Tigerbeat6, the label that has continued to crank out audio gems for the past 13 years, continues its tradition of giving you more than you could have predicted that you wanted. In what seems to be a resurgence in output from the label, and the artist, Kid606 dropped the precursor an upcoming full-length, called Ejaculazer Tag EP.
During the early 00’s, while living in San Francisco, I witnessed the ascent of artists who were, fairly or unfairly, dubbed “laptop musicians.” Kit Clayton, Twerk, Matmos, Blectum from Blechdom, Sutekh, Mochipet and scores of others were taking their laptops out of their bedroom studios and into clubs to perform in front of an audience. While today it may not seem out of place to see a laptop musician or DJ performing, a decade ago it was something of an anomaly. The one artist who was the face of this scene at the time was Kid606. Since 1999, Miguel Trost De Pedro (aka Kid606) has been fucking with a variety of music scenes—punk rocker, raver, IDM-list nerd, Kid606 didn’t care. Your scene was fair game, and Miguel was dubbed, “L’Enfant terrible” by the press. The Kid with track titles like, “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass,” has grown up, moved to Berlin and continued to kick out the jams.
Tigerbeat6, the label that has continued to crank out audio gems for the past 13 years, continues its tradition of giving you more than you could have predicted that you wanted. In what seems to be a resurgence in output from the label, and the artist, Kid606 dropped the precursor an upcoming full-length, called Ejaculazer Tag EP.
“Ejaculazer Tag”—”influenced in equal parts by Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, and Vangelis”—is an 80 BPM track that comes on like the ambient track to a Sci Fi movie—with an expansive and lush synthesizer line—then evolves into a full-on layered and beat driven track with ghostly pitched-up vocals. The bass-driven rework of Mochipet’s remix pulls the ghost vocals from the original mix and pulls them up in the mix, adds sweeping stings and jacks the beat up a few BPM’s and twists it up with a swing, putting it somewhere between a hip-hop and grime rework. Another 80 BPM jam that’s a lot more of a bassbin stomper is “We call it life.” With rave juno sweeps sitting in the background, and subtle drops, it feels like dubstep’s more pensive goth brother. The rolling snares featured on “160bpm club remix” stays true to the original. Like early purveyors of “intelligent” drum and bass like LTJ Bukem, Photek and Subtropic, this track takes all of the energy, drive and bass of a club banger and infuses it with a truly beautiful melody. The 1-minute and 41-second wobbly bass driven affair of “Cartoon Fun” starts off as a choppy drive, complete with cartoon samples and eventually expands into a beautiful and lush synth-driven song reminiscent of an early Tranquility Bass track. Another remix on the EP that takes the original into smokers dub territory comes courtesy of Schematic Record’s artist Joe Lentiti. His “Dub” mix mutates the track into a sound that would be right at home in the Pole/Basic Channel family. It’s as if the layers of sound used here were stacked-up high, then stripped away to leave an imprint of the sound that was once there. The Kanji Kinetic remix of “Let’s get radioactive” is a close to a “classic” TigerBeat6 sound on the record. It almost immediately preps you with a build moving to drop with big filtered synths, stabby pianos and quickly sampled vocals. The track then jumps into familiar mutant drum and bass territory, with vocals that sound like they were generated off Apple’s Text To Talk feature (think “Rewind” by Cylob). A very solid mix.
Ejaculazer Tag EP is available on Tigerbeat6. Buy at Amazon or Juno.
