WILT_2023-08

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 19 Feb 2023 to 25 Feb 2023.

1. Gated Area – Pool Boy, Cyril Hahn
2. HEX – Lorn
3. escapism – Elkka
4. A Street I Know – Skrillex, Eli Keszler
5. XENA – Skrillex, Nai Barghouti
6. Narcissus – Xyla
7. Fire Man – DJ Orange Julius
8. Grateful – Kush Jones
9. Baaaaaa (Taken from Bass + Funk & Soul) – DJ Earl
10. Divine – Jana Rush
11. Forgotten – FLP
12. Afrika Jungle Them – DSS
13. Off We Go – Juki P2
14. untitled – xxtarlit⚸
15. home – Two Shell
16. Brown Paper Bag – Roni Size, Reprazent
17. Been So Long – EQ Why

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2023-08

Notes

The week started innocuously enough. Gated Area by Pool Boy and Cyril Hahn, HEXby Lorn, and escapism by Elkka are all gorgeously unique electronic pieces that are incredibly easy to lose yourself into. I thought that the rest of the week would further explore this direction, but it meandered when I saw that Skrillex had released a new album.

I’m not a big Skrillex fan, particularly when dubstep became way too popular and something of a meme. However, I did enjoy some of the songs that he produced on Utada Hikaru’s Badモード (2022), and was slightly intrigued that he had evolved from dubstep as well. 

A Street I Know and XENA are wonderful explorations into extreme beats and vocal melodies, and as far as producers go, there are also some daring samples going on, as well as how these get spliced together. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but overall I think the productions are rather impressive, and I hope that the collaborators had a good experience collaborating.

Listening to the new album, Quest For Fire (2022), did unearth something in me that I’d been wanting to learn more of, and that would be the Footwork movement that came out of Chicago in the 1990s and remained underground for the longest time. Perhaps still. I remember attending a few such nights back in 2013–2015, and man I always loved the energy on the dance floor, or the selections that the DJ was making, and the visuals were always a ride. I couldn’t dance the the way to dance, but that never really stopped the music just being amazing in my opinion. 

It’s a very frenetic style, and I love how the BPM is of a particular tempo (160). It sounds haphazard and all over the place, but there’s always a little flourish or nuance that just keeps things interesting. Based on the selection of what I’ve been hearing also, a lot of the samples also reference deep cuts from rare groove, which just makes the genre feel more alive despite it being electronic music. I mean, a human being decided to re-synthesize one form of music into another. It’s quite an extreme approach to music innovation. Maybe that’s why the sounds always sound extremely fresh to me.

I’m glad I had this exercise as it feels like I know a little bit more about something I didn’t know too much of before.