The Audiozine

After an achingly long period of dormancy, the Audiozine is back in action. It's been over a year since I posted to the Listening Series, but today's posts should be a nice return to form. Check it:

1) Portishead -- "Machine Gun"
This is the new single from the upcoming (and 10-years-in-the-waiting) new Portishead album, Third. "Machine Gun" represents a significant change of pace, with a stuttering electro beat replacing the pitched down R&B samples of yesteryear. This bodes extremely well.

2) Ricardo Villalobos -- "Enfants (Chants)"
After hearing about Villalobos for a long time, I picked up his Fabric36 Mix many months ago and it quickly became one of my favorite albums of 2007. He has a knack for sculpting really clean, round sounds and placing them into really intricate rhythmic structures. The tracks are minimalist dance music through and through, but when I played the mix for non-fans of electronic music it resonated with them too; his attention to detail, the seamlessness of his mixology, the snappy treble and elastic bass sounds, and strange leftfield turns (taiko drummers?!?!?!) invite outside listeners in, even as they confound dancefloor conventions. "Enfants (Chants)" is a 17 minute epic that Villalobos made the day before his first child was born. The track is deliberately minimal because he meant for a handful of his DJ friends to use it as a scaffold for mixing with other tracks. As his small coterie of friends started spinning this jam, it created a sensation that culminated in its release as a somewhat limited release EP and tons of blogohype. Rather hard to find for a while but now proliferating on the interweb, enjoy this slab of digital hotness!