Booka Shade-Memento (album)

(Also Ronan, if you are still looking for that Mei Lwun UNO Mix, drop me a line)

x-post yes, and when listed as "Get Physical Music" this adds to the same, the idea of perky acid house as fitness music is quite irresistible.

i saw the get physical peeps play in amsterdam a few weeks back -- well, DJ T, anyway; i forget who else from the camp may or may not have been playing. and i must say it came off as a little samey -- too much of the same beat and texture, really. i think the GP releases work best when worked into a more diverse set -- they're like the eye of the storm, or the glassy portion of the lake surface right before the wind and current creates a line of ripples. but whatever, they're still killing it on record.

It's odd, the DJ T sets I have are quite good, one in particular, "live at XXL" is really really good, and quite varied.

I wish he was playing here on Christmas night!

Have you heard "Timeout", Get Physical 017? By DJ T? It samples "Plastic Doll" by Dharma!!

http://physical-music.com/label/releases.php

i can't find anything about the album, though!

Maybe later.

Oh man, this is bad BAD BAD news, I hope she changes her mind. Bpitch has been great about releasing stuff through legit digital channels, I would hate to see that stop.

Downloading music, advance releases, music piracy, and artist reactions

It's such amazing NIGHT MUSIC

That logic is ridiculous. The same thing has happened with every other Bpitch release as far as I know, and they're still being bought by people who buy such things.

(also, this record is fucking G-R-E-A-T.)

the ep is really good! LOVE "trespass06".

cannot wait to hear the album...i still rate and play every album GPM released last year.

so when you hear they are doing an album,its hard to suppress the "OMG 12 massive massive tunes!" but it never turns out like that, there always seems to be a lot of filler. i dont think a lot of these producers are so good at making non-dancefloor tunes, so the filler bits are often a bit weak.

artist albums im not that into but have heard:

oliver hacke
dominik eulberg
gabriel ananda
dj koze
dandy jack

artist albums i would like to get but have been made suspicious of the whole enterprise:

alex under
metope
booka shade new one
ada (think this will be gold tho, not too suspicious)
er... some others...i thought this was a really long list?!

i would prefer to see mini albums, or eps, about 6 tunes of pure fire, each one a dead cert. Achso provides the template for that. i normally expect a return of about one quarter tunes i like on an album, so 4 out of 12. i sued to be cool with that but im losing patience with the album format as a whole - this is not an efficient rate of return by any means.

so in conclusion, i want to hear this before i buy it. but ILX always does the trick of hyping me up about anything, in my mind this is already amazing.

problem with the template is that Achso is insanely expensive. :(

on the other hand, ohoh 'Night Falls', let me kiss thee. Such beauty.

It's true that artists make need to make money, and I really respect that. At the same time, there's only so much money in a bank account to buy records with. Not everyone gets free promo copies or hookups from friends with distros or stores. In my mind, it's important to support artists you like when they roll through town, and it's important to actually purchase albums. Although, I can't say that I've never downloaded the occassional track on Soulseek, I can say that I do my best to purchase every album that I can.

How does everyone else feel about this?

Also they're spectacular sound designers. And few other producers can make tracks which play with the listener so much and yet still be anthemic - so much of their recent work has these long drop-outs and breakdowns where there's no beat at all, where the track sounds on the verge of falling apart or dissolving into nothingness, only to suddenly slam home in triumphant fashion.

It's weird to see Get Physical's entire back catalogue in HMV now, on special offer. There was a time when I'd have killed for those records yet yesterday I pretty much bought the last few of the first 20 releases I wanted.

"Pong Pang" is esp. amazing on this front, a big big record that nonetheless lives up to anything that Ricardo Villalobos or Dominik Eulberg or Luciano or Trentemoller or James Holden or Gabriel Ananda might come up with when it comes to intricacy and unexpected beauty and general oddness.

it will be interesting to see if tim's great unifier theory is true. i think it's pretty fascinating to watch (er, listen to) how all of these producer's sounds evolve in tandem.

That was at least the impression I had of them when Geeta and me interviewed them last summer. I rarely spoke to any producer so much in peace with themselves. They just came back from Spain where they had played some beach rave and seemed so happy with it. They told us, that they've been doing music for ages now but that they never played live. And how much they enjoyed this direct playing-audience situation. Seeing all these people dancing.

And I don't think it's so much record collectors music. When I asked them about "Mandarine Girl" they told me that they did the track in order to try and recreat a certain situation. They were at the Omen (this big Sven Väth club in Frankfurt) sometime during the trance heyday in the midnineties, it was early in the morning, they were just coming down from whatever they had done, some trance track was playing and then out of a sudden a girl stood in front of them, offering them mandarines. And they looked at her and thought she was an angel.

That's just one track. And probably most of the other tracks don't have stories like this. But I think that most of their tracks work in a similar way. They have a certain connection to musical experiences in the past but in a very broad, atmospheric kind of sense.

I think I know what you're talking about here Tobias. "In White Rooms" (whose title makes me think of that cocaine club you took us to) is like this miniature tear-jerker trance version of "Mandarine Girl", only it's not tear-jerking because it's melancholy or morose, just supremely wistful (as per the end of "Night Falls") - like remembering an amazing person you met one night years ago who you'll probably never meet again, and wondering what they're doing now. Actually the best trance often hit me in the same way...

Strange that all this talk is buried under a thread title for the previous album? Oh well...

Yeah spot on. I was thinking about this when I read Simon Reynolds sorta dismissing all German dance music producers except Villalobos - for me it's more like this great glowing network of different producers all involved in this fascinating conversation

And Booka Shade are actually a very good and open example of this. I read an interview with them in DJ Mag I think (the magazine that gave them "label of the year") where the interviewer asked if they were concerned about being superceded by newer, fresher producers now that they'd reached the top of the ladder. And the Booka Shade guys were like, "no, we listen to all the new records coming out so we're not likely to suddenly miss the boat."

It was actually really refreshing to see someone admit that they're musical direction is deeply influenced by what's going on around them, rather than the usual "I'm just doing what interests me, and if that happens to coincide with what's fashionable then that's an added bonus" arrogance-posing-as-self-deprecation line.

I don't see Booka Shade's approach as overly careerist or cynical, or even if it is, it's redeemed by the fact that their openness to current developments results in this restless forward movement, and (in real terms) these beautiful, constantly surprising dance tracks.

(on a related note, the Dominik Eulberg/Gabriel Ananda combo effort on Traum is pretty awesome too)

x-post yes "Darko" is great too (that's the other track I've heard). At first I thought it was a bit cheeky of them to reuse the rattling "Manderine Girl" percussion, but on the third or fourth listen you start to notice that there's so much other stuff going on in the track that the self-referencing is quite deliberate, it's a real "building on a theme" effect that they're going for I think.

has anyone else noticed the "Planet Earth" (by Duran Duran) reference at about 2:30 into the track?

it's not 100%, but there is a STRONG resemblance to it. I FUCKING LOVE IT. that has always been one of the best melancholy melodies of all time.

Booka Shade is ridiculously good. There was even a Missy Eliot mashup that sounded good. I just hope the MANDY craze isn't eclipsing the full fucking glory of Booka Shade.

I can't get enough.

No matter how many sounds there are going on at any one time, this still contains some of the best uses of space I've ever heard in house music.

Odd to think that some people might like early Get Physical stuff but not this (jaymc?) and then vice versa as well (Matt DC?). I mean I know it's a different sound now mostly, but it just strikes me as an unending run of greatness.

I mean, the only really lacklustre stuff on Get Physical has been 3rd party tracks right? Practically everything Booka Shade have been personally involved in has been gold. And when you think of that volume of awesome stuff it makes them probably the most important producers of the last three years.

Yes! It's very UK dance before trance/prog kinda smoothed everything out. With all the melancholy synth chords early Orbital are probably another big reference... or even late Orbital - recent Booka Shade stuff bolsters my theory that Middle of Nowhere is secretly a key precursor to current German electrohouse - also demonstrated in different ways by Ada, Rex the Dog, Dominik Eulberg...

Bill, each of the artists I mentioned are a bit like Orbital in a v. specific way:

Rex the Dog - hyper-melodic synth arpeggios, show-off layering (think "Know Where To Run")

Ada - 64 million shade palette and texturally emotional sounds (think "Forever", "Style")

Dominik Eulberg - absurd kitchen-sink maximalism (think "Spare Parts Express")

I agree Tim. I think I'm gonna Audacity it and just loop the hot spots for like 15 minutes.

"Lost high" sounds like Sigur Ros to me. Which is OK, because I like Sigur Ros.

With Booka Shade though, any parallels strike me as melodic more than anything else. The Hartnolls could easily have come up with much of a track like Pong Pang but the execution would have been totally different. They wouldn't have left that rumbling bassline alone, there would have been several melodic lines weaving in between everything. Whereas the great thing about Booka Shade is how much differentiation they allow between the sounds, that they tickle one sound up against each others but with full knowledge of the space in between and how it can be used. It's like it was conceived with this big room function in mind without ever having to sound bombastic or self-consciously big.

yes, booka shade = live drumming, and this is actually a good thing, amazingly.

'in white rooms' needs to be twice as long, really it does. i love the acid bassline on 'darko'!

I know! But it works really it does. It's kinda mellow, and I don't tend to like things which other people describe as "mellow", but something about the combination is really compelling. Not sure if it's better than Trentemoller's "Beta Boy"/"Work It" live bootleg though.

now whenever I listen to the regular Body Language, in my head I hear "work me, work me, work me, do it right" ....

there are bits that sound like radiohead (not like radiohead, but radiohead 'sounds'). has anyone else noticed this? mostly interlude-y moments. is this something to do w/IDM (which I know nothing about)? i think i noticed one the songs on the 4th anniversary thing did it too.

Can anyone identify the dialog sample at the beginning of "Moonstruck," the last song on the album? It's been itching at the back of my head. Feels like it should be from some popular movie, or a Lynchian thing, but I'm drawing blanks.

Female voice: "Dad used to bring us here ... when we were kids."

Male voice: "I find it interesting that you keep showing up here."

Female voice: "Well this is the last time."

Hmmm it's not on the-breaks. Booka and Get Physical websites don't seem to have a forum. I guess I could email the label.

Was hoping someone would be up for the challenge, though. I'd post an upload of the song, but I guess that's a no-no here these days.

I'm enjoying the new one - better than The Sun and the Neon Light I think.

memento is still so good. rougher around the edges than their later stuff, but i like that.

i want to know if matt2 ever made his extendo-mix of white rooms.

Mourning the loss of an early production by former ILM poster Kornel Kovacs on this threat.

you talking about white knight matt dc

oh wait a completely different mashup of heartbeat/mandarine girl is mentioned in this thread omg

haha

why isnt mandarine girl on streaming ? weird

also holy shit at realizing the reason i knew the name 'kornel kovacs'