DjOriented

More than anything, Miami’s annual Winter Music Conference is about hot new club music. You can bet that every DJ and record label owner in Miami this week is touting a bag full of promos, having spent most of the winter planning their release schedules and summer sets around WMC.

Whilst the conference’s relevance as an industry b2b event has waned in recent years, as the focus has shifted towards a week of non stop partying, plenty of records are still dancefloor-tested and broken during WMC, giving Miami party goers the opportunity to hear dance hits before they go on to dominate the summer’s festivals and club events.

Crystal ball in hand, we called up a number of DJs, both big names and up and comers, to find out which records they think will be big during this year’s WMC. Then we also analysed Beatport’s DJ chart data – specifically the top charted tracks of March 2010 – to seek out the tracks that are being charted and played the most by DJs currently.

We hope that the following list of soon-to-be-released cuts, top charted tracks, and DJ favourites gives some indication of how Miami’s WMC will sound in 2010.

Read more on Beatportal

‘Sophisticated’ isn’t something that is generally bestowed upon a 19-year-old’s shoulders, but the sounds of Wolf+Lamb’s golden boy Nicolas Jaar might well be described as such.

With roots deep in disco, funk, soul, and Chilean minimal (the country where he spent most of his childhood) Nicolas Jaar’s remarkably mature dancefloor sounds defy his lack of years.

How many teenaged producers could create beautiful French-flavoured disco waltzes such as ‘Marquises’, on his own label Clown & Sunset, or soft piano-led deep house grooves a la ‘Love Teacher’, on Circus Company?

Jaar isn’t even old enough to have a beer in a bar in Rhode Island, where he currently studies.

To find out more about his sound and his unique tastes, we asked Nicolas Jaar to guide us through his current crop of DJ favourites.

Read more on Beatportal

Cadenza’s new release ‘SeventyNine Remixes’ is a techno fans wet dream – Chilean masters Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano have contributed remixes of ‘Tahktok’, taken from Mirko Loco’s recent album. Detroit legend Carl Craig has penned a remix of ‘Love Harmonic’.

Ricardo’s 20 minute minimal take of ‘Tahktok’ is suitably epic, with scatty layers of machine funk and broken beats layered beneath the vocals of children singing.

Luciano’s remix is more uptempo, reworking the vocal into a hypnotic chant that’s driven forward by aggressive bleeps and minimal drums, that notably lack any of the Cadenza bosses trademark bongo loops.

Carl Craig’s Soundscape Remix of ‘Love Harmonic’ sees the techno master return to organic drum patterns, that contrast beautifully with the trance-like sounds of the main riff. Anticipation in a can.

Read more on Beatportal

Saw Recordings’ boss Satoshi Tomiie has contributed to house music in many ways, but without a doubt, it was his groundbreaking releases such as ‘Love In Traffic’, ‘Tears’, and ‘Solar Wind’ that made him an American house music hero.

It is Satoshi’s commitment and consistency to the darker side of house music, that has earned him a ever-growing army of fans. His recent

mix of Mes ‘Back To Basics’ is a prime example of the kind of deep electronic house he has made and played since the 1990s.

But he isn’t stuck in the past either, as this group of future leaning Weekend Weapons prove.

Read more on Beatportal

An ice hockey player named Dmitry Fyodorov mysteriously disappeared after an accident on the ice 30 years ago. He was a successful attacker for CSKA Moscow.

Out of all the things that could have followed for Gaspadin Fyodorov (if indeed he is still alive, God bless), he would surely never have imagined that two punk kids in Sweden would use his name to release wonky minimal techno many decades later.

Watch this video on Beatportal

Everyone loves a good back-to-back DJ session. When we saw that Britain’s top deep house dogs, Ralph Lawson and Jimpster, were scheduled to play together at Shindig in Newcastle this weekend during the club’s 18th year of parties, we couldn’t resist offering them a place for an intimate tête-à-tête.

Jamie Odell aka Jimpster’s rise to the top of the deep house tree over the last few years has been nothing short of brilliant. His label Freerange Records has become a home-from-home for deep house protagonists such as Manuel Tur, Milton Jackson, Andre Lodemann, and Tony Lionni, and is now one of clubland’s most respected imprints.

The label has just clocked release No.130, an amazing feat considering its output has been, for the most part, highly consistent.

Ralph Lawson is one of England’s most respected deep house players with a successful live band and high profile record label to boot.

Lawson’s 2020 Vision Recordings recently celebrated its 15th anniversary, and looking at the label’s recent ’15 Years…’ compilation, it’s amazing how many deep house classics the label has put out.

From David Duriez’ raw saxophone hit ‘Get On Deep’, to Soldiers Of Twilight’s 2001 bomb ‘Believe’, and Bobby Peru’s rough electro house roller ‘My Bleeps’, 2020 Vision has flown the flag for deep house magnificently over the years.

We decided the get Jimpster and Ralph Lawson to interview each other about music, DJing, and productions, ahead of their back-to-back gig at Shindig on Saturday.

Inevitably though, with it being two blokes alone in a pub, their conversation drifted off towards football and birds from oop North.

Read more on Beatportal

Weed heads will have much to puff over when watching Dub Pistols’ new video (above) for the group’s new single ‘Ganja’, taken from their latest album ‘Rum & Coke’.

The London posse’s ode to da reefa delivers an expected but enjoyable hit of laid-back, feel-good dub, hip hop, and reggae, lyrically justified by UK rhyme king Rodney P.

The fat video joint centres around a group of baked smokers, who have a little bit too much fun with the magic dragon wherein they start to hallucinate. Now that’s a situation that Barry Ashworth and friends would never find themselves in!

Watch this video on Beatportal

Electronic music’s longevity, and some would say most powerful attribute, is from its ability to transmute.

This comes partly from technological determinism – each new invention, software update, and processor refinement brings yet more possibilities – and on the determination of its artists to not sound like guy standing next to them.

If electronic music is anything, it is a culture of remixers obsessed with the future.

One of house music’s most famous mutations came from Chicago’s DJ Pierre, who in 1987 under the name Phuture together with Marshall Jefferson, Spanky, and Herb Jackson, released the very first acid house track.

“We didn’t know what we were doing when we made ‘Acid Tracks’, we were just playing around with the 303 and thought ‘wonder what it would sound like if we put a beat to that acid wiggle’,” Pierre said about the track back in December 2008 (read our in-depth interview with Pierre about ‘Acid Tracks’ here).

As part of our Black History Month celebrations, we sat down with Pierre to find out more about those early acid house days, and decided to take a look back at some of the sub genre’s most memorable tracks.

Read more on Beatportal

Few have wrung as much raw emotion and radiant euphoria out of techno as Brazil’s Gui Boratto.

The shy yet affable producer from São Paulo catapulted to the top of the melodic techno tree in 2007 with his debut album ‘Chromophobia’, a position he continues to hold like a bright shining star.

Boratto’s contemporaries – particularly Cologne’s Robert Babicz and Stockholm’s Axel Willner aka The Field – have at times, come close to stealing his limelight, but the Brazilian’s 2009 sophomore album ‘Take My Breath Away’ did just enough to cement his status as a master of the micro genre that revolves around bliss.

Whilst the album’s mass appeal came from its safest moments (‘No Turning Back’ was no doubt Boratto’s attempt to recreate his most popular single ‘Beautiful Life’), it was the record’s more experimental numbers like ‘Godet’ and ‘Besides’ that remained long after the album’s sunset.

However, it is perhaps Renaissance’s invitation to Gui Boratto to compile and mix the latest edition of their prestigious ‘The Mix Collection’ album which confirms Boratto’s place among the greats of dance music.

Not only is it Gui Boratto’s first mix album, but quite unusually, it is the first time the British label has given the reins of the compilation to a man known principally for his productions, not his DJing.

Boratto’s mix might well be the best edition to the series since Sasha & Digweed’s magnum opus in 1994.

But what is Gui Boratto really like? We posed a series of quickfire personal questions to him, in the hopes of finding out more about the producer behind the melodies.

Read more on Beatportal

No one really knows exactly how drum & bass started or where it came from, but stand next to a soundsystem and you’ll feel its Jamaican dub reggae roots.

Bristol’s Krust aka Keith Thompson, whose parents moved to England from Jamaica, was there right at the beginning before drum & bass’ predecessor term ‘jungle’ had even been coined.

As part of our Black History Month celebrations, we asked Krust to talk about his earliest memories of the blistering breakbeat sound, from its hip hop and squat roots, to its biggest records, and one of its most important record labels, Full Cycle Recordings, which Krust set up in 1993 alongside Roni Size, DJ Suv, and DJ Die.

Read more on Beatportal