[Club Edition: Welcome to the Weekend]
I’m not the only VC interested in music. Three “swim lanes” influenced my house and D&B forays in the early days. And I’ve been interested in many of these samples that I’m hearing everywhere now …
Afrobeat
We used a lot of Clyde Stubblefield samples from 95 and 98:
Some early stuff:
Some his funky stuff (the HiHat going “70-80”, which is a vocalization in German of the sound “Siebzich-Achzich-Siebzich-Achzich”) became Drum and Base samples
There is a whole documentary on PBS on “The Funky Drummer”
He inspired the great (and late) Tony Allen, who started the Afrobeat movement and you can recognize his style immediately on Art Blakey, Dizzie G, TMonk (and also on many of Gorillaz tracks).
Tony’s mentor was no other than Max Roach:
In 1995, Pharoah Sanders was working on a new Album. He was playing every Thursday evening in Philly with Sherman Fergusson at a hotel bar at that time. For the new Album he wanted to collaborate with Tony Allen in Brooklyn, NYC, but Tony struggled with depression and became unavailable. Aïyb Dieng brought Hamid Drake to the studio, and Pharoah recorded a landmark album to this day.
Both Pharoah and Hamid shared the understanding of NYC poet Moondog, / 30 years earlier, whom you surely recognize from “Bird’s Lament” (“Bird” as in Charlie Parker). Moondog moved to Münster in Germany in 1974, where he lived until he died.
I was more interested in the multi-rhythms of Moondog that you can also play at higher speeds. Here are some recordings between 1954-1962:
Jazz
There has been some Persian / Near East / Hungarian folk multi-rhythm that I heard in my time in the Balkan. Art Lande in 1976:
Mark Isham, the trumpet player on this album, of course became a bit more known for his amazing music for movies later (and drummer Glenn Cronkhite became known for his gig bags).
I’ve heard some samples of New York-based band Slavic Soul Party! — they even remixed their own album! For example:
Other remixes and samples I used are based on Avishai Cohen:
Adam Ben Ezra, “Fair Fight” (2015) – take it and remix it!
Deep House : Hardcore
2010 and 2012 saw a slew of innovation on the pre-amp side. Don Garber released the second version of his Fi Preamp (the Fi 2b, after working 14 years on it!). Charles Hansen started working with John Meyer at Meyer Sound (in Berkeley!) to create a commercial version of his Variable Gain Transconductance (VGT) that would integrate into Meyer’s Variable Room Acoustic System (VRAS) — the 1100-LFC low frequency control element won countless awards in 2012 (and led to John’s induction to the NAMM Hall of Fame in 2014). It suddenly changed the sound and possibilities for large-scale tours and installations.
Together with John, the Swedish House Mafia turned on the big beats and started touring, which suddenly gave them a bigger audience:
Remember that Steve Angello was sound engineer / advisor for Ypsilon! Some folks might remember the PST-100. You can totally hear Agnello’s preference for tonality and overtones!
And the remixes rolled in, the rebirth of Dubstep – listen to Caspa’s faster stink-face remix of “The Day is My Enemy” by The Prodigy:
To this day, The Prodigy and Massive Attack are still my favorite. And some people can even take that to the next level. Nitepunk is the future:
@1:35 how do you get from Chase & Status / Tempa → Thunder → Absolute Zero?! Or @9:00 Tyler The Creator → 16Bit → Skepta (!) within 1 minute …?!
But back to the tech, back to 2015: The Würzburger Airport Club installed a bespoke pre-amp plus amp bank by Shindo, based on the Masseto. The Masseto was already a landmark pre-amp:
“I’m not going to break this review down into things like detail, soundstage, midrange, bass, etc. I hope you get my point and understand that to do so somehow belittles what the Masseto does so well. If you want to know things like that, read the review of the Monbrison and just know the Masseto does all of that, and it does it better. No – with the Masseto we have to talk about experience, that is experiencing a musical performance right there in your room.”
How can that beast of a pre-amp be improved?! And for concert equipment?! WTF?! And suddenly the big house beats were back, with a bass sound that most modern headphones can’t match. Bassdrums usually had wavering bass lines underneath that produced subsonic sounds via interference patterns and subwoofer resonant frequency tuning — people designed sounds for specific locations and their sound systems. You can listen closely to the bass line @0:30 over good headphones to this bespoke track for the Würzburger Airport Club by Darpa & Pappenheimer:
Ironically, all of this is coming back now: Listen to Charlotte de Witte’s 2025 set at Tomorrowland in Belgium a few days ago:
Gothic Metal
Back in Germany I liked listening to symphonic metal — Gothic Metal, as the lingo goes — like “Bloody Kisses” by Type O Negative:
I was smitten by the genius of Kristian Kohlmannslehner who is running an amazing recording studio at https://www.kohlekeller.de/. Kohle worked with Crematory, Powerwolf, Subsignal, and also played all instruments except the drums on his solo album:
Coming Full Circle
And then there is the Soundtrack to Ultrakill, by Heaven Pierce Her:
And “Rmen” by Social Sport & Rosetown:
And there we have it. Full circle for me.