Wolf + Lamb

Every now and again a label comes along that has the ethos that you’ve been pining for. Wolf + Lamb are just that having released the lion’s share of my favorite tracks of the last couple of years. Their catalog goes from lo-fi minimal house through to inspired retro house-disco edits. A love of the sample, hand claps and analog bass pervades their releases. They’re digital only and can be checked on Beatport and Juno Download.

WOLF + LAMB DOWNLOADS

Love Light – Soul Clap
See Line – Le Loup
Billie Jean – Nicolas Jaar (Nico’s Rework)

Young Spectators

Okay so I know I’m always banging on about RA podcast this and RA podcast that, and also how great Guillaume and the Coutu Dumonts are but this week both teams have outdone themselves. On the latest RA podcast we’re given a dash through various shades of R&B, funk, hip hop, afrobeat and disco that have come to shape Guillaume and the Coutu Dumont’s own inimitable sense of the groove, and it’s pure bliss. This isn’t a trendy disco mix for dilettantes, nor it is a funk mix for unimaginative students who are scared of a regular kick drum, this is something else entirely. Grab it while you can off their site…

DOWNLOADS

RA.185 Guillaume and the Coutu Dumonts

Rick James – Love Interlude
Q-Tip – Life is Better
Linkwood Family – Piece of Mind
ORS – Body to Body Boogie
The Budos Band – Chicago Falcon
Sabu Martinez – Afro Temple
The Daktaris – Musicawi Silt
Zapp and Roger – More Bounce to the Ounce
Banbarra – Shack Up
Mauri Bailey – Soul Pop
The Budos Band – Eastbound
War – Galaxy
Al Green – You’ve Got the Love I Need
D’Angelo – Chicken Grease
Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons – Beggin’ (Pilooski Edit)

Betsy Dadd

Of all the many millions of gallery opening I’ve been to in Berlin there is one that sticks in my mind. Betsy Dadd, illustrator, animator and hair chopper, makes sublime hand made animations a selection of which can be found below.

The Morning Star is The Evening Star

I was enjoying this until I realized it sounded just like that shit that those guys play down Covent Garden. But come to think of it, I still like it. Plus it’s got a sort of Christmas flavor…

DOWNLOAD

Forbidden Colours – Ryuichi Sakamoto

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Both Martyn and Efdemin have been impressing me for yonks now, so when I realized the one had remixed the other I had to hit it. Be warned however, the Bitterwseet Mix has also got a bit of a Covent Garden tinge.

DOWNLOAD

Acid Bells (Martyn’s Dark Mix) – Efdemin

Acid Bells (Martyn’s Bittersweet Mix) – Efdemin

Acrobat

DOWNLOADS

Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence – Ryuichi Sakamoto

The Night Is For You and For Me – Danny Norbury

Prologue – I Can’t Make The Hills (from the Book of Longing) – Philip Glass & Leonard Cohen

Do Easy – William Burroughs

A short film by Gus Van Sant called “Do Easy” based on William Burroughs’ essay of the same title. Below that is a Detroitesque techno take on the reading by Minilogue, right click to download…

DOWNLOAD

Doiicie A – Minilogue

Stevie Wonder

Two good Stevie Wonder inspired club tracks below. One is a downtempo disco groove that I first heard on Joy Orbison’s disco mix I posted a few weeks back, the other is a Henrik Schwarz remix of a different Stevie track with a nice gristly retro house feel. Both are top and are making serious inroads on a rather brutal hangover I’m currently experiencing.

DOWNLOADS

I’m Feeling You – Omar feat Stevie Wonder (Henrik Schwarz Remix)

Night Flight – The Revenge

The Library of Babel

Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a famous short story called The Library of Babel. In it he conceives of an endless universe made up of small hexagonal rooms. On the shelves of these rooms are books, all the books put together contain every possible permutation of single characters (all the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks). Most of the books on these shelves then are complete nonsense, but some of these books contain true and accurate descriptions of the universe, including everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen.

Every “once in a while”, shall we say, is a book of wisdom. It’s a nice thought experiment if you’re that way inclined, lots of thinkers have drawn on it for their various purposes. Perhaps you too can use it for something. I’ve included an English translation of the story as an audio file below:

Jorge Luis Borges – The Library of Babel

World Music

World music used to be a dirty term used to describe music preferred by white people with dreadlocks and Giles Peterson. Now it’s cool because Diplo uses the term to refer to his own music and also because Panorama Bar occasionally descends in to an African drumming session minus the white dreads. I like it because I’m a musical dilettante and tend to enjoy other fads like disco and minimal techno. You should like it too, but for better reasons like this track that I heard very late at night on the Charlie Gillett’s BBC World Service show. “Pundela”, according to my research, is a Rajasthani song of longing for one’s beloved.

Pundela – Titi Robin & Gulabi Sapera

He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)

Pretty un-pc but imbued with an incredible vitality that “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” by Britney Spears never quite delivered on. I first heard this track as a cover by Grizzly Bear during an encore at their most recent Berlin gig. They did a brilliant job of making it their own but something about the forcefulness and clarity of the lyrics was uncharacteristic of a band that otherwise favors dreamy suggestion or the non-linguistic new folk equivalent of doo-wapping (as also practiced by the Dirty Projectors).

Here is the original…

And a recorded (as in not live) version of the Grizzly cover…