- Mon, 2010-12-06 10:17
In 2007 Beardyman became the first beatboxer in history to retain the UK Beatbox Champion title for two years running. Since then, his impressive microphone mastery has amassed a copious following and now...the bearded master is ready to release his debut artist album, I Done A Album, on March 14th 2011 on Sunday Best Recordings.
As if this wasn't enough, Beardyman has wrestled control over I Like Music this week to bring you his Guest Edit. He's written about a heap of musical delights, featured a trio of videos and penned an impressive feature titled Are We Living In The Future?
Beardyman Playlist
Introduced by Beardyman Dubstep is dead...it was killed by a giant octopus last Thursday. Now hear this...glitchy glitchy lovely thick juicy meaty crunchy chewy banging phat enormous tiny tight huge mental deep in your face bigness in a de plaaaace!!! What you lookin at?! I'll nut ya!!! COME ON THEN!!!!
1. Beardyman - You Need Some Samples?
2. Foreign Beggars Featuring Noisia - Shake It
3. Apparat - Bolz
4. Jon Hopkins - Vessel
5. Trentemøller - The Forest
6. Fenin Featuring Gorbi - None Of Them
7. Beardyman - Where Does Your Mind Go? (JFB Remix)
8. Tim Exile - I Don't Know Where I'm Going
9. Kritical Audio - Krupp
10. Foreign Beggars Featuring Jehst, Kyza & Dr Syntax - Keep It Comin'
11. Tipper - Ken Oath
12. Roots Manuva - Dub Styles (Micachu's M.A.T.H.E.S. Remix)
13. Jon Hopkins - Colour Eye
14. Sharon Phillips - Want 2 / Need 2 (Trentemøller Remix)
15. Tipper - Tiny Face
16. Horace Andy And Ashley Beedle - Rasta Don't
17. Phon.o - Stop Da Shot Blocker
18. Si Begg And Slabovia 8-Bit Orchestra - I Ain't Afraid of No Guts (Kanji Kinetic Remix)
19. Noisia - Stigma
20. The Qemists - Your Revolution (Reso Remix)
Track
Artist: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs Track: Blood Pressure ft. Riko Released: August 2010 Label: Greco-Roman
As Riko astutely observes in the vocal version of this track, "old-skool like sale of the century", "dutty like youporn". Never a truer word. I have an irrevocable fixation with those precious few years in the early nineties when the forces of 4-to-the-floor and 2-step breaks were one giant, beautiful, messy, euphoric, mixed mezze platter of underground music. Contained in this primordial soup of rave culture was the DNA of virtually all future dance music forms. Old-skool Hardcore, as it quickly became known, incorporated Ragga, reggae, Hip Hop, Gangsta-rap, Techno, Trance, Hardcore, Nu-soul, Balearic and anything else you could dance to. Skream's got a soft-spot for the 1992 ravin' ting, Herve's partial, Cardopusher, Datsick, Subfocus and many others are returning to the genesis of it all. IDM-nutter Shitmat recently made an album of tunes dedicated to that era. Many realise that if you want to push things forward you can do worse than to go back to the source, and also, that the Amen break will sound good till the sun goes out. I therefore applaud T-E-E-D for getting proper ravey and right dirty on their debut E.P. All In Two Sixty Dancehalls.
Blood Pressure is the stand-out, pseudo junglist tear-out piece of DJ-arsenal, but every track on there is massively dope, really clean and current yet still pretty flithy. There's something for everyone on there. Well, maybe not for my nan...but she doesn't go on Beatport much. Check out Garden for a sweet unrequited-love-song set to bubblin', fidgety, stripped-back blissful / wistful electro type vibes, or Dipper for techy-housey, old skool trance-ish minimal-electro type stuff. Bangin from start to finish. 11 out of 10. Oh, and they wear dinosaur suits when they play live...which makes the music sound even better because its coming from dinosaurs.
Album
Artist: Jon Hopkins Album: Insides Released: 4th May 2009 Label: Double Six
A word of warning to anyone who makes music for a living. Think very carefully before listening to this album. It is a work of staggeringly beautiful, highly emotive glitched-out, atmospheric genius and may well cause you to re-think your career. For the average music professional, the standard reaction to a listening of this album is to be left in a momentary state of torpor, in which all you can do is vacantly shake your head desperately trying to force out words, while only expletives come out. Then comes the bottomless pit of existential panic. "How's that even possbile?" you will ask...then, immediately "who the fuck is this guy?" Whereupon you immediately download his entire back catalogue, only to find that he's always been a bit of a genius, but that only with this album has he made something so heart-wrenchingly delicate and evocative, yet disgusting and brutal, that he has rendered it pointless for anyone else on the planet to ever make any music again. A week later you will most likely have made your peace with this and will now be at the wide-eyed-ranting stage. You will find yourself telling bus drivers, mothers in supermarkets and street drinkers outside poundstretcher about what Jon Hopkins can do for them. Ultimately you will conclude that music is something best left to Jon Hopkins and will give up trying to make it yourself, resigning to just wait for his next album. YOU WERE WARNED!!!
I can't describe what I see in my head when listening to this album... He creates landscapes, spaces, contorting morphing beat monsters which implode and destroy themselves whilst constantly being in a state of becoming. Listen to what he does to me? He makes me talk like a complete wanker. Masterful production, beautiful composition and not a single lyric or vocal sample in site. Perfect for any mood. Deep, immersive worlds made of real strings, pianos and expertly tweaked, morphing, mutant electronic beats. For those who do not make music for a living, the hazards are far less severe. Minor disorientation, dizziness and mild euphoria as you try to figure out how something this intense and fulfilling can be bought legally. The only people who wouldn't have a profound and exhilarating experience listening to this album are those who are either deaf or dead. Buy this album or die unsatisfied. It's that simple...I have spoken.
Video (s)
These two videos compliment each other so well it would have been a shame to present one without the other. Obviously they have a Beard theme. I am after all the indefatigable Beardyman innit. So this week, there's 3 video's. But think of them as starter, main course and desert. The first video is The Beard Master - a micro-epic in a vaguely Pythonesque vein, about a fearless warrior fighting for truth with a supernatural flying beard. Genius. Well. . . not genius, Einstein was a genius, Bach was a genius. This video is actually fuckin stupid but I love it. And so will you...or double your money back!
The Beard Master:
The next video is the Vagina song. I could explain what it is. . .but I don't actually know. . and therein, to my mind, lies the real beauty of this exquisite piece of cultural effluvium. On this incredible portal we call the internet, we are able to view the works of those at the thinnest end of the weird-wedge. Fringe art by those who would never other wise get an audience. We could call it the R. Kelly effect. People with seemingly no self-awareness or self-censorship whatsoever, make stuff. Perhaps they mean it to be funny, perhaps they don't, but notwithstanding, it creates a baffling kaleidoscope of experiences, at once shocking, challenging and hilarious. There. Now I've waffled enough bollocks to try and justify this mental piece of shit as art, now watch an endearingly rubbish female wannabe MC sing a song about bearded men tickling her "juicy vagina". Her words not mine.
Vagina Song:
Still...if you're after a straight-up badbwoy music video from dubstep, drum n bass and UK Hip Hop kings...check dis...tron lightbike boxes...rawness...possibly the best music video that could have possibly been made for this song...love this...sick.
DUTTY!!!!!!!! UUUUEEGHRHHRH!!!
Foreign Beggars & Noisia - No Holds Barred - Excision rmx Official Video:
Are we living in the future? by Beardyman
Back in the heady days of the summer just gone, I was sitting in my kitchen in my dressing gown, perched at my laptop...no, not wanking...but working on a tune. Lost, deep in the music-production vortex. Suddenly, my phone rang. My concentration broken, I exhaled some rude words and pressed the insistent green button. It was my manager, babbling something about a magazine interview. Determined not to disturb my precious tune's journey from the depths of my subconscious into this cruel reality, I muttered something along the lines of "sure, sounds good, wicked, safe, laters..." and hung up, sinking effortlessly back into the cosy, amniotic bliss of Logic Pro.
Imagine my surprise therefore, when several weeks later, sitting in the exact same position in my dressing gown at my kitchen table and in much the same state of concentration, an effervescent, moustachioed journo turned up at my door, trailing behind him a seemingly endless torrent of youths who proceeded to parade past me shaking my hand, quickly saturating my meagre little flat. It soon became clear that I had foolishly agreed to let around 20 young people into my personal space to interrogate me about what the hell I was doing with my life. With no-where near enough space to seat all these inquisitive young humans I suggested that we sat in my garden, which we did, whereupon the interrogation began and didn't let up for a good hour. I say good. . . it was tortuous.
As unusual and unpleasant as this was though, it was not the sheer quantity of youthful interrogators which alarmed me about this surreal garden invasion...No. My abiding memory of that day is the confused and amused reaction amongst these kids as I blithely mentioned the widely accepted fact that we are living in the future...well...we are...aren't we? Everyone I know agrees unequivocally, it's not even a question. Apart from the shocking lack of flying cars, we're there! It's obvious to those of us who came of age in the 90's or in fact any time before. Smart phones, a vestigial record industry, looming environmental apocalypse, Chinese pre-eminence, a Black President, a state of permanent war. This shit's fucked up!! We're closer to Huxleys hyper-technological doped-out dystopia than ever before. But as the words left my lips I was met with confused silence, some nervous giggles and searching stares. Then came baffled and slightly embarrassed meer-cat head-whips between the puzzled youths as these young humans tried to process what this strange old man was rambling on about.
That very instant, death shimmered into view behind me...I couldn't see him...but I could feel his presence. A shudder the length of my life rattled through me and settled at my feet, which suddenly felt heavier than the fickle ground on which they were resting. Was I really dying I wondered? My Dad appeared before me in an apparition, "I told you that laptop I showed you in 1990 was incredible! 2 mega bytes of RAM! Amazing!! " My soul sank into my toes, desperately looking for a way out of my decrepit body. I fell to the floor and cried for the lost years..."WHY HAVE YOU DESERTED ME GOD!?" I screamed hopelessly, running into a church and collapsing before the alter. Tears streaming down my pathetic face, I lay prostrate, beating the ground, slowly becoming aware of a blinding white light. I stopped blubbing and peered keenly up into the gilded chimera. The idols of the deluded, doting lovingly in childlike pictograms fashioned in fragile, beautiful, stained-glass. I waited for a disembodied voice to whisper to me that there was life after death and that i had nothing to worry about....
"DARREN!!" a moustached journo barked...I looked round...I was still in my garden and 20 or so kids were waiting for me to finish the sentence. So I did, "...so er...yeah. Media distribution has changed entirely." My words curdled in my arid mouth as my Grandpa now appeared before me, "There were no cars on the road when I was a kid," he jibed, at peace with his seniority. "My first job I earned six shillings a week, delivering coal to the rich folk..."
I affixed my gaze on a distant chaffinch to avoid the curmudgeonly stare of the apparition and carried on with my increasingly desperate sentence..."These days we live in a meritocracy of information, if something's good it gets seen, simple, the old, one-way channels of media-distribution are obsolete..." And suddenly, with the utterance of these magic words, I felt strong again, satisfied that I was sitting amongst such venerable progressives as Jobs, Fry and Eno, impatient with things as they are and always ready to utilise technology to improve the human condition. Yes. This body I inhabit may be hurtling towards death but I am a soul of good conscience who welcomes sweeping changes to defunct systems. Revision is necessary for progress, regardless of how entrenched our outdated societal structures are. Yet, though I felt buoyed by having expressed my own brand of assertive liberalist futurism, I still couldn't shake the fact that I remember "Funhouse" like it was yesterday, despite the fact that it really, really, REALLY wasn't. Bloody kids...I was lucky they didn't knife me or something...
Gaahh!!!...Ayawaska...melt me into the eternal river...I see you mother earth...I see the future. Dubstep shall be the new Glamrock, Skream shall be the new Glitter, Benga the new Noddy Holder, Katie B the new Lulu. Subfocus will be the new Duran Duran, Michael McIntyre will be the new Bernard Manning and I...well...no man should know his own future...but Jean-Michelle-Jarre would be nice...onwards...FUCK YOU DEATH!!
Interview #322: Beardyman Read the full interview here
Interview #287: Beardyman Read the full interview here
