burial’s debut full-length, the release of sophomore effort Untrue was certainly a highly anticipated moment of the last decade. Just sixty seconds into opening cut “Archangel,” it became clear that Burial had not only matched, but superseded the absurdly high expectations thrust upon him, grafting a certain spectral soul to the heavily swung dark garage percussion that has become his trademark.
Resident Advisor Present’s 10: A series of Resi-Guides™ Releases Edition005 RG005