From Kent Williams Sent Fri, Jul 30th 1999, 18:20
From Kent Williams Sent Fri, Jul 30th 1999, 18:20
On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, r. kidwell wrote: > > Muziq "Royal Astronomy" (Astralwerks ASW 6275-2) > > did anyone else get serious Fat Boy Slim > vibes from this one? I did. I can't hear ANYTHING in common with Fat Boy Slim. Fat Boy Slim is ALL sampled (or mostly, with the odd bassline played in). The Muziq is about 90% played/sequenced, by someone who can actually play. > i mean, what the fuck is with that "Knock > that shit off, that's some serious greedy fake > boooolsheeeittt" sample that repeats ad nauseum? That's Guru from Gang Starr. It's a tribute by way of quotation, and I like the way he mixes it into the sequence. Your mileage may vary. > my beef with this album is that the drum programming > doesn't seem to have evolved at all.. he's using the > exact same breaks. think and amen appear in like 2/3s > of the songs... and they're cut up a little, but not > dsp'd or anything, just raw. give me a break. I think that the drum programming is really quite nice, and I listen very closely to a lot of drum programming. The Motorbike track is one I'd love to have on vinyl to add to a drum and bass set. But it's all beside the point with Muziq. What makes his music is the way he actually writes songs, rather than just working loops. He has never been about extensive sound design -- Royal Astronomy features some of the same sounds that he used on Tango N Vectif -- the D50 vibes and pads stand out. If I have to complain about anything on this record is that he could have used better string samples, and lay off the distortion. And you can diss people for using Amen and Think but I regard the 'classic' breaks as being like the Mandelbrot set -- no matter how deep you dive in, there's always new stuff to do. I've spent hundreds of hours over the past several years on drum programming, and from a technical standpoint it is very difficult to really come up with something new, and still come up with rhythms that are accessible to listeners. There are certain local optima in terms of booty shaking that are hard to get away from without losing listeners. But for me, the best Muziq tracks work because they're, well, musical. If you can't appreciate what he's doing holistically, go buy some phoenicia or rich devine. Not that I don't love what they're doing, but their tracks by and large have no emotional handle for users to listen to. The Rich Devine tracks on the Ischemic compilation are all original sound designs, and fiendishly complex, original drum programming. But if you drop it into a set of any kind of music, you'll empty the dancefloor faster than a neutron bomb.