Beats + Pieces Vol. 64
Dazed, Audio Culture, Mazes, All The Usual Beats.
Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING / WHAT I’VE GOT COMING UP:
Four times a year, I write a recap of ten great and sometimes underappreciated music releases from the previous three months for Dazed & Confused: EPs, albums, mixtape-style records, you name it. I say all of that to say this: the latest edition of my column - featuring Private Joy’s Manchester soul music, De Schuurman’s cybernetic bubbling house and Total Blue’s oceanic ambient jazz - is live on the site now. Check it out here.
As the 1990s dawned, the influence of British and American fashion and music, particularly hip-hop, R&B, and house music, rang out across Aotearoa. Up and down the country, a wave of musicians, dancers, party kids, and promoters began to find ways to intertwine these fast-rising forces with our local cultural backdrop.
Within this milieu, a collection of emerging record labels of the era, like Southside Records and Deepgrooves Entertainment, and a few hipped ears at the major labels, began to release music from a generation of predominantly – but by no means exclusively – Māori and Pacific talents such as Houseparty, Ngaire, Semi MCs, Jules Issa, and Moana and The Moahunters.
In my latest for Audio Culture, I compiled a list of 10 local R&B, street soul and new jack swing classics and deep cuts that fired up imaginations and dancefloors in the 1990s and still have the power to do so decades later. It’s live on the site here. I also made a video version of this story on Instagram, which people seem to enjoy. Check it out here.
At 8 am NZT on Wednesday, the 9th of October, I’ll be live on the Christchurch student radio station RDU 98.5 FM, participating in their new Audio Archiving series. For this edition, we’ll be discussing my recent Audio Culture profile of the Māori musician, DJ, producer, Indigenous rights and social justice researcher Isaac Aesili. You’ll be able to tune in here.
MAZE UPDATE:
Over the last week, I finished building two new marble mazes, Deep Blue and King Crimson. It is amazing what you can do with some foamboard, coloured mirror board, craft glue and a craft knife. As above, so below.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
How Tricky's ‘Maxinquaye’ forged a new frontier for Black British music: Released in February 1995, Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ marked a paradoxical shift in British music canon. A paragon of the trip-hop movement, crafted at the genesis of British hip-hop's ascent, the onyx-tinged opus was unshackled by rational convention — it liquefied genre. Assembled by a small team of musicians, the album's murky, unfiltered shrills remain cutting edge almost 30 years on. Here, with the help of producer Mark Saunders and record co-pilot Martina Topley-Bird, Niall Smith revisits a pivotal UK record for DJ Mag. Read here.
How Midland's debut album brings his unique lens to queer history: The 13-track LP 'Fragments Of Us' is a musical journey of identity acknowledgement, cultural inheritance, and an exploratory impulse that bridges the past and present — including imagining Arthur Russell at a dubstep night. For Mixmag, Marke Bieschke. Read here.
The New Chaos of Asian Dance Scenes: In the past decade, underground electronic and experimental scenes in Asia forged new connections across borders. Is a global movement next? For Pitchfork, James Gui. Read here.
Change of Heart - A night on ecstasy inspires Prince to change creative directions: At the end of 1987, Prince had a sudden revelation and decided to pull his impending visceral release, The Black Album, immediately going to work on its replacement, an artful record about love and sex titled LOVESEXY, whose subsequent tour saw Prince at the height of his performance powers. For Waxpoetics, Dan Dodds. Read here.
The Art of DJing - DJ Storm: The First Lady of Drum & Bass met with Chal Ravens for Resident Advisor to unpack a life at the forefront of UK rave culture. Read here.
WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:
The Voice of Love is a collection of British sophisti-pop and jazz-funk from the 1980s - ten songs ranging from unreleased demos to scarcely pressed 12”s attempt to define the scope of the British underground scene during that era. Massive kudos to Michael Patricola and Smiling C boss Henry Jones for the deep digging and close listening they’ve done here.
How about an exuberant slice of 1970s disco-makossa from the Paris-based maestro Martin Socko Moukoko, aka Esa, as presented in original, instrumental, dubstamental, keys, and acapella mixes. I say all of that to say this: this is one for the DJs.
Outstanding vintage dub, US boogie and disco-inflected Brit-Funk from the little-known vocalist Steve Myers, aka Steve Jones and his producer Lindel Lewis. These mixes sound amazing now, and I bet they sounded just as good back in 1984. Here’s a quick comment from Lewis: “I used a Linn Drum for the drums and played all synth parts using a Roland 106. I’m a classically trained musician and also a sound engineer, I worked at Mark Angelo Recording Studios for 18 years and have produced a great many artists. Steve Jones's real name is Steve Myers, but I didn’t like the surname, so I changed it to Jones, which felt more soulful. The name The Fat Boys came about because of the big bellies of myself, the flute player Mike Appoh, my trainee engineer at the time. Ray Carlass played the sax solo, but they have sadly passed”.
As it goes, Los Angeles’s DIY OR DIE stalwarts, Not Not Fun Records are celebrating twenty extraordinary years in the game this year with a compilation of new material titled Alley Of The Sun. Lots to dig into here with; as NNF put it, “a double LP suite spans every shade of NNF’s Pacific palette: rainforest ceremony, skyway motorik, Tascam rapture, silhouette shoegaze, basement vapor, astral ascension, jazz shadows, 5th world tropics, lucid dream drone, desert quests, prophecy electronics, ritual wreckage.”
FIN.