DjOriented

Toronto’s rising indie dance stars Azari & III uploaded their first ever DJ chart to Beatport this week.

Over the past 18 months, the pair have become one of the most in-demand remixers on the Canadian dance circuit thanks to a deluge of brilliant dancefloor-friendly nu disco and twisted house releases.

In particular, their single ‘Hungry For The Power’ on I Am Cliche, dominated indie floors last year, and continues to be a mainstay for alternative house-inclined jockeys.

Read more on Beatportal

Toronto’s rising indie dance stars Azari & III uploaded their first ever DJ chart to Beatport this week.

Over the past 18 months, the pair have become one of the most in-demand remixers on the Canadian dance circuit thanks to a deluge of brilliant dancefloor-friendly nu disco and twisted house releases.

In particular, their single ‘Hungry For The Power’ on I Am Cliche, dominated indie floors last year, and continues to be a mainstay for alternative house-inclined jockeys.

Read more on Beatportal

He might have given us one of house music’s most memorable singalong moments, but that hasn’t stopped Kings Of Tomorrow’s Sandy Rivera from exploring darker and more hypnotic house and techno instrumentals in recent years.

The American-born, Poland-based producer has just dropped his first artist album in five years, and there isn’t a single ‘Finally’ moment in sight.

Fans of Rivera’s vocal house classics may be surprised by the change in direction, however the Blackwiz Records boss insists his darker side has always been there, as we found out whilst chatting to him to about his new album, ‘The Blackwiz Farm’.

Read more on Beatportal

Over the past few years, Dutch producer and DJ Laidback Luke has gone from being The Netherlands’ brightest house talent, to one of the biggest names in global dance music.

His three nominations in this year’s Beatport Music Awards are the icing on the cake for the shy yet affable producer who is currently enjoying the biggest year of his career thus far.

Despite his soaring profile in the electro house and progressive house scenes, Laidback Luke continues to sprinkle magic dust on a new generation of house producers that includes Avicii, Bart B More, SonicC, and Afrojack.

Via his online forum, Luke has mentored and tutored hundreds of hungry aspiring producers over the years, and now with the launch of a new Super U & Me compilation series, he is giving young guns the kind of professional support that is essential for nurturing young talent.

We caught up with the Dutch remixer, house music sensation, and boss of Mixmash Records, to chat about future talent, his new compilation, and “trance 2.0″.

Read more on Beatportal

Sheffield’s iron, steel, and coal industries declined 30 years before car production in Detroit, but when it comes to electronic music, they have much more synergy.

Perhaps it is the cities’ industrialism itself, the essence of which Adam Smith defined as the specialisation of labour, that sparked its inhabitants’ curiosity in repetitive machine-driven music.

Read more on Beatportal

Modern jazz and trip hop are serious subjects for Gilles Peterson’s BBC Radio 1 listeners, so when they named Bonobo’s ‘Days To Come’ Best Album in 2006, Simon Green wisely decided to take his time to produce his next record.

‘Black Sands’ is Bonobo’s fourth studio album, and with it, the British producer and DJ has captured the delicate optimism of spring, as might be interpreted from the video for the album’s first single ‘Eyesdown’ (above).

Watch this video on Beatportal

As each software update, new application, and memory increase makes the job of the dance music producer ever easier, there are a few who choose to ignore such ‘progress’.

Gavin Russom is one of them. Whilst most producers cheered at the advent of audio manipulation tools like Ableton Live, and digital recorders and MIDI controllers, Russom was too busy doing a vintage synth autopsy to notice.

‘Hang on’ he would shouted, as the studio masses threw their 808s and 909s on to the synthesizer graveyard heap, otherwise known as eBay. ‘We haven’t even begun to explore the limitations of these machines yet!’

Read more on Beatportal

As each software update, new application, and memory increase makes the job of the dance music producer ever easier, there are a few who choose to ignore such ‘progress’.

Gavin Russom is one of them. Whilst most producers cheered at the advent of audio manipulation tools like Ableton Live, and digital recorders and MIDI controllers, Russom was too busy doing a vintage synth autopsy to notice.

‘Hang on’ he would have shouted, as the studio masses threw their 808s and 909s on to the synthesizer graveyard heap, otherwise known as eBay. ‘We haven’t even begun to explore the limitations of these machines yet!’

Read more on Beatportal

Germany had Kraftwerk, and France had Jean Michel Jarre, the enigmatic electronic music composer who experimented with synthesizers, machines, and ambient sounds all the way back in the late ’60s and early 1970s.

As a former pupil of musique concrète’s founding father Pierre Schaeffer, and as an understudy at Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Cologne studio, Jarre’s bold musical works lit up France in the late 1970s – quite literally – with spectacular outdoor laser, light, and firework shows to enormous crowds (which helped popularise the use of lasers at electronic music events).

One such show in 1979, put Jarre in front of over one million people in Paris’ Place de la Concorde.

Jarre’s breakthrough came in 1976 with the release of his solo album ‘Oxygène’, that to date has sold over 12 million copies, making it the best selling French album of all time.

Read on, for a quick guide through some of Jean Michel Jarre’s most important albums.

Read more on Beatportal

Are remixable videos the future for electronic music? Designer Henrik Leichsenring demonstrates why interactive videos could become big in the DJ world, with this, the world’s first ever mixable YouTube video.

Remarkably Leichsenring, along with art director Sofia Gillström, have created a music video experiment on YouTube that allows users to ‘remix’ a video as it plays in real-time, using a jump-in timeline-fixed sample bank that’s embedded into the actual video.

You can play with it for yourself above (wait for the video to fully load).

Watch this video on Beatportal