Tag: drum and bass

Sorry for the lateness in posting this up, but lots of things on the go right now (only 3 weeks to go till the ECMAs!)

Gonna keep on the late 90s drum & bass path this week with a classic track from Optical entitled “Bounce”, circa 1998. This track would have been in rotation right around the time I was getting seriously into drum & bass. I had it on a mix tape ripped from the radio (actually, I think it was Karl Haze‘s Futurhythm show 😉 which I’m sure has quite bit of mileage.

As you can hear, and as we would go on to hear more of in his collaborations with Ed Rush, he’s s able to move effortlessly between creepy and funky. And how can you not love the drop at ~3:30.

Enjoy!

P.S. watch for more original Snug stuff soon. Hoping to go on a writing/polishing/posting spree in the next few weeks as I have a huge backlog of tracks that are like 90-odd percent complete)

For this St. Patrick’s day throwback I wanted to give you something green, but unfortunately this was all I could come up with, so as you can imagine I had to formulate a back-up plan.

Instead I bring to you a track by the classic production duo (now trio) Blu Mar Ten. This is probably the first track I heard by these guys (at least knowingly – a lot of their earlier stuff would have been featured in atmospheric mixes of the mid to late nineties).

This track has always stuck with me in some way shape or form, and I can hear myself drawing inspiration from it even today. What really got me is the synth line that runs through most of the track. I’d not heard anything like that in a drum & bass track at that time, and it’s still not all that common place. I love it though. Enjoy!

For this throwback I present to you an absolute classic from the heyday of the production duo Ed Rush & Optical (c. 99):

You’ve got to love the calmness yet creepiness of the intro, the way the initial bassline breathes, and of course the riff at about 3:20 (although it wears a bit thin by the second half, but I can forgive this because everything else about this track is top-notch).

As I recall, the labels on my vinyl copy of this were actually flipped, so for the longest time I was under the impression that this side was “Bacteria” (I’m still half-convinced that might be the case 😉

To be honest I’m not sure how many times I actually played this track in a set – maybe once or twice as an opener? I think I’ll have to increase that number soon.

I was hoping to cover a few other techy drum & bass artists before coming back to Kemal and/or Rob Data, but screw it…

I remember when this track came out in 2002. I was living in Montreal at the time. I specifically remember listening to it on my crappy little 128 MB MP3 player on the way to work – a metro ride and then a walk in the frigid death cold winter. I also remember Optiv (of C4C) playing it around the same time-frame at some club.

That’s my story. End of post.

This week’s throwback is a track from Seba & Paradox. Vocals are courtesy of Robert Manos, who’s done several tracks with Seba, and occasionally Paradox.This is the “Version” version (go figure). The A side is much more vocal.I originally came across this tune on vinyl when it was released (2005) and was so close to buying it, but thought, “Nah, it’s not really my style, I won’t play it”. Funny how things change though – I just played the digital copy of this a couple nights ago.

Here’s a summery-sounding throwback to warm you up on this grey wintry day. This is probably one of my favourite cuts off of Klute’s 2004 album No One’s Listening Anymore, and definitely one of my Klute favs in general.

While most components of the tracks are pretty simplistic I think they come together quite well and I’d even venture to say its greater than the sum of its individual parts. And who could forget the pièce de résistance: the very up-lifting modulation from Dm to Fm. (Just don’t try harmonic mixing during these parts, hehe 😉

Check it out…

Also, don’t forget about the YouTube playlist!

Happy February people! Apparently yesterday was half-way between the start of winter and the start of spring. Thank fuck.

Here’s an intelligent/atmospheric classic circa 95. Unfortunately, no time for commentary this week as I need to go shovel another 700 lbs of snow!

Happy Thursday! This week’s throwback is a track by yours truly, circa 2003. Surprisingly, I didn’t have renders of many tracks from this period, so I only had a few to choose from.

It’s always fun to go back and listen to how I’ve progressed – or in some cases haven’t! – over the past few years. I find most of my tracks from this period to be a bit underdeveloped. This is probably one of my stronger ideas, but as you can hear the track may be a bit longer than justified (the third drop at the end is probably unnecessary, haha). Suffice to say I’ll forgive you if you jump ahead in places 😉

One of these days I’d like to dig up more old tracks, polish them/refine them and either give them a proper release or give them away. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime I’ve posted a few others, as-is, on my SoundCloud.