Jewbei starts the first of our in house mixes dropping every friday.

A collection of Japanese rare grooves and funk from the late 70s and early 80s, oh how we love Jewbei.

DOWNLOAD the mix here.

Jewbei also happens to be a super cool producer too. For more of his music check his soundcloud.

Tracklist
Tatsuro Yamashita – Dancer
Minako Yoshida – Asa Ha Kun Ni
Kimiko Kasai – Love Celebration
Kiyoshi Sugimoto – Yeh! Boogie
Yasuko Agawa – LA Night
Masayoshi Takanaka – Disco B
Hiroshi Sato – Say Goodbye
Toshiki Kadomatsu – Step Into The Light
Tatsuro Yamashita – Love Talkin’
Masayoshi Takanaka – Chill Me Out
Hitomi Tohyama – Love Is The Competition
Chocolate Lips – Milk & Honey

We stumbled across this gem of an artist from Oakland, CA and we quickly fell in love.

Soulful and gripping, her gentle but weathered voice creates a calm we’re not quite use to. Her music has a wide mix of acoustic, folk, soul and hip hop influences with hints of rare groove and funk, making for this exceptional debut EP — From Her Eyes.

Download here. ‘Lose Yourself’ reminds us of Floetry.

More info at her website and her facebook page.

Old friend and talented producer, The Last Skeptik blesses Beatnik with this exclusive mix and download.

Blending all the best bits of hip hop, funk and soul we tend to represent his selection choice couldn’t be more supreme. Add to that the mix is taken all exclusively from vinyl, not a Serato in sight, it makes the goodness extra special.

With his dedication to old and new, we have come to love Skeptik over the years for the music he represents. And now with two pending albums dropping in 2012 we’re expecting big things from him this year. We’ve also been told there’s a super special announcement concerning those projects too, but mums the word for now.

The Last Skeptik Facebook

Tracklist:
Spencer Davies Trio – I’m A Man
Kashmere Stage Band – Super Strut (Kay Dee mix)
David Joseph – Let’s Live It Up
Heatwave – The Groove Line
Vicki Anderson – Answer To Mother Popcorn
Quantic – Something That’s Real
Blue Mink – Stay with Me
The Free Design / Madlib – Where Did You go
El Michels Affair – CREAM
Visioneers – The World Is Yours
J Rawls – A Tribute to The Beatnuts
Erykah Badu – Honey
Madlib – Dream Scene 4
Dudley Perkins – Flowers
Little Brother – Dream Merchant
Dennis Bovell – Jazterpiece
Blooblo – Loose Baby Love

The Doctors Orders & Main Squeeze in association with www.WhoSampled.com present – SAMPLED: SICKER THAN YOU AVERAGE SAMPLE SALE

Midday – 6pm Saturday 3rd & Sunday 4th December 2011
Bar Music Hall, 134 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AR
£2 all day or £5 with entry to the club included!

Prepare to get fresh this Saturday as SAMPLED combines a sample sale with a record fair and a club night featuring your favorite street wear brands at a fraction of their usual price, some of the UK’s best record dealers, sets of original Soul, Jazz, Funk & Disco breaks from some of the finest DJs in the UK, a nail bar and a stall selling art!

It doesn’t matter what kind of party—house, garden, tea, or political. Katalyst’s Deep Impressions will be hanging about, effortlessly mixing with the finger food (crisps), liquor and smoke of countless late nights and sludgy mornings.

Even in the cold light of that unforgiving early sun, as you’re waiting, trembling for the solace of a minicab to rescue you; as you avoid the soul-sapping glances of the Sunday worshipper and smug-sneakered jogger, you can find strength in whistling a choice phrase from, say, ‘Ready to Drop’ or the Anita Harris-aping ‘Clapping Song’.

Deep Impressions will be your party friend and your protector. Were it up to me, I’d market it just as such.

A bit of brief background: Sydney-based Ashley Anderson (aka Katalyst) has been producing since the mid-90s, and had his first release as a solo artist on the internationally respected, Dope on Plastic-compilation. 2002 saw the release of his debut album Manipulating Agent on INVADA Records, and in 2007 he released the long-awaited follow up album What’s Happening on BBE.

Katalyst went on to form a group with Steve Spacek called Space Invadas, and has also just finished a project is with Geoff Barrow from Portishead.

This long player is complete fun-ness, simple, and without pretence. I can think of no situation it wouldn’t fit—except perhaps a funeral, pet or human; unless specifically requested, it might be a touch upbeat.

As whole there is a great mixture of styles, with hip hop, reggae, soul, electronic whathaveyous, jazz, and funk all getting a look in, but the mix rarely seems laboured or forced. The Australian producer also appears to have a great knack for picking his guests, with Kween G, Stephanie Mckay, Steve Spacek and Booty Brown, among others, all getting to stick their tuppence worth in to very satisfying ends.

You should be checking for the summer-sound, club-friendly ‘Ready to Drop’ with Kween G, or ‘Black Dragon’, which features Mr Clean, a slippery tune with a showy brass segment, totally ace, or the reggaefied ‘Day into Night’ with Stephanie McKay. Party on.

words Barry Smyth

——-

BBE website
Katalyst website

A State Of Mind are playing in London this Friday at the Queen Of Hoxton, as part of their Crown Yard European tour.

Super fun live, they always bring their shenanigans of funk infused hip hop to delight the masses.

For more details hit the facebook group!

Funk hip hop proprietors ASM (A State of Mind) just dropped the video to their new single ‘Don’t Look Back’. It features our old friend Rob Waite as the main character and we love it!

Taken from the new album CROWN YARD
For more info hit their bandcamp.

A few years back, Los Angeles’ beat cosmonaut, Flying Lotus, decided to start a label that would channel his endless energies into a solidified movement. Lotus’ releases, particularly the pioneering Cosmogramma, are musical clashes of civilations. The artists on his label tend to follow suit, but mostly to a lesser degree. Lorn’s electronic beats do that FlyLo spazz from time to time, and Teebs refines the label founder’s more psychedelic moments—but nothing gets quite as schizophrenic as FlyLo’s work.

Then came Thundercat. His moniker might precipitate music steeped in recycled visual culture, but that isn’t really the case. The Golden Age of Apocalypse jitters between styles of music but maintains a sort of jazz and r&b foundation. But it jitters in a good way—probably thanks to Lotus’ involvement in the production of this record. He may just be the very reason for the medley, too.

No matter how unexpected, the shifts tend to fit—whether it’s acoustic soul or robotic ambience we’re talking about. The galactic funk streaks of ‘Daylight’ lean towards Dam-Funk, ‘Walkin” towards the better parts of Phonte and Nicolay as Foreign Exchange. Thundercat’s weapon of choice, the bass guitar, is prevalent throughout. Not least in that magnificent switch from trippy swing to a roaring break at the end of ‘It Really Doesn’t Matter to You’ before ‘Jamboree’, an instrumental funk number, kicks in.

Those twenty seconds epitomize the idea; Brainfeeder is about big thoughts—condensed into deliberate concepts, executed with full commitment. The Golden Age of Apocalypse is no different.

words Sven Hultberg Carlsson

Thundercat: It Really Doesn't Matter to You

Thundercat: Jamboree

——————

Buy The Golden Age of Apocalypse

Zed Bias just released a new album, Make a Change, under the alias Maddslinky. But any conversation with a such a seasoned producer has to touch in the old days in some way.

“At that time I could never have imagined that I could make anything commercial,” says Zed Bias about the classic UK Garage anthem ‘Neighbourhood’.

We’re supposed to be talking about Make A Change, his last album under the alias Maddslinky, and his new albumBiasonic Hotsauce, but while I’ve got him on the phone for a short while, I couldn’t resist asking him about the massive club banger. Those who remember will recall that ‘Neighbourhood’ was accompanied by an Andy Hylton-video showing scenes from the Brixton community. It turns out that ‘Neighbourhood’ only took three hours to make in total, and was the result of a favour for a friend.

“In 1998, a friend of mine called Glenn Woods used to DJ at a local club in Milton Keynes. Every week either one of the Dreem Teem would come up, or it would be Norris ‘Da Boss’ or Mike ‘Ruff Cut’ Lloyd, and he wanted a dubplate that would basically smash it before they came on, because he would always play the last record before the guest came on. When Glenn started playing it, it was going off so hard that a lot of the guests would want to go home with the dubplate, and as soon as we knew that, there was thought that this record could be released.”

Since then the sound of UK Garage has lived on through various sub-genres. I wanted to know why Bias thinks that the dance music landscape has become what it is, a melting pot of electronic sounds.

“People’s tastes have got a lot more broad. 10 years ago, if it were a garage club it would be garage played all night. You’d hear the same songs being played a lot if they were big tunes and that would be it really, but these days, I mean in the same set you can hear UK funky, UK Garage, dubstep, all sorts of stuff. I know I play various genres across the board now,” he says, and this is reflected by the variety of production on Make A Change and Biasonic Hotsauce.

Both brilliant albums boast stumping appearances from Mr Scruff, Skream, Mighty Moe, Ghost1, Toddla T, Falty DL and Paul Randolph. Then there’s the chilled out moments offered up with Omar, Tawiah, Nile Sugar and Jenna G. “Probably my favourite track on the album would be ‘Further Away’ with Tawiah” he says of Make A Change. “Just because of the way it turned out; the vocal performance was amazing. There’s something a little bit magical with that, especially with the backing track which I co-wrote with a lady from Croatia called Jana and it just turned out really nice.”

Biasonic Hotsauce takes off where Make A Change left off. A truly exciting release, it shows a producer full of confidence waving a big sign that we old boys do it best. Switching between the too releases you get a comforting embrace that while there are new artists today pushing musical boundaries by harking back to the old its clear the pioneers of the original baseline sounds still have the skill to stand strong.

One of the most creative productions can be found on ‘Lost On Tenori Street’, where every sound is made solely using the Tenori-On instrument. I tell him that I spotted fans on forums commenting on how clever the title was and he replies “aww, that’s nice. I wasn’t trying to be clever I was lost on it. I got given a Tenori-On by a client of mine, and basically it was really confusing one day. I thought I’d make a track from scratch using it and it took me all day.”

As we continue to talk, he lets me know that producing came to him at a late stage, only making his first record at 23, after realising that he could produce properly a year earlier. “I personally feel that I learn something every single session, you know, no matter how boring it is. Whether it’s a little shortcut on the keyboard, or a kick drum sound could be better EQ’d a certain way; there’s always something that we’re learning.”

To upcoming producers he has this advice: “Keep sticking at it. If you think you’re good enough, chances are you will be good enough, you just need to put the hard work in.”

And he’s continuing to stick at it with the new Zed Bias album, where Skream makes an appearance. He’s also writing a new album with Rodney P & Fallacy. Before I let him go, I can’t leave without asking about the new name.

“That’s another thing, where I get my words from. Sometimes I make words up. I think I saw the word ‘slinky’, like the American toy, a spring that falls down. I’d seen that somewhere and I thought of making a word using that word.”

——-

Zed Bias website
Tru Thoughts website

The trio’s first album as Ovall, We Don’t Care Who Knows That from last year, treaded between abstract experimentation and more commerical jazz and soul songs. And that’s basically what we find on Heart Fever, in a slightly more extreme format.

‘Feverish Imagination’ is rampantly commerical, fusing a characteristic hip-hop thump—after all, this is Mabanua, Japan’s own Soulquarian, on the drums—with chart melodies and, somewhere amongst it all, a Prince-like funkiness. But alongside that track, and ‘Beautiful Love’, which has loungy tendencies (and I mean it in a bad way), there is that trademark abstract output: ‘Water Dream’ is sampled-instrumentation mastery, making use of muffled handclaps and floating sea organs. And ‘Moon Beams’, complete with a reprise and all, is a mellow groove dictated by a jazz piano and signature rhodes.

It’s like Shingo Suzuki, the band leader, knew that with one serious radio flirt on there, Ovall could get away with turning in the instrumental, jam-oriented music that makes up the rest of the EP. And they succeeded—but they’re not getting those screechy guitar solos past me.

words Sven Carlsson

———

Ovall’s MySpace, Twitter