Claro Intelecto - Second Blood EP (Delsin)

After nine years of putting out consistently high quality house and techno variations, new material from Claro Intelecto gets pretty much brought on sight nowadays, so I jumped on this three tracker for Delsin last time I was in the shop. Whilst Mark Stewart's earliest work was heavily indebted to Detroit and Sheffield, with a few influences from the burgeoning bass music scene, Second Blood sees him encorporating aspects of Demdike Stare's skeletal drone compositions and a fair dose of Deepchord's reverb-heavy echochamber work. Overdriving the high end and layering up ridiculous amounts of reverb, Stewart channels a goodly amount of Rod Modell's dreamy aesthetic, coating everything in fine-grained dust and echo that blur solid shapes. Adding to the oneiric feel is the distinct tempo drop - Second Blood and Heart both see Stewart slowing to 90bpm despite retaining a house/ techno blueprint for the beats - which adds to the floaty, disconnected feeling.
Final track Voyeurism raises the tempo back to 120bpm, and throws in a more solid palette of claps and percussion to drive things forward, but retains the scuffed and blurry aesthetic, building through three false climaxes before introducing a skronky acid line that's still brillinatly minimal. With a full-length album due on Delsin later this year, there's further reason to be keeping eyes on Claro Intelecto and his unique brand of dub. Awesome stuff.

Model 500 - Control / The Messenger

Model 500 - Control / The Messenger (20 Feb R&S Records)
Model 500's triumphant return with OFI led to much rejoicing, and it understandably made many people's record of the year last year. The pounding techno undercarriage, coupled with maniacal electro riffs and magic Juan back in full force with epic rants about the mothership, time travel and dimensional shift, made for a genre-crossing dancefloor destroyer. Model 500's latest 12" however sees Juan setting control for the heart of the sun and heading into far more cosmic territory, layering up floaty synths and woogy-woogy theramin melodies that are all kinds of awesome. Despite Model 500's reputation for hell-for-leather electronic madness, both sides of the 12" are heavily influenced by the kind of machine-driven bleep-techno that Sleeparchive and Mika Vainio have made their mainstay, with Control translating analogue fetishism into a rolling italo number, replete with vocodered vox and flailing synth lines. It ought to be a jarring clash of styles, but Atkins weaves together the underlying fascinations with analogue equipment to create a brilliantly uncomfortable piece of machine funk. I can't say the vocoder impresses me, but it does add to the whole "this is detroit electro... in space!" vibe. The Messenger is less scattershot, boosting the theremin to the forefront of the mix and thankfully cutting out the vocals, it makes for a suitably epic B-side, that frankly outshines the A.

My only criticism of this record is that Model 500 seem straightjacketed by the electro template, unable to move beyond high-speed synth riffs and hip-hop beats, and admittedly neither track does much to change this. However, between Control's anashamedly retro sound and The Messenger's epic cosmic feel, there's plenty to like about it.

DJ VIKTOR TROTTA steals & sells other people's music - inc Glasgow producers

Yep, this is a fact - this thieving turd is making a name for himself by using tracks released by other producers renamed and re-sold as "his own", and in the process getting some high profile gigs like a support for Umek at Amnesia. Things came to light when producer Hefty realised Trotta had taken his free download "The Mothership", renamed it "Atomizer" and was selling it on Beatport as part of an EP on the label Futura.

Some links, via Chapter24:

ORIGINAL FREE DL by HEFTY :
http://soundcloud.com/hefty/hefty-the-mothership

Stolen and released by Trotta >>>>> DONT BUY IT :
http://www.beatport.com/track/atomizer-original-mix/3123654

If you wanna leave your feelings,DJ VIKTOR TROTTA PAGE :
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=93311550736


Hefty has given an interview with Techno FM speaking about the theft:

BEN: So once you found out that this was for real then what did you do? ... and how do you feel about what has happened here - both from a monitory perspective and an artistic perspective? (both being completely different angles) ...and which of the perspectives is the most important so you think?

HEFTY: hey ok so, When I found out about all this, the first thing I did was contact Mr Trotta basically asking "WTF" he was doing releasing one of my FREE tracks. Then I contacted Beatport to tell them about the issue. I received a reply which wasn’t really satisfactory, though I'm not sure if they understood the problem. The tracks were only removed after the label contacted Beatport....

Regarding how I feel about this, well I went through a few emotions really, starting with annoyance and ending in amazement at the sheer audacity of the guy. It’s definitely not about the money as we all know that royalties from releases are not going to make you rich, so it was definitely about the artistic/principle angle that I was more concerned with. I gave that track away for free as a celebration for reaching 3000 followers on Soundcloud, so it was also a personal "slap in the face" also.

So I decided to do the mature thing and knock up a photo shopped photo of him and stick it on my facebook wall, just to vent some of my anger, expecting a few "OMG" type comments, but it spread across facebook and twitter (and various other online platforms) like wildfire. It started to emerge that this guy had done this to other producers both in the past and on the very same EP as my free track, and many people were really angry about what this guy was up to. He had 50+ tracks on Beatport, so who knows how many were not his own, it’s strange that his Soundcloud page was empty if he had released so much stuff. As more people investigated this guy it turns out he has various pretty high profile gigs coming up, which incensed folk even more.

But the plot thickens - turns out it's more than just Hefty whose music Trotta has stolen. Producer Rowan O'Neill says (on Hefty's Facebook wall) "he has stolen from at least 4 folk living in the Glasgow area". WTF?!

Needless to say this fucking sucks and this douche needs to be kicked to the kerb - his Amnesia gig has been cancelled, but his artist profile still exists at Beatport and Juno. EH? Do they know he is selling music that is not his own? And why bother paying money for it when it was released free in the first place?

Here's Hefty's original free download of "The Mothership":

Hefty - The Mothership - HQ FREE DOWNLOAD - (3000 Follwers!!! Thanks!) by HEFTY

Nigerians Are the New Jamaicans (sorta)