I have to admit, I haven’t kept up with lat­est trends and new music releases for the last six months as inten­sively as always. I real­ized this when i was check­ing up Boomkat’s charts 2008.  Instead, I might be able to give you in-depth analy­sis of videogam­ing year 2008 but lets skip that for now. As a bystander, I might have a bet­ter over­all pic­ture of new music.

Every­thing inte­grated
It seems that sev­eral gen­res or styles came closer together and some of them have already merged. Fine exam­ples would be the lat­est hyper­dub releases: every release is try­ing hard to stretch the bound­aries of dub­step draw­ing ele­ments from dub techno, house, rave, wonky, chip­tune and skweee. Rustie has done remix for Zomby, Samiyam released his EP on hyper­dub and Kode9 him­self is fool­ing with bro­ken beat and house. No, there is noth­ing wrong with this but not every­thing they release are advance­ment. Zomby’s 2x12 EP speaks for itself. Yes, it’s exper­i­men­tal but why does it have to sound like stone cold SHIT. It’s very much like Anti­con were. They even had ‘Music for the Advance­ment of Hip Hop’ –com­pi­la­tion back in –99. I’m expect­ing to see ‘Music for the Advance­ment of Dub­step’ –com­pi­la­tion in –09.

These tides
The lat­est hot­ness regard­ing to dub­step is the union with dub techno (didn’t it hap­pen last year too? And the year before). This isn’t exactly new thing to appear since plastikman’s musik “fore­shad­owed” this 13 years ago. Dub­step is expand­ing for sure but espe­cially last year and it’s indeed a good thing. Half-step + wob­ble bass –tracks by some wannabe pro­duc­ers became quickly bor­ing (fact that some peo­ple (e.g. peo­ple that are new to genre)  seem to for­got: dub­step is sup­posed to be lis­tened from VINYL so LOUD that it gets PHYSICAL, so in that light those half-step-wobbles might sound decent). Note that a dub­step record that is released today, has prob­a­bly been played out all at the par­ties over Lon­don for the last 12 months at least. Besides that, we did see increas­ingly amount of influ­ences drawn from other gen­res as men­tioned before. In turn, pro­duc­ers like Mike Slott, Hud­son Mohawke, Rustie, Fly­ing Lotus, were/are no doubt influ­enced by the sound of dub­step. Wouldn’t it have been nice if Kanye West would recruited Rustie & Joker to pro­duce his album proper. Joker = Cham­pion of syn­th­pro­gram­ming 2008?

You are so HOT for me
It’s dif­fi­cult to be savvy when you are hot. Not every Fly­ing Lotus release is nec­es­sar­ily good. Surely the guy thinks so him­self but give it a year or two and some might think (includ­ing FlyLo him­self) “how did that thing got released”. Some qual­ity man­age­ment would be needed here! Same kind of thing has hap­pened to Lind­strom dur­ing the past few years. Hav­ing Lind­strom rmx in it doesn’t prove a thing about the record’s qual­ity! Lately Fly Lo seems to be fig­ured out how to do Burial-style beats with his remix of Kanye West’s Love Lock­down, which is one of the few high­lights from Fly Lo for the lat­ter part of 2008. You can do bet­ter than this! I trust that his DJ Kicks-deal will be good. I’m not blam­ing the guy but the labels who are way too eager to release any of his productions.

Fly­ing Lotus — Essen­tial Mix — BBC Radio 1 29/11

Boo­gie
I finally truly real­ized the essence of boo­gie! Thank you very much Dam Funk! And thank you Beat Elec­tric and keep post­ing great tracks.

The songs that defined 2008:

Joker & Rustie — Play Doe
Zomby — Where Were U in ’92?
Pinch — 136 Trek

More about Mike Slott (with exclu­sive beat)

There’s lot of new elec­tronic music terms/genres/themes over the past few years. Dub­step is quite self-evident and jus­ti­fied, Skweee is ulti­mately just dis­tin­guish­able style of elec­tro, Bal­ti­more is solely par­ty­mu­sic and “blog house” just futile term (imo New House would be bet­ter). This sum­mer we have yet another theme for music that have existed pretty long time.

Mar­tin Clark calls it “Wonky”, Sasha Frere-Jones “lazer bass”, Mega­soid calls the music “psy­che­delic robo crunk remix action” , Ghis­lain Poirier uses the phrase “bas­tard bass”, edIT offered the phrase “dig­i­tal crunk shit.” and the list goes on. This music has been going on since EL-P  and Def Jux (which strangely no one men­tions when talk­ing about this new gen­er­a­tion of futur­is­tic hip hop shit), Dabrye and Prefuse 73.

I’ve been refer­ring this music just “off-beat” hip hop or lately “Elec­tronic Beats” (which refers closely to Eliot Lipp’s blog of the same name). All I know that I’ve liked it all the time never mind the term. If it’s good. So this is loosely the theme for this months Kyny­Nasty party. Off-beats, Skweee, New House and yes, some Chip­tunes too. The Return of the Boom Bap? Perhaps.

More about “Wonky”:
Mar­tin Clark’s Pitch­fork arti­cle
“Lazer-guided” arti­cle at The New Yorker
“Wonk Fonk”, free mix for down­load
Hud­son Mohawke — Hudson’s Heeters, beat tape (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

Off-topic:
What is Wonky techno? Phew, you could spend hours and hours research­ing all the gen­res and styles.