Burial: Kindred EP

I bought the Street Halo EP on sight and was disappointed to say the least when I heard it. Part of the problem was that it was the first Burial release I bought on vinyl. I discovered Burial when I was making my first tentative steps into discovering dubstep. Having found a lot of stuff a bit cold and clinical, Burial’s pops, scratches and glitches, along with the warmth and other-worldliness of his sound was a godsend. I quickly snapped up all his back catalogue on emusic. However, I had no plans to put these tracks in a mix, just to listen to them (which despite seeming blindingly obvious, I have to remind myself on a daily basis that this is primarily what music is for).

Monthly Review: January 2012 [Podcasts & Mixes]

I got my hands on a lot of music over January, so I’m going to break my review section into chunks. Here we go with a review of the podcasts and mixes I got my grubby little mitts on.

Guest Post: Dave Bush, 3 Drummers

In order to keep the content fresh and have another opinion other than mine (i.e. a wrong one), I’ve let my little brother Dave give me the low down on three of his favourite drummers right now. This also means that I’m guaranteed to increase my blog traffic by 100% as now he will read this post as well as me – BONUS! You can follow him on twitter.com/mrdavebush.

Monthly Review: December 2011

December 2011 resulted in 4 Mixes and Podcasts, 4 albums, and 5 singles being added to my itunes. No sign of any partridges in pear trees though! Read on for the review.

30DC:D30: worst gig you’ve ever been too

I tend to enjoy most gigs. Live performance always has that element of danger what with the safety net of a second take being removed. Even the celebrity DJs have to remember to put their Mojito down and mime a mix over the pre-mixed CD their miming too. I may have filed away the bad gigs deep in the recesses of my mind as I had to really wrack my brains to think of a bad one, but think of one I did. Luckily the gig in question came at the end of a fantastic day I had spent playing pool, drinking beer and buying a massive parka that you could live in on the North Pole, all with my good mate Kev for company. It was also the only gig to date that I’ve been too with my little sister, and I had a bunch of good mates and drinking buddies from work with me. Sadly, although the fun didn’t stop and we enjoyed the over-priced Earl’s Court beer, Radiohead (for it was they) might as well have been playing in France and broadcast it on a plasma screen at the end of a corridor.

30DC: D29: best gig you’ve ever been too

I was 18 years old. I was studying Music at Southampton University. I was young and free and the beer was cheap. More importantly, I had discovered Drum n Bass at the beginning of the year and now had an insatiable hunger for it. All in all, it was a fortuitous time for the Creamfields festival to come along, and to be occurring in the same County that I was currently living in. My housemates Laura and Danielle (who was always up for a party and was my co-pilot on many late night raving missions) and me bought tickets. A few friends on the music course also got in on the action, and the network of mates, course-mates and mates-of-mates that had built up also bought in. A small army of us descended on Creamfields ready to party.

30DC: D28: tune that you love but nobody else gets

I’ve already discussed my embarrassing love for Aqua: Barbie Girl in great detail. Although the isolation of my current location (deep in the Northern Cape) has led to me playing a lot of Solitaire, which in turn has led to an unhealthy amount of shouting “for the love of God, please give me a queen”, I am still lucid enough to remember doing so. Although its a guilty pleasure, to write more about it would amount to writing movie reviews for porno’s so I will write about something else I like that a lot of my friends here in South Africa don’t get. More importantly, it gives me a chance to relive one of the few DJ slots I landed this year (I’d like to think I’m building up a mystique by not playing much, but to be honest, Lord Lucan has probably made more appearances).

30DC:D27: what music would you have played at someone you don’t like’s funeral

When I was a youngster I was a really into He-Man. I had as many of the toys that I could lay my grubby hands on. Between me and my brother we had He-Man, Man at Arms (complete with his single shin-pad, not sure what that was about), Skeletor and various other characters. My Mum even built me a paper-mache version of Snake Mountain using the Argos catalogue as a reference (I only realised what an amazing thing that was for a Mum to do when I was a lot older). At some point He-Man was expanded and Hordak and his cronies were added. My brother and I scored Hordak, Beast Man and Slime Pit as a result of my parents going to the States for a month when we were young, and leaving us behind (long story, nothing like Home Alone). Even back then I was a sucker for completing collections, so if we had Hordak et al, we needed his arch-enemy, She-Ra. Without thinking it through, I requested a She-Ra toy for Christmas. Only when I received it did I realise what a fatal error it was for a young boy to ask for a toy of a woman for Christmas. To cut a short story long, be careful what you wish for.

30DC:D26: what music would you have played at your funeral

A lot of people claim that they want their funeral to be a celebration of their lives. They don’t want people to dress in black, they want a party atmosphere, and people to walk away smiling. I, on the other hand, want beautiful women to sob uncontrollably, I want large mommas to do that wailing thing, and I want granite-tough men to be caught trying to wipe a tear away unseen. I want my neighbourhood to come to a standstill as my coffin is carried through, and if they want to top a secret agent like they do in the funeral scene in that James Bond film (I think its the Roger Moore one where they feed people to crocodiles, but I’m not sure), I’m all for it. Sadly, it will take far too much effort to achieve this, and I simply can’t be bothered to try and make people like me that much. I do have a secret weapon up my sleeve for the few that do turn-up though (probably just there for the food, greedy buggers).

30DC:D25: ring music

If you ask my mate Evert about fighting, he’ll tell you he won his last one by 25 metres. I hold a similar philosophy when it comes to physical confrontation. I don’t think I ever evolved from the days when putting your mate in a headlock constituted a battle won. As such, my ring music as a boxer would probably be a major symphony that lasted several hours, and I would insist on not entering the ring until the last note had sounded. This would give me plenty of time to board a plane to somewhere a suitable distance away from any risk of physical contact. If I was contracted by a boxer without the tendency to turn both (arse) cheeks at the first sign of trouble and said boxer required some ring music to fire him up and generally terrify anyone unfortunate enough to be waiting in the ring for him, then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend ‘Messiah’ by Konflict.