Kadasarva - Steamagination

Band / Artist: Kadasarva
Year: 2011
Genre: Psytrance, Goa, Techstep

My Review:
With a 9 track album running for 75 minutes, its safe to say that this artist is working to ensure that you have as much of an experience as possible, assuming you were getting his music via cd. I did not expect that I'd manage to find good psytrance ever again, after infected mushroom released their last album, and it was at that moment, that I find like 7 bands all working on their music and releasing loads of quality stuff for free.

Kadasarva is a "project" from Kiev, Ukraine that is essentially manned by Alex Volkov

Parts of Steamagination remind me of the tech days of Drum & Bass. I'd say that this is definitely more on the technical side than on the free-form end. It's got cold and rough-edged sound layered throughout, with some dark and subdued moments. It isn't all creepy though, it holds up other moments throughout. It was absolutely perfect music for doing chores or going for a jog. Very driven.

Kadasarva - Steamagination

Basick Sampler

Band / Artist: CHIMP SPANNER, CIRCLES, MONUMENTS, SKYHARBOR, UNEVEN STRUCTURE, 7 HORNS 7 EYES, BLOTTED SCIENCE, ION DISSONANCE, THE ARUSHA ACCORD, ALIASES, VISIONS, THE ALGORITHM
Year: 2012
Genre: Metal, Nu Metal, Metalcore, Death Metal

My Review:
Metal from a ton of bands on the Basick label.  Basick is a label out of London, with a lot of their bands being ones that experiment with the digital/analog world of metal. in their own words they are "A fiercely progressive record label". Here is their site.
http://www.basickrecords.com/

..And their facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/basickrecords

I'm hit or miss for samplers, but with metal it always seems to work well, since often enough a metal band only really has one or two sounds that they can really create. The mixes tend to lend themselves to a lot of variation in the sound.

Either way, there is a lot of pretty good metal bands here who you might want to look into if you like what you hear.

Stay frosty.

BASICK 2012 FREE Sampler

Free Singles - Soul Are, Raw Music International, Sportbilly Krsi Embargo, Ellie Goulding, Bassnectar

Soul Are - Southern Jakarta Hardcore

Indonesian METTTTTTTTTAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. This one has a heavy garage quality, but it reminds me a lot of Killing Joke and early Fear Factory, or maybe a live show from fear factory. They've been together since 2000. Totally worth looking into, I know that I will be. Heres their facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/soulare/info

LaFam (Raw Music International) - Aduwa (ft. Chiness)

African soulful downtempo. This has a lot of interesting soundscapes in it. There is just a bit of the old school trance, with kenyan rappity ripping across the soft singing, and throat chanting. Soft and pleasant, a great way to relax for a minute before the next track coming up.

Sportbilly Krsi Embargo - Lemeka

I really like this song. It has that heavy guitar tuning that you used to hear from Korn, and the song itself is an amalgam of balkan and funk. So good.

So far I haven't found much about the band, but if I do, you can imagine that I might share it.

Halloween Town - Easy Lover

I'm loving all the songs so far on this collection. This reminds me of the old post on here from lavalier. Apparently it is a jam band made up of members of a couple different groups, including Louis XIV , Transfer, 12 Volt Sex, The Red Romance, Ambulance LTD, and The Killers. Here's their bio on Ryan Pardy's website.

http://www.ryanpardey.com/bio.html

..and if you enjoyed that track, here are two more. Your Christmas Song and A Faster Bullet.

Ellie Goulding - High For This

You are about to listen to a gorgeous rendition from the exquisitely talented English singer Ellie Goulding, covering The Weeknd’s ‘High For This’. With the help of Chiddy Bang producer Xaphoon Jones, the two lay a memorable cover from one of the most buzzed hip/hop group of the last 12 months.

This is a really chill song, with just enough glitch on the vocals to make it feel interesting. I could see a song like this being a big pop song, except its just too soft and not bouncy enough to make a pop single. It'd be more like one of the songs that yo hear on the album after you buy it, and then you end up liking it mroe than anything else on there. I do really like it though, it makes me think of Aliyah when she started to step out onto her own.

 

Bassnectar - DREAMTEMPO

I'm working through this mixtape that just crossed the emails yesterday.  Bassnectar is always good for a little bit of wub, though this is a lot older than his Wub-works. Here's some of his information that came with this.

I’ve been wanting to re-release this for a long time…

This was a mixtape I recorded in one take on four CDJs back in 1999, summarizing my love for thick, heavy, hypnotic downtempo music: ethereal melodies, weird loops, funky acid jazz, trip-hop, and everything left field of center.

Musically, it’s a collection of songs which are very special to me...

 It feels a lot like something from Bonobo, and has a little bit of an old Cujo track. It even feels a little like a slacker riffing off of Buddha Bar, and coming out with something so much better.

Giraffe - ...There is no devil

Band / Artist: Giraffe
Year: 2010
Genre: Indie Folk, Acoustic, Indie Pop, Folk Rock,

My Review:

The mix of instruments here leave you with expectations that get flipped on you. Acoustic guitar, organ synth, simple drums, and tambourine makes for the sort of softer sound that you expect of folky pop americana of the sort that you hear in almost every episode of sons of anarchy. That is not exactly what you're going to get.

Giraffe is mainly Berlin based composer James Gardner, who has been working with record label 12rec. for at least a few years and a few different releases.

I had saved this for a future post, and replayed it again recently. I'm really liking it. This album plays with a subdued, brooding darkness that you can get really comfortable in. Its the soft folksy album for people who don't really like folk, maybe more industrial rock, or goth rock. That isn't to say that a fan of folk wont enjoy it, in fact I think that it would add to a good folk collection nicely.

Giraffe - ...There Is No Devil

Duilio Pasquale - A Different Me

 
Band / Artist: Duilio Pasquale
Year: 2012
Genre: Dub Techno, Tech-House, Deep House, Minimal

My Review:
A mildly psychedelic Tech-house EP. This one is short, and I listened to it a lot. I'll just start out by saying what they said on the label release.

Duilio Pasquale of Oakland, California, dishes four tracks of deep, heady, laid-back, yet groovy for the afterhours, quirky minimal techno/house on "a different me". 

 The Unfound Sound / Found Sound labels are a great one for the occasional tech house release. They release an album roughly every few months, the ones for found being the record label end, and unfound sound being the alternate side which primarily deals in net releases.

Their site is here. http://www.foundsoundrecords.com/

I'll leave the rest to the short description.

Let your mind and body go, and let the frolicking sounds do the talkin'.

Duilio Pasquale - A Different Me

The Foggy Mountain Boys (Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs - Untitled mix)

Band / Artist: Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, The Foggy Mountain Boys
Year:1948-1970
Genre: Bluegrass, Country

My Review:
As far as old country bands go, Flatt and Scruggs were the big time thing. Lester Raymond Flatt (Born: Duncanâs Chapel, Tennessee, June 19, 1914) was a skilled guitarman, and Earl Eugene Scruggs (Born: Flint Hill, North Carolina, Jan. 6, 1924) a talented banjo man. They formed a wonderful partnership for a good deal of time (1948–1970), and then went on to run their own projects. During that time, they had 24 other people involved in their group at different times.

I can't speak from the experience of age in this, but I'd say that were they from the hipsters era, we'd call them sellouts (no disrespect). They were involved in so many hollywood projects and were huge for touring, though that was a different era for music. They have a lot of skill, and bring on a very homegrown southern feel, despite how much public broadcast work they did.

Lester Flatt died in 1979, and Earl Scruggs passed away in March of last year. This is a collection of tracks from various recordings of live shows. Hopefully you enjoy it.

Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs - Untitled mix

Electronic Music Education - Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

It isn't techno. and it isn't electronica. Its not dance, nor is it musique concrete. Electronic music spans so far and wide, that it has eaten a slice of rock, encapsulates all of r&b rap, and nearly all of pop. It has roots so far back that you could say it predated the civil war, and it very well may be what you'll hear in one way or another for the rest of your life, unless you listen to bluegrass.

So with all of that in mind, I'm going to share something I was given as a study guide sometime back near 2005. It has been defunct for so long now, that I'm occasionally worried that its going to be deleted, yet it remains.

I give you, Ishkurs guide to Electronic Music (v. 2.5). This will take you HOURS to read through, and it can give a name to hundreds of vague genres that you always enjoyed, or wanted to know.

here's a bland quote

"The guide attempts to depict the chronological order of electronic music genres' appearance. It contains 7 separate parent areas of electronic music to explore - House, Techno, Breakbeat, Jungle, Hardcore, Downtempo, and Trance."

The whole thing is done in flash, which leaves it a little annoying to me since I've done interfaces and web design, but the depth and entertainment that it brings makes up for it in droves. The tutorial about electronic music's historical beginnings alone is about 14 pages, but if all you want is to skip through all that and get into the music surfing, then you can go right ahead, and explore through at least a hundred genres, with songs tied to them, his impressions of it, as well as a little background into why it is what it is, where it started, what the scene was like.. There are even radio stations linked in to tons of the genres so that you can just instantly start listening to netradio of your favorites, or look up the bands listed under the genres you like (thats how I found Tsunami One)

If I met this person I would buy them any drink or drug they wanted, and just sit back and talk with them for a day at least.

Rumors circulate that he's working on a version 3, but there hasn't been any news about it for a while now. His website is just a landing page, and the last thing I've found was a DJ set that he did in anticipation of the next version.. from 11 months ago.

https://soundcloud.com/ishkur23/ishkur-pure-trance
Ishkur - Pure Trance Mix
(Edit: it seems that Ishkur has quashed his account or at least the mix that was there. I found some online versions, so I've uploaded a copy to mediafire)

I hope that one day in the future, someone collects all of the information saved on this site, and keeps a copy of it as a backup to convert all that info into some other version, because one day in the future, this shit would make for the best textbook or college course ever.

Digitally Imported Presents - Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Black Mesa: Source - Soundtrack

Band / Artist: Joel Nielsen
Year: 2012
Genre: Independent Game Soundtrack

My Review:
Original half life, the game to change all first person shooters. It's the game that set the bar, creating the story driven first-person shooter genre. Originally it came out in 1997, winning over 50 PC Game of the Year awards. Like all 3D games from 97, it has the joy of being incredibly outdated now, but spawning a huge fanbase and an entire franchise.

And thats where Black Mesa comes in. Originally the project was called Black Mesa: Source because it was recreating the Black Mesa Test Facility from game 1, and using the new Source engine as the main way of building it. All of the work was done by a small team of indie modders, and I know that some of the reason for the incredible time drag in releasing it was due to the meshing of 2 separate teams that had both started on the same project, and decided to merge and pool resources as soon as they realized that they were competing against one another. the end results can be sort of seen here.



The updated experience goes for both streamlining elements of the original gameplay, and for creating a much more modern modelling for all of the characters. It is in its first official alpha release, but I've seen an incredibly promising mod addition..

..that I hope gets adopted into the next alpha release, which should also continue the storyline along into Xen.

I've played through the game twice as it is in this stage, and i've had a lot of fun doing so. I cant wait to see a version repacked that includes the updated sections from the secondary modding developer, as well as the finishes to the story.

As far as the music goes, it has a good sound that you can tell was very much inspired by the score work from Half Life 2, and the later two episodes extending the storyline onward into some pretty engaging places. As much as I'm looking forward to seeing where the Valve team is going to go with their story, I am incredibly grateful for this mod, and the music that come along with it, which is awesome desk music while I'm working.

So play the game, get the soundtrack, have a fun time.

Black Mesa Soundtrack