Baauer's in Trouble

So it turns out that Baauer's Harlem Shake uses two unlicensed vocal samples. This would largely have gone unnoticed, were it not for the massive amount of recent internet attention that propelled the song to the Billboard #1 Chart Position.

Now Mad Decent (Baauer's record label) are in legal discussions with the original artists, but nobody is willing to talk about details. Jayson Musson, one fifth of early 2000s rap group Plastic Little and man behind the original "do the harlem shake" sample hilariously called up Harry "Baauer" Rodrigues and thanked him for "doing something useful with our annoying music."

Universal Music's daughter label Machete Music, who own the introductory "con los terroristas" sample, issued a considerably douchier response, as is to be fully expected from a major label:

"Hector will get what he deserves," he said. "We can turn around and stop that song. That’s a clear breaking of intellectual property rights."
(via NY Times)

We live in a complicated world for electronic music. On the one hand, sampling has been an integral part of innovation ever since the MPC first made it into the bedrooms of early hip-hop producers in the late 80's. On the other hand, the recording industry continues to push for a draconian lockdown on all copyright laws in what can only be described as a severely misguided attempt to protect their intellectual property. How much copyright is too much copyright? It's an interesting question, but we'll save that one for a different day.

Deltron 3030 @ Montreal Jazz Festival 2012

The year is 3030 AD. As our planet lies in ruins, the hopelessly corrupt world government is trying to suppress one of the last vestiges of free speech and liberty: hip-hop. It seems like all hope is lost, but fear not! Our hardy protagonist and lyrical wunderkind is here to save the day with fresh rhymes. I am talking, of course, about Deltron 3030, the first ever hip-hop concept album.

Let's rewind back to the year 2000. Hip-hop is already well on its way out of obscurity, and has started rapidly gaining a foothold in mainstream musical culture. As a result it's branching out quite a bit stylistically and thematically, and sprouting a bunch of different subcultures. Around the same time, Eminem is finally enjoying some commercial popularity with his Slim Shady LP, and MC Frontalot is about to coin the term Nerdcore Hip-Hop as a sub-genre for computer geeks and sci-fi enthusiasts.

One of the groups to pop out of this panoply of aural artistry is Deltron 3030, a trio consisting of rapper Del the Funky Homosapien, producer Dan the Automator, as well as turntablist Kid Koala. Their self-titled (and so far only) album is highly unusual for the time, both because of its eerie, operatic soundscapes and its science fiction themed content. Over the course of the LP, we hear the story of Del, a.k.a. Deltron Zero, as he's trying to win the Galactic Rhyme Federation championship before "returnin' to Earth and burnin' some herb."

Deltron's album was a big success, and played a large role in legitimizing hip-hop for the nerd sub-culture, where hip-hop typically isn't very predominant. After their only release, the three members went on to work on Gorillaz' first studio album with Damon Albarn (previously of Blur fame), and Deltron 3030 slowly faded into obscurity. Because of this, I was all the more excited to find out that the trio were active again, and that they would be performing at the Montreal Jazz Festival. So, naturally, Afromullets sent their finest correspondent to the North American continent to document the momentous occasion.

This guy can barely contain his excitement.

Fast-forward again to the present day. I'm hurrying down one of Montreal's main streets, trying to make it to the venue on time. Simultaneously, I'm trying to find the email with my ticket confirmation details on my phone, and racking up a small fortune in roaming costs in the process. A bead of sweat trickles down my cheek in the midsummer evening air, and I reflect on how the weather is both hotter and more humid than Canada has any right to be.

Montreal's International Jazz Festival is the biggest of its kind worldwide, with more than 2 million visitors each year. And right now, it feels like every single one of them is standing in my way as I hastily push my way through the masses. I'm a man on a mission. As the crowd slowly morphs from mid-40s in baseball caps to mid-20s hipsters with V-necks and messenger bags, I know I've almost reached my destination. Five minutes later I'm inside, happily sipping my first beer and making faux-pas with the local tipping culture.

The local warmup band.

The Deltron gig has attracted a fairly diverse crowd. There are lots of hipsters and tattooed eccentrics, dispersed among a sea of nondescript t-shirt wearers inside the old, European-style auditorium that is playing host to the spectacle; nobody I would categorize as stereotypically hip-hop. The opening band are called Nomadic Massive, and they're a local multilingual funk/hip-hop act, headed by a sassy black chick with a great voice. They're giving off a bit of a Fugees vibe and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Moving swiftly onward: with the opening act having done their thing, and the crowd being sufficiently hyped, the roadies take over the stage in order to prepare the venue for tonight's main attraction. I see turntables and a MacBook in the foreground, along with a bass guitar, drums, keyboard as well as a string and brass section in the background, which we're later told are manned (and womanned) by one of the local symphony orchestras. Knobs are twisted, cables are adjusted, and it's time for the house lights to go down. The Deltron 3030 logo is projected onto the back wall of the stage and the crowd momentarily goes wild. This is the first real sign we've seen of the hip-hop legends we're about to witness.

Deltron 3030

As the clamor dies down, we hear the plop-plop of a tennis ball being hit back and forth through the speakers, complete with running match commentary. Every time someone scores a point, we hear the deafening applause of the tennis audience, and each time, around a third of the crowd joins in, misguided in the notion that the concert is about to start. They're fucking with us. But soon enough, a shadowy figure enters from stage right and takes his place behind the decks. DJ Kid Koala is in the building, and he starts ripping it up like it's the DMC championships, juggling a bunch of Deltron-themed vocal samples while Dan the Automator quietly sidles in from backstage.

All of a sudden – uh oh – Dan's laptop isn't outputting any sound! Murphy's Law strikes again. This is every musician's and every stage technician's worst nightmare, and I'm sure the three stage-hands who jump in to help are having mini heart attacks at this point. I smile and think back to the numerous occasions on which this has happened to me. God, am I glad I'm not up there right now. Meanwhile, Kid Koala is still hanging on to his intro scratch schtick on the other side of the stage. He's had to grab a third vinyl now because he's run out of new things to do with the first two, but is still bravely soldiering on while Dan and his aides are frantically trying to figure out why the hell this shit ain't workin'.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Just as I'm starting to think they're going to have to delay the start of the concert, or maybe call an ambulance as one of the techs dies of embarrassment, lo and behold, the problem is fixed, and the concert can run its merry course…

Dan himself is dressed, rather comically, as a concert conductor, complete with baton and tailcoat, and – when he's not fiddling around with his laptop and Tenori-on – he's directing the string and brass sections. (Although they seem to be doing just fine the other 50% of the time when he has his back turned to them.) It seems more of a stage gimmick than a necessary part of the performance, but I'm not going to pass judgment. The visuals being projected on the back wall of the stage are a slideshow of illustrations exhibiting a mixture of psychedelic fantasy creatures and somewhat Jules Vernian sci-fi contraptions, which fits well with the general atmosphere of the gig.

Above: Dan the Conductor. Below: Visuals

The concert feels like a song-for-song recital of their original album. Barring a small handful of exceptions, the performance includes no new material – but since the songs are meant to be listened to in sequence anyway, I guess this is hardly surprising. The string section is barely audible, and honestly I probably wouldn't have noticed a difference if they weren't there. The brass section was a little more entertaining, if only because the trombone girl seemed to be having the time of her life. I'm surprised she managed to accurately hit the notes with all the head-bobbing she was doing. Then again, maybe she didn't – the brass section wasn't a whole lot louder than the strings.

The brass section.

I think you see the pattern that's starting to emerge here: while fun, a lot of the extra elements in the performance seemed superfluous and gimmicky. I feel like having just the three main guys on stage with their equipment would not have diminished the music in any way, and may even have given the performance a more intimate feel. Still, the whole night was a bucket of fun, helped in no part by the godawful American beer they serve at the bar. (For $2 extra, you can get the "deluxe" option, which means a Heineken instead of a Bud Light, but I'm on a budget.)

Above: DJ Kid Koala Below: Audience member taking a photo.

As the concert draws to a close, the band plays an unreleased (yay!) track off their new album, rumored to be in the works since around 2006. But it's definitely, positively coming out later this year. Maybe. The band leaves, but everyone's having too much fun to see them go just yet, and of course everyone on and in front of the stage knows the band's not going anywhere without at least another song. The crowd yells for an encore, and it's an encore they get.

Above: A job well done. Below: Happy Dan.

The time it takes for Del and his homeboys to return to the stage is about equivalent to the lifespan of a hastily smoked joint. This will become relevant later on. The song they play is – wait for it – Clint Eastwood. For the uninitiated, Deltron 3030 is said to be the album that inspired Damon Albarn to create Gorillaz as a side-project to Blur, and the unmistakable voice in the rap chorus of Clint Eastwood is none other than that of Del himself. Back when that album came out, I had it on repeat for several weeks, so I'm quite excited about this surprise performance. Sadly, it doesn't quite live up to my expectations: there's no Damon Albarn singing the main part, but I don't particularly have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is that Del now seems quite wasted, and is forgetting about half of his lyrics. Been a while since you performed this song, huh, Del? But even this I would be willing to overlook, were it not for the fact that they don't include the awesomely groovy piano chords in the second rap verse. In my opinion, this is the best part of the song. There's a keyboard player right there on stage for Christ's sake, and it doesn't exactly take an Oscar Peterson to get the part right. C'mon, guys, are you telling me you were so caught off guard by having to perform an encore – at a concert you were the main act for – that you didn't find the time to practice it first? I'm not buying it.

I leave the concert hall feeling happy yet vaguely unsatisfied, and make my way to a McGill house party where people are drinking themselves senseless. Of course, my phone decides that this is a great moment to stop working, and I instead find myself lost in Montreal's flamboyantly gay quarter, trying to extract directions from an old Chinese grocery store lady who speaks broken French and no English. But that's a story for a different day.

Overall, the concert was a great time for everyone involved, even taking into account all the minor boo-boos that were perpetrated over the course of the performance. Kid Koala was certainly in top form, and Del was at least decent. I can't accurately assess the performances of Dan and the rest, since it was mostly hard to tell who was doing what, and in some cases whether they were doing anything at all. If you "buy" the album and listen to it (which, by the way, I would heartily recommend to all readers), you will probably have an equivalent or greater musical experience. But of course you will have missed out on the excitement of seeing one of the seminal music making groups of the early 2000's in their element.

The Night We Saw Sinjin Hawke

A story re-told using the help of photographs and the blurry minds of four individuals.

It started off as what was a pretty ordinary day for the four of us. Nursing our hangovers from what we at the time thought would be the highlight of the weekend: a full blown line-up that included acts such as Lapalux, Ikonika and Dauwd. Who the fuck would have thought what sort of shit would be going down on the Saturday.

As I sat on my couch, slowly regaining my strength and a clear frame of mind I recalled sensing the distant vibration of a phone as it clattered against the brown mahogany kitchen table. A NOTIFICATION. Multiple notifications in fact, as they seem to have accumulated while I dazed in and out of naps throughout the course of the afternoon. The balls were thrown in my court while I was asleep. The plan of attack for the night was as follows:

1. A house party was happening somewhere in town. The plan was simple: infiltrate the party. Crash, mingle, hydrate and move on.
2. Rendezvous with the family at a Viennese coffee house for a more intimate vibe. I was grabbing a flight the next day so it would be good to catch-up.

Pretty standard so far, until Sofie threw the curve-ball:

3. SinjinHawke at Sexy Deutsch III. WHAT THE, WHO THE, I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW. While I am no longer a full Viennese resident, my scanners are pretty good on the parties anywhere I go. I’ll throw in the excuse of bad promo for the event overall. But who cares at this point, Sinjin Hawke is playing Vienna and we are all going. I remember my reply being somewhere along the lines of ‘he is such a boss’ or something like that (ALL CAPS of course). Pretty fucking ecstatic at the moment. Cherry on top of the cherry if you know what I mean. One more time, #YOLO till the sun comes up, take no prisoners kind of mentality.

At this point the night started in different ways for each one of us, but I can tell you how mine started. Father comes up to me before dinner. Stern look on his face; serious talk coming up in 3, 2, 1: "I’ve got this bottle of Clicquot lying around that we need to open and finish over dinner as it has been racking up dust and it may have gone off." Now if that wasn’t a good omen, I wouldn’t know better if you slapped me across the face with one. Please refer to Exhibit A. The photo sucks, so you know I'm not lying to you:

Exhibit (A):

What happened next was good re-con from the scouts I had on my payroll. House party mentioned prior to this was pretty much D.O.A. No point in dropping by, they had moved-on. Casualties were spared. Objective two wasn’t looking too good either. We missed our table reservation at the café as we were all running late.

I ended up meeting fshstk in an Italian café. Nothing against Italian cafés but when you are in Vienna you do not go to an Italian café. End of. We’ll ignore that for now. The dude was running late because he was giving an interview to a Master’s student who was writing her thesis on "third-culture kids." (This has nothing to do with the Third Reich, you dumb-ass.) Pretty intellectual stuff. I weighed in on a couple of socio-economic factors to stir up the conversation but I digress.

JUST LVZE joined me as the interview was coming to a close. Just in time. From this point onward I will calculate time by drink intake. This is not to brag about drinking abilities or such, but that’s just the best way for me to calculate my voyage through space and time when partying, as I am a responsible adult who needs to know when and where to moderate.(editor's note: lol) Keeping a vague tally helps. So Sofie finally joined one beer down. It turns out she actually went to the real café we were supposed to meet at. Oops. It was after the revelation that Sofie was carrying concealed weaponry in her handbag (a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Black Label) that we decided to find a place to destroy the evidence after finishing our Long Island Ice Teas.

We gave the boy Stewiwonda one last try. Rendered unfit for battle from the night before along with his natural tendencies to encapsulate himself in his studio to make beats, we obviously had to go out and pull him into action. We got into a few difficulties in getting a cab there but eventually reached our destination after having to recite a few laws to various greedy cab drivers who seem to have forgotten their duties to take us on as passengers. Unfortunately, this story will not include Stewiwonda, although his pad served us suitably to go H.A.M. on that bottle of Black Label. Has anybody ever had Black Label? It was my first time, and man does that go down smooth. With the bottle down, we faced the dark, cold Vienna night, next up: Sinjin Hawke.

We finally got to the place. I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty packed, despite not hearing about the event until hours before it started. The crowd: various species of dickhead in all its magnificent forms. Sinjin Hawke was playing when we got there. And man, that little dude went hard. He was playing the finest selection of tracks that I had on my iPod. See audio example A, B and C below:

This is where the memory is blurry. I cannot fully vouch that exactly these tracks were played but you get the point, it helps to set the scene. Not to belittle Vienna, but I was surprised and very pleased to see that this type of music was getting validation. Who would have thought, a little community of trap-a-holics and music enthusiasts existed in this city. Nevertheless, I got asked for ID a few times. Found that pretty amusing as this always makes me think of the Boiler Room chatroom. Please refer to exhibit B, C and D for the man Sinjin Hawke below:

Exhibit (B):

Exhibit (C):

Exhibit (D):

During the time we were walking with Johnnie earlier that night, I somehow managed to obtain a German flag and took this to the party with me. The moment I pulled this out, it was evident that there were a few people from the smaller lesser-known country Bordering Austria. This entertained the crowd for a good minute until it made itself to the ‘stage’. The guys backstage proceeded to hang our flag up. We just totally Iwo-Jima’d the party. Please refer to exhibit E and F below:

Exhibit (E):

Exhibit (F):

The Serbs eventually announced their presence (The other DJ’s that night were from Serbia) by adding their mark on our flag. Always the friendly type, I caught up with one of the girls who was on tour with the DJ’s whom I exchanged stories of the legendary Happy Novi Sad stage at the EXIT festival with. She thought I designed the t-shirt I was wearing at the time, so I told her where she would be able to cop the ones I actually designed. RIGHT HERE. (See how I just casually inserted that plug right there?)

Now to get a few things off my conscience. To the bar: you need a better system in capturing sales. I must have UNINTENTIONALLY gotten away with about three free beers as the bar tender didn’t bother in adding up how many she had poured. ALSO: You undercharged me for long drinks multiple times. I managed to pay one round at the actual intended price from the 3, maybe 4 rounds I bought that night. These unfortunate errors on your behalf probably made the night better. So thank you, next round is on me.

After Sinjin Hawke’s set, we managed to meet him outside the club. A real cool dude. He told us how he just recently moved to Barcelona to set up base. We actually thought that would be the end of it as he was done so we grabbed our stuff ready to bounce.

Sinjin Hawke eventually went back down to tear it up one more time. THANK YOU. WHO DOES THAT?! We have this little inside-thing between us around the Juicy J track ‘Who Da Neighbors,’ and the short-story is that, that shit got dropped that night. Any DJ that plays that gets an instant plus in our books. 100 society points for you, Sinjin Hawke. See audio example D below:

What followed was banger after banger and vodka shots with Sinjin Hawke whilst playing. Once again, WHO DOES THAT?! Another 100 society points to Sinjin Hawke. At the end of it all, we gave him a well deserved KONY ISLAND tee we designed. Hopefully it fit. If you need a different size get in touch with us man.

The verdict: One hell of a way to say goodbye to Vienna. Until next time.

Bonus Material:

Be sure to check out:

• SexyDeutsch (For a good party next time you are in Vienna)
• SinjinHawke’s EP (For your dose of top tunes)
• Some other pictures I took

A Brief History of Dubstep

The story begins in 2005. The scene is London (and before very long, Bristol). UK Garage, at least as known in tracks like Sweet like Chocolate by Shanks and Bigfoot and Do You Really Like It by DJ Pied Piper, is very much gone from the clubs...

...they're playing deeper, darker, bassier shit now.

Crime's on the rise in crummy boroughs like Hackney and Croydon, and it turns out living there are a few young 20-somethings that own computers and some budget pro-grade audio equipment. They live in depressing grey tower blocks, hold down shit jobs and are bessies with misfits and drug dealers. Thankfully, policing of weed in London is some of the laxest it's ever been - marijuana's just been made class C - so everybody in the council flats is getting fucking blazed and chilling out to dub music.¹ Out of all this come the young grandfathers of the scene:

• Skream
• Benga
• Digital Mystikz
• N-Type
• Cotti
• Hatcha
• Scuba
• Ramadanman
• Kromestar

And a plethora of others. Their music has two critical characteristics:

• Loud, deep sub-basslines
• A half-time snare

Though their approaches vary - Skream opts for tetchy, evolving percussion arrangements and a spacey sound, Scuba (as his name suggests) puts you underwater with nautically-themed bass textures and aquatic fx - they all have these two features in common.² They're also defining characteristics of dub music - so now you know where the genre got its name. Ketamine also got very popular around this time - I knew a lot of people who liked nothing better than to consume varying amounts of k and forget their worries in front a very big subwoofer in the dark somewhere.³

Every pirate station DJ worth his salt is playing the heck out of Skream's Midnight Request Line, along with loads of other cuts, on the B-sides of breaks records or being released by Tempa Records, the first home of dubstep. On the internet, a few radio stations dedicated to underground London dance music like sub.fm kick off, becoming very popular and, in my opinion, one of the main reasons we're not only just hearing about the genre in 2012. Myspace music pages and demo tracks sent by AIM are the main communications channels of the scene. If you were particularly big, you might have a few uploads on YouTube, but it was far from the common thing it is today (remember learning about adding "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL? Good times).

2006, now - Skream has released his seminal album, Skream!; Soul Jazz has released the imaginatively-named Box of Dub (1 and 2). Dubstep is, somehow, starting to leave the squat raves and seedy house parties in Wandsworth, and starting to appear in adverts, the BBC is starting to run stories on it, all that shit. Colour me slightly surprised - I thought it was going to be Arctic Monkeys and The Arcade Fire on the radio until the fucking extinction of the human race.

Jumping ahead to 2008, it's about the time that tracks like Murda Sound by Bar9 start coming out - that subtle bass texture that was getting used more and more between 2006-2008 in tracks like Iron Dread by Kromestar are getting exaggerated and blown up until they become growling, buzzing freakshows, helped along by the arrival of jump-up drum and bass in the clubs, like the seminal Machete by DJ Hazard.

The crown jewel of this little turn is Caspa's remix of Where's My Money, which, as I recall, was dropped several times at any respectable night for a period of a few months (to my slight chagrin - come on, guys, it's not that great, jeez). This kind of stuff was tentatively called 'bassweight' for a little while, a label which never stuck. I liked 'wubdub', myself.

Not long after, Nero came along and shook things up, really bringing the gnarly, extremely rich bass texture to the fore. A good example of this is one of their later tracks before they lost relevance, Innocence. I note that this was remixed by Skrillex, and is probably round about where he started getting noticed - he followed that up neatly by getting Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites remixed by Noisia, which is when I first heard of him.

Various stuff happens between then and now - I went to university, for one, meaning I couldn't put as much time as I would have liked into music, and consequently I can't comment very much on the scene at the time - but I do know that artists like Cookie Monsta and especially Borgore (with the hit which launched him, Nympho) started appearing and being more popular than the old hands like Skream, and any and every goddamn track you could think of was getting remixed into dubstep.

The big, buzzy bass sound that everyone knows and loves(!) about dubstep today had become, apparently, the entire point of the music. Producer friends in my classes were purposefully doing dubstep remixes of stuff just for pageviews, hoping to go viral. It was round about then I knew that dubstep was going to diverge - pointless crap for the mouthbreathers, with the old guard still doing their thing and innovating like since the beginning. Benga and the like are still playing sellout shows around the world, so there's hope yet. In terms of good new directions in dub these days, there's the future dub thing that's been going on since Hyperdub started up in 2004 that got all mixed up with the Planet Mu crowd, and extremely pleasing vibes have been coming from their direction - plenty of stuff of that nature is making itself known on Boomkat.

An important note: there's a hell of a lot I've left out here. I've kind of made out that the only influences on dubstep were dub and garage, and mentioned nothing about the absolutely huge selection of influences on the genre - a byproduct of half growing up in London and half on the internet. Apart from what I've mentioned, it got mixed up with bassline, glitch, jungle, house, techno, electro, grime, nu-rave, and a million other things ranging from serialist breakcore to ethnic African music. All of them were appropriate styles.

I guess I'll round out with some of my favourites from down the ages:

• Skream - Dutch Flowerz
  My favourite from Skream!.
• King Soly - Tamil Dub
  "Marijuana is harmless..."
• Kromestar - Rainy Dayz
  If you want to hear the dub roots of dubstep, just put on any Kromestar track.
• The Others - Africa
  Just about as tasty as wub ever got.
• Excision - Do it Now
  Pleasantly deep, and then grotty.
• Ed Solo & Skool of Thought - Sludge
  Fun! Off a slightly rebellious "more profits for artists" album that never received as much attention as it ought to have, in my opinion.

---

1. It's that kind of time when you can head to a drum and bass night and, at around 2am, rely on catching that overpowering tang of dry ice and ganja smoke in the top of your nose. You poor fellas in the states.
2. A note on Burial here. He started in 2006 with a beautiful self-titled debut album, full of street lights flickering in alleyways and pregnant teens hiding their faces at McDonalds. Despite the allegations to the contrary, I can't identify any way, shape or form in which it constitutes dubstep. Just about the closest he ever got was his track Archangel, which had a regular bassline and a 2-step rhythm. However, if you tried playing that in a club, now or ever, people would just get confused - it hasn't got anything even remotely resembling impact. That track, like many of his, are what I'd call ambient breakbeat.
3. Maybe I'm making out the connection between early dubstep and depressant drug consumption to be too strong. If nothing else, they do at least go well together. I'm not sure it was ever formally shown there was a link between an area's ecstasy and cocaine saturation and drum and bass/breakcore nights, but that makes sense, too.

---

This excellent article comes to us from Will Berg (aka DJ Niceberg on SoundCloud).
Make sure to check out some of his tunes!