A VIP mix is a special edit or remix of a song made to be played as part of a DJ set. VIP stands for “Very Important Person,” meaning it has been designed for DJs to use, not for fans to listen to at home.* Because of their nature, VIP mixes are usually not officially released for mass distribution online, and copies of these songs therefore may be only available as bootleg recordings. However, some VIP mixes do see official or semi-official releases. For instance, Valentino Khan gave away his VIP mix of“Deep Down Low” on SoundCloud “to celebrate the love [fans] have shown” for the song.
Explanation
VIP mixes are first and foremost a special treat for fans who come out to a live show. Plus, like any remix, they add new life to a song whose original mix may have gone stale.
*Source: Skrillex and Valentino Khan, OWSLA Radio, Episode 3, discussing the VIP mix of “Deep Down Low”. Skrillex: “This is the VIP mix, though. What does VIP mean?” Valentino Kahn: “That means Very Important Person.” Skrillex: “That means only DJs used to only be able to play this record. It’s a little bit different. It’s for the live ****. But he decided to put this out after the video dropped.”
Jayeson Andel has visions. A path lit by artificial fireflies. Oil slurping through veins of a human-machine hybrid. A colossal mech blazing a trail through a forest. A man walking the snowy streets of a moonlit metropolis, solitary as a monk.
Mastering engineer-turned-producer Jayeson Andel
These are vignettes from the world of Urban Monks, Jayeson’s debut album, released on Silk Music’s Arrival division in 2015. Urban Monks proved to be one of the best (and most overlooked) EDM albums of last year. It is a work of diverse genres, drawing from trance, chillout, dubstep, and glitch hop. In fact, Urban Monks reached the top 10 charts on Beatport in no less than five genres, according to bptoptracker.com. And yet in spite of their diversity, the songs feel cohesive and purposeful, grounded by powerful grooves, electrifying melodies, and exquisite sound design. Together, the songs provide glimpses into an unnamed world where humans, machines, and nature blend together.
Until now, we haven’t known much about that world beyond the tantalizing clues provided by the track titles, such as “We’ll Build It Here,” “Oil in the Veins,” and “Laughing Buddha.” That’s because this concept album doesn’t feature a single lyric.
So on Episode 4 of The EDMist Podcast, I ask Jayeson to let us in to the world behind the music. Over our 46-minute conversation, he reveals the concepts behind several tracks, the subtle sound design choices he made to bring his ideas to life, and the artists and films he drew on for inspiration.
About the eclectic sounds of Urban Monks Jayeson says, “The way I kind of describe it as a theme for everything is organic-infused cyberpunk.” (Don’t worry, I had to take a second to parse that too.) He explains: “I like the futuristic, high-tech, augmented reality world of cyberpunk, but it’s a little bit too noir for me. Like, you look, at say, Blade Runner, and it’s very dark and has that edge to it – which I like. But [Urban Monks] is this very organic, life-based world with trees and stones and everything there mixed with this futuristic tech side of things.”
Jayeson cites the films Elysium and Oblivion as specific points of inspiration, both of which explore worlds of marvelous technology and organic life through stunning imagery. While his medium is different, Jayeson clearly thinks of his music in cinematic terms, describing how he uses recurring themes in “We’ll Build It Here,” and “Awe” Parts I and II to recontextualize familiar motifs and “infuse the listener with this album.”
One of the aspects that sets Jayeson’s album apart is his incredible attention to detail in service of the greater narrative – for example, in the way he plants clues to his ideas deep in the sound design of each track. “I can’t even tell you how much I’ve actually sampled of different leaves and twigs and used that as part of my percussion layers,” Jayeson says. “I spent an entire session with a friend cutting up apples and just breaking them and twisting them and used that as a percussion element.”
In one fascinating moment, Jayeson reveals that he conceives of his tracks as three dimensional journeys. This is most apparent in the tracks whose titles suggest movement, “Follow the Firefly Lanterns” and “Walking with a Colossus.” After hearing the ideas behind these tracks, I asked Jayeson whether he sees his songs not only as progressions through time, but progressions through space. “Yes,” he answers, “Absolutely. And that goes right down to the sound design of everything. … ‘Walking With a Colossus,’ the intro of that track … I wanted to have these footsteps, but it had to feel like it was percussion as well. So there’s these big orchestral bass drum sounds that I put an incredible amount of reverb on and put them lower in the mix so that it felt like these giant steps were being taken.”
By now you may have guessed that Jayeson is not your stereotypical DJ-producer of the sort that cobbles together a career with one-off hits and passable production skills. This Edmonton-based artist has had turns as a classical violinist, mastering engineer, and record label A&R person. And while he no longer DJ’s live, he does produce a regular mix for Silk Music Showcase that he feels just as passionately about as his own album. Not a bad resume for a 25-year-old.
Jayeson’s broad background enabled him to take a vertical approach to producing Urban Monks. While most albums are a collaborative effort between many parties, including producers, engineers, designers, and more, Urban Monks was nearly a solo effort, in which Jayeson crafted everything from the samples to the album art. Even the label seems to have been happy to let Jayeson do most of the driving. I asked Jayeson how much the titular track “Urban Monks” changed since he submitted the first demo to Silk. “Not at all,” he says.
Jayeson’s influences in the music world are, unsurprisingly, varied. While he grew up on the sounds of trance and progressive house, these days he is drawn to visionary, genre-defying producers like Porter Robinson, whose album Worlds shares many thematic elements with Urban Monks. “For the album itself, I think the two people who really took hold were Andrew Bayer and Seven Lions.” Jayeson reveals that “Walking With a Colossus,” the only dubstep track on Urban Monks, was modeled on Seven Lions’ sound, while the downtempo beats of Andrew Bayer’s 2013 album If It Were You, We’d Never Leaveserved as inspiration for the grooves of many tracks.
Like any good fantasy world, Urban Monks leaves you wanting to explore it further. But while Jayeson claims he’s “still figuring [the world] out” himself, future visits to this sonic landscape are uncertain. “I have some incredibly terrible news in that I lost all of the project files for this album,” Jayeson admits to me. “So this is one hundred percent standalone work. … And of course, I designed the album to be so unique with the sound design that no one could ever recreate it, and unfortunately that also includes me. So, this is a perfect, beautiful, piece of uniqueness that will never, ever be recreated or remixed.”
The answer is: not much! Apart from some new material and some token trap beats thrown in here and there, the show sticks with pretty much the same live setup and feel as the Adventure Tour. This would be disappointing if I didn’t already think the Adventure Tour is one of the best EDM experiences you can spend your money on outside of a festival right now.
Because there’s no denying it: Madeon (a.k.a. Hugo Lerclercq) has not only created a dazzling, slick, powerful stage rig that leaves you feeling guilty every time you pick up your phone to take a picture; he has also developed a level of showmanship and verve worthy of a veteran rock star. (Oh, here’s your obligatory reminder that the kid is only 21 years old.)
The Venue
Emo’s is a large boxy space, something like a warehouse, located in the Riverside neighborhood of Austin. It was my first time there so I can’t compare the atmosphere to that of other EDM shows at this venue, although the people around me in the 20-minute line kept mumbling that this was the biggest turnout they’d ever seen for a show at Emo’s. That as may be, the space was big enough that, there was still plenty of space for shuffling in the back.
The diverse crowd was relaxed, with people wearing everything from collared shirts to sweatpants. I spent the first half of the night on one side of the room, where I gradually realized that the sound quality was impaired. After I moved to the back-center, the show sounded much clearer, and hit much harder.
Despite the new name, the Pixel Empire Tour is substantially similar to the Adventure Tour I saw last year. The stage is exactly the same, and since Madeon hasn’t actually released all that many songs, you’re guaranteed to hear all of his hits (“You’re On,” “The City,” “Finale“… you know the rest). That being said, Hugo dropped at least two new tracks for us, which while not particularly mind-blowing, at least held up to the standard of the rest of his oeuvre. (A Youtube tipster calls one of them “Albatross”.)
What makes the Pixel Empire/Adventure Tour stand out among the many EDM tours going on right now is the many live elements Madeon brings to it. At the heart of the show are the Novation samplers that made Madeon famous in the first place, which he uses to delay, stutter, rearrange, filter, and generally explode his songs into echoes of themselves. Hugo showcases his remixing skills in the live mashup of his first hit “Pop Culture,” which throws in 42 samples from well-known pop songs. The impressive act demonstrates his ability to turn even dry old material into juicy, exciting new flavors. I also noticed his presence on the keyboard much more prominently this time around (although whether there was actually more of it or whether I was just more aware of it I can’t say for sure). These kind of live elements make every night unique, and in a culture where DJ’s just “press play” even (and especially!) on the biggest stages in the world, seeing a musician perform live music and mashups over his own tracks is refreshing.
But the true soul of Madeon’s show is the man himself. Hugo is a small, skinny guy, but like Freddie Mercury, he turns his lithe, little body into an asset on stage. You can see the passion radiating from every inch of Madeon’s body as he jumps, spins, and reaches toward the ceiling. He is as in tune with his own music as computer with its CPU; as the music rises, drops, and bends, so does he, an avatar of his own sound. One tiny example of this was when the screen behind him quickly went to black, as if a curtain had been dropped over it, just as the music went quiet for a moment. As the light moved down the screen, so did Madeon’s hand in front of it, like he was going down with it, or even pushing it himself. It was an effect that lasted maybe half a second, but it’s the tiny, perfectly synchronized details like this that make his show so captivating.
I noticed an overarching story as the graphics evolved over the course of the show from large two-dimensional pixellated displays to ever-finer boxy images and eventually three-dimensional shapes, landscapes, and more traditional animations. The fantasy worlds depicted onstage very clearly resemble those of Porter Robinson‘s Worlds Tour, but this isn’t surprising given the duo’s close ties and perhaps decade-long association. His other biggest influence, Daft Punk, is equally as clear in the Pixel Empire tour, as samples of and homages to the robot duo’s electro-house backcatalog are scattered like easter eggs throughout the show.
If you’ve already seen the Adventure Tour, this show won’t be a surprise for you. But I personally think it’s good enough to see multiple times. We’ve all been to shows where DJ’s play the same sets you saw them play a few weeks or months ago, where you find yourself asking what you just paid for. With the audiovisual extravagance of the Pixel Empire and Adventure Tours, Madeon has given us a special, unforgettable experience that is worth revisiting for the energy and the details.
Thursday night offered a lot of firsts for me: it was my first time clubbing in Austin, first time seeing Infected Mushroom, and first time at the Vulcan Gas Company, one of the few venues here that gets big name EDM acts.
I’ve never listened much to Infected Mushroom, although I’ve heard their tracks here and there over the years. One of the few things I did know about them before the show was how unpredictable their music is, running over genre boundaries like a tank over barbed wire. This promised an interesting show, even if it’s not what I normally listen to. I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see them after hearing my friend Jon talk about the transcendental moment he experienced when he discovered them in middle school on the first episode of The EDMist Podcast.
The Venue
I was impressed with Vulcan Gas Company. Size-wise, it’s somewhere between a large bar (they all seem to be huge in Texas!) or a medium-large club. (San Franciscans can think of Public Works as the closest analog for a venue, but without the underground feel.) Vulcan is located on “dirty” Sixth Street in downtown Austin, stuck right into the heart of the seemingly endless row of college bars. This makes it highly accessible, especially because Sixth street is closed to vehicle traffic on weekend nights so you don’t have to fight with traffic to get there. I thought the online ticket price of $15 was a good deal, although the $30 price at the door seemed steep to me. Drinks were also reasonable ($5.50 for a gin and tonic), if a little dry. There are two bars in the venue, at which I had no trouble getting a drink. The industrial chic decor meshes well with the building’s exposed brick walls. Glowing columns of lights adorn the walls; I couldn’t decide if they were cheesy or cool. Finally, there is access to a rooftop deck where you can go for a smoke break (for those who partake) or a cooldown from the dance floor, which is definitely a sweet perk of this venue.
The vibe on this particular night was very relaxed, although since it was my first time I can’t be sure if it reflected the vibe of the club, the Austin scene, or the particular fanbase. (Infected Mushroom have been around for a long time and appeal to a crowd beyond the EDM-heads your “typical” dance music duo might draw.) I saw zero aggression for floor space, and there was always plenty of room to maneuver despite a fairly packed dance floor. People upstairs were even allowed to spin hula hoops and glowing poi. (This seemed like an accident waiting to happen but, hey, I don’t run the place.)
The Show
The opening DJ (whose name I didn’t catch) played an eclectic mix of trip hop and engaged the crowd with his own fervent dancing. He was followed up by Ram-Z, who served up the typical palate-cleansing pre-headliner house set that people nevertheless seemed to dig.
While Infected Mushroom are known for their wild stage setup, their performance on Thursday was only a DJ set. The Israeli duo came on at 12:15 to cheers, bringing their signature, genre-spanning sound with them. Early on they lit things up with the Zedd-esque riff of “Bass Nipple” before promising a psytrance set, which is of course the sound that they are best known for. While there was certainly plenty of it throughout the night, I heard influences as disparate as trance, hardstyle, dubstep, and electro mixed (or, rather, smashed) in as well. It was an energetic set whose driving beat switched tempos rapidly throughout the show. The fast pace of the changes kept things fresh and interesting, if a little unsettling. The energy really picked up about an hour after the set began, when the veteran DJs dropped the RIOT remixes of their own tracks “Kipod” and “Fields of Grey.” Both tracks brought the room down with their ferocious dubstep beats. See for yourself in the following video.
While I didn’t personally connect with the set, the crowd was clearly eating it up and I was able to feed off of their positive energy and have a good time. I would probably pass on seeing their DJ set again, but as a big fan of stage shows, I’d definitely give their live show a shot next time it comes around.
When I started The EDMist blog almost a year ago, I set out to cover the national dance music scene with a specific focus on the San Francisco community. The Bay Area EDM scene is one of the most vibrant in the country, and has an outsize national influence (SF only ranks 13th in the nation by population at 800,000 people but is one of the top tastemakers and creative centers for dance music today). I felt privileged to be a part of it and I wanted to create something that invited others to share in the special, diverse, welcoming vibe of that community while discovering new music, artists, and subgenres that reflect exciting new developments across the country.
Last month, I moved to Austin, TX. As the sole contributor to The EDMist, that means that the site’s focus will move with me. From now on, I will no longer be covering shows and gatherings in San Francisco, and will instead focus on the community and scene here in Austin.
Austin has a lot to offer. It can be described in very similar terms to San Francisco: It is a youngish, smallish city (founded 1835; population 900,000). As a progressive stronghold, it fiercely embraces its diversity and uniqueness. It is a booming tech hub with a young, tech-oriented, and increasingly wealthy population (earning it the nickname “Silicon Hills”). And it has a rich musical history with a staggering number of music venues.
Yet it offers many contrasts with San Francisco too. After just a month here, it’s clear to me that the EDM scene is not as expansive or developed as it is in SF. There are only a couple of venues that consistently book EDM acts. And Austin’s disposition towards live music (it is known as the “Live Music Capital of the World”) means that electronic music is more of a niche here and less of a movement.
I see these realities less as a sign of a weak scene than as an indication of the potential for explosive growth. People are pouring into Austin for the jobs and prime real estate available here, and with that influx of people is likely to come a horde of electronic music fans from cities all around the country (and beyond!). I want The EDMist to be a resource for them and a tool for helping bring together and expand the EDM community here.
All of that being said, I won’t be abandoning SF completely. Because I think the scene in San Francisco is so special and worth paying attention to (and because so much of my network is there!) I will definitely be more aware of what’s happening in SF and it will likely still play a large role in this new chapter of The EDMist blog and podcast. I just won’t be able to cover it from a first-person perspective.
Going forward, you can expect reviews of shows, events, and festivals in and around Austin (notably, South by Southwest and Austin City Limits) – starting this week! And as I have for the last year, I will continue to post music reviews, recommendations, and other stories that are not specific to Austin or any other city. The EDMist is aimed at a broad audience and I hope you can enjoy what I post here no matter where you live.
Thanks for reading the blog and for sticking with me on my journey. Be sure to follow me on Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for the most recent updates and recommendations from the blog and podcast.
The phrase “artist album” refers to an LP showcasing original work by an artist or group. This term is used to differentiate in cases where the artist has released albums that do not primarily feature their own work, such as compilation albums that include multiple artists on one record.
Description
While in other genres the phrase artist album would be redundant, in the dance music world it is useful because many producers (i.e. artists) are are also DJs who build their reputations by playing other people‘s music. DJs sometimes gain notoriety by releasing compilation albums that they have curated and mixed, which are credited under their name, even if the album does not feature any music produced by the DJ. (Just as editors are credited for compiling anthologies regardless of whether the editor’s written work appears within the book’s pages, compilation albums are credited to the person or people who curated and/or mixed the collection.)
Example
Consider for example the the Anjunabeats Volumes series of compilation albums, which showcase the work of artists on the Anjunabeats label. The albums are compiled and mixed by Above & Beyond, who therefore receive credit for the album, even though the albums typically only feature a handful of songs contributed by the group. Above & Beyond have released several artist albums, including Tri-State, Group Therapy, and We Are All We Need.
In Episode 3 of the EDMist Podcast, I talk with music critic Matt Bessey about the big stories of 2015. We discuss how Jack Ü, aka Skrillex and Diplo, reshaped the musical scene this year, and tackle the controversy surrounding their mega successful collab with Justin Bieber, “Where are U Now?” I ask Matt about the breakout artists of 2015, which he says include Lane 8 and Madeon (but you already knew that) , and he names a drum and bass album of the year: City of Gold by thePrototypes. Towards the end we tackle the question of what genres will blow up in 2016 and where we see the EDM scene headed (hint: more diversity, which is a good thing).
This episode includes seven featured songs. They are:
We recorded over an hour and a half of audio for this episode, which I whittled down to 34 minutes in the final cut. That means that people who follow The EDMist on Soundcloud may find some exclusive bonus content from the episode over the coming days. 😉
Let me know what you think of the podcast! Give us a shoutout on Twitter at @theEDMist or Snapchat at “theEDMist.”
Above & Beyond at Bill Graham Civic Center, San Francisco, in 2015. Photo credit: Drew Ressler/rukes.com.
The best-albums-of-the-year list is as traditional to a music blog around the new year as the ball-drop is to New York City. But it’s a bit of a different exercise in the EDM world, since albums are not a native format for electronic music. EDM as we know it sprouted in the underground, where the album-driven format of the traditional music industry was shunned in favor of sample-heavy, one-off tracks from bedroom producers. It’s only in recent years as EDM has gone fully mainstream that electronic artists have adopted the album as a way of packaging their work. That has led to a new kind of dynamic in the music world: whereas once albums were seen as the baseline for musical legitimacy, now they have become a badge of honor among electronic artists. A producer with an album can say that they dedicated themselves to a long-term project instead of just a string of singles. They can also use the format to show off a deeper artistic vision than they would be able to exhibit through one-off songs.
Consider, for example, two of the artists on the list below. Although Skrillex almost single-handedly lit the EDM explosion in America, it wasn’t until last year that he completed an album. Similarly, Madeon has been a big name in the scene since 2011, and even produced hits for Lady Gaga before finally releasing a debut album this year. Nobody questioned the credibility of either of these artists before they released their first LPs, but now that they have, their brand and carries extra weight and legitimacy.
Interestingly, 2015 seems to mark the first year where you can find electronic artists introducing themselves to the scene through an LP instead of through one-off productions. A prime example of this is another artist on this list, Jayeson Andel, whose album Urban Monks is a stunner of a work, although he has yet to achieve any kind of serious name recognition. This speaks to the increasing dominance of the independent dance music labels, some of whom have now become powerful enough to finance artists in the more traditional way of bankrolling a first LP before profiting off of their later success either as producers or DJs.
Because the role of the album is different in dance music, I actually think the criteria for what makes a good album have been raised. It’s no longer enough just to throw a bunch of cool songs together in one bundle. Nero did that this year with Between II Worlds, and the result is an ultimately forgettable collection of decent standalone tunes, and a significant step down from their whopper of a debut album, Welcome Reality. If producers who take the time to craft full albums want to be seen as true artists, then we need to judge them according to the rules of the art form. And this blogger is more than happy to do the judging.
So, which albums killed it in 2015? I’ve put together a list of my five favorite albums from this year, in no particular order. To make it on this list, each album had to fulfill three basic criteria: Is the album a significant artistic achievement? Does the collection form a coherent whole? And, overall, is the album worth spending some time with (i.e., would I recommend it to non-fans)?
The following albums answer those questions with yes, yes, and hell yes. I hope you’ll give them a spin, support these great artists, both newcomers and well-known heavyweights, and appreciate what they brought to the table in 2015.
Having now built up an empire around the Group Therapy name from their last record (#ABGT for short), the pressure was on Above & Beyond to deliver something as punchy, polished, and memorable for their next studio album – and that they did. 2015’s We Are All We Need is full of arena-sized tunes designed for maximum singalong potential. With knockout favorites like the (almost) title track, “We’re All We Need,” the dark and delicious “Sticky Fingers,” and the radio-friendly “Blue Sky Action,” We Are All We Need stocks the pantry with plenty of treats for fans to savor for years to come. This album was certainly the highlight of the year in the trance and progressive corner of the scene, but also grabbed some mainstream attention with a grammy nomination. I also want to point out that this album is a whopper, clocking in at over 1 hour and 11 minutes long. If you’re going to charge fans a hefty amount for an album, I like to be sure what I’m buying has some value to it, and the prolific British trio have definitely packed in the tunes on this one.
This album shares the title of “Most anticipated album of 2015” with We Are All We Need. But unlike A&B, who took their record in a safe and conservative direction, Skrillex and Diplo dropped into the scene like a grenade, introducing wild new timbres and beats that set the EDM world – and mainstream radio – on fire. From the juicy, hollow snares of “Take Ü There” and “Mind” to the sampled and re-sampled horns of “Febreeze” and “To Ü” and especially to the modulated flute-like lead sound of “Where are Ü Now,” the sounds, beats, and textures here are fresh, firey, and a little frightening all at once.
This is of course what Skrillex is best at, and it’s in no small part thanks to his passion for weird, challenging, forward-thinking sounds that the music in our scene continues to diversify and push forward to new and exciting frontiers. When I heard that the OWSLA head and his good friend Diplo, a.k.a. captain of the Mad Decent juggernaut, were teaming up for a music project, I set my expectations high, and I was thrilled to see the breakthrough success these two achieved with this album.
Of course, this epic pairing also smashed taboos by inviting the much-reviled teen hearthrob Justin Bieber to collab with them on the unexpected song of the summer, “Where are Ü Now.” And that song? That song went platinum and also earned this trio a grammy nom. While the song had plenty of detractors, their criticisms seemed to boil down to “It’s Justin Bieber!” I applaud all of the artists involved for ignoring the haters and taking on real musical and social challenges. While it may not have been my favorite music of the year, it’s undeniable that Skrillex & Diplo Present Jack Ü was the defining album of 2015.
Adventure is the long overdue debut album from French electro house wunderkind Madeon, a.k.a. Hugo Leclercq. When he burst onto the scene with his legendary live “Pop Culture” mashup video in 2011, it was clear that Madeon was special. Since then, he’s a distinct style that fuses elements of house, electro, disco, and funk to create something bouncy and irresistibly danceable. Adventure is the synthesis of that sound and a manifesto of his signature style. Which means, basically, that it’s great as you’d expect.
Before releasing Adventure, Madeon was able to attain stratospheric levels of fame despite having a very short discography. Singles from him have been as welcome as they have been infrequent. So it was with all the fervor of a Thanksgiving dinner guest that I dug into the cornucopia of music Hugo released this year. Happily, Adventure is not only an excellent compilation of some of the best music we already knew (“You’re On,” “The City,” “Finale”), but introduced plenty of other versatile songs to flesh out his repertoire and discography.
I can’t mention this album without talking about the next-level live show that Madeon gave us along with it. If you haven’t seen the Adventure Tour (now the Pixel Empire Tour), do yourself a favor and buy a ticket immediately. The Adventure Tour is hands down the best show I saw in 2015 and you won’t regret going to see it.
This one is so fresh out of the oven you can still hear it crackling. Jaytech’s second album, Awakening, is a solid step up from 2012’s Multiverse, with an altogether more progressive, energizing, and visionary sound. Awakening is a concept album built around the question of what music will sound like in the future. This is a difficult concept to tackle directly (in fact, I’d say Jack Ü’s album is the most wholly futuristic – that is, the weirdest – album released this year). So Jaytech attacks it in a practical way by using a futuristic musical vocabulary to articulate his vision of the world to come. This means that he actually digs back in time to find sounds that promised an exciting future – specifically, back to around 2012, when complextro and dubstep were new and cool and decidedly futuristic. It’s a strategy that works: the outcome is a project that sounds familiar and modern but hints at a world more technological and overwhelming than our own.
The sparky vibe of this album is energized by dubstep-inspired growling basses that add some oomph behind Jaytech’s hopeful melodies, peppered through with complextro accents that recall the glory days of Porter Robinson and Wolfgang Gartner. Many of the track titles imply movement or a journey, which hints at the unique strength that Jaytech brings to full effect on this album, which is that his songs build and climax: each one is a mini arc within a larger story (like, say, books of the Odyssey).
The dubstep undercurrent culminates in the slow and heartfelt “My Heart Goes Out.” As for the complextro flavors, “Future Story” makes heavy use of sidechaining for some solidly pumping synth lines like the best progressive house songs of the early 2010s. The vocalized guitar riffs of “Odyssey” recall Jaytech’s older track “Pyramid.” “Yugen” and “Darkscape” would not be out of place on a Final Fantasy soundtrack. “Awakening” is probably the closest thing to “classic” Jaytech, with some vocals in the background recalling sonic themes used throughout Multiverse.
Two things make this album an improvement on Multiverse. The first is the switch from bouncy reese basses to growly dubstep basses. They add a real grit and energy to the music that propels it forward into the future. Second, while Multiverse certainly had a coherent sound, it was an incestuous aesthetic that trapped itself within the walls of that record, like a too-exclusive niche genre room off to the side of the big room. Some tracks there could serve double duty as singles, but most of them are sort of blah and not really worth listening to outside of the album. Awakening successfully walks that fine line of building a collection that can be enjoyed piece by piece, song by song, but whose beauty is enhanced by enjoying the album as a whole.
If you are looking for a record to give you an optimistic start to the new year, this is the album you want to check out. (And by the way – if you love Jaytech as much as I do, consider signing up to become a patron of his monthly radio show on Patreon for early access to his mixes and other exclusives.)
Jayeson Andel is certainly one of the breakout artists of 2015. When he started getting airplay in support of this album, I couldn’t believe someone with such a lush, soulful, and polished sound wasn’t already standing out among the legions of copycat progressive house songs saturating the progressive podcast circuit today. His debut work Urban Monks is a richly textured record full of deep grooves and delicious trip hop beats. This is straight up groove porn, with bass lines as luscious as a Kardashian booty.
Despite being an instrumental album, the crunching, squelching melodies riding on top of every song nevertheless seem to communicate with all the emotion of a seasoned vocalist. The twitchy, otherworldly electric soundscape of “Follow the Firefly Lanterns” got a well deserved round of heavy airplay on a bunch of podcasts this year, and is a great song to start with if you’ve never heard of this guy before.
With notes of Pretty Lights and Jaytech, Andel’s sound is familiar enough and yet altogether unique and supremely confident. From the childlike optimism suffusing the the opening track, “We’ll Build it Here,” to the reflective arpeggios of the closer, “Awe (Part II),” Urban Monks is brimming with emotion and verdant with sonic scenery, and is worth a deep exploration.
This is a dark, beautiful, and expertly crafted album. I love the consistent feel of the whole thing, and to be sure it’s great to just press play, sit back, and listen to it. That being said, there are a few standout tracks here – most notably “My Love Aside” and the haunting “Inside My Head.”
Consistent hitmaker Arty released his first album this year, and considering the relative diversity of sounds in his extensive back catalog, I was surprised at how well it came together. Full of his melodic, piano-driven tunes, and reinforced by the work of many talented vocalists, this Avicii-flavored album is definitely a delight for the melodic-minded.
The EDMist Podcast, which has been available on Soundcloud since May, is now available to stream and download through the iTunes store. Find it here. The first two episodes are up now, with Episode 3 coming in September.
In the second episode of The EDMist Podcast, I talk with Joe Deza, a raver, music critic, and friend, about our experiences of EDC 2015. Joe shares an incredible story of his last few moments at the festival, getting up close with Galantis as the sun rose over the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. We review our favorite sets and stages, and discuss our costume choices (and an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction!).
This episode is also a music special, featuring tracks from Seven Lions, Avicii, Galantis, Pretty Lights, GAIA, Adventure Club, and progressive house newcomer Alex Klingle.
Joe Deza
Let me know your thoughts on the episode or your experience of EDC by hitting me up on Twitter or Snapchat @theEDMist.
The EDMist 