Stripewaves is a music blog updated by a selected group of artists from all over the world. They submit their latest tracks, sets, news and extend the network to more artists.
We mainly focus on Dubstep, IDM, Broken Beat, Glitch-hop and all sorts of experimental music.The goal of this blog is to broaden your musical horizon and keep you inspired with the newest, freshest sounds.
Stripewaves is based in The Haque, The Netherlands and is also hosting events in that area.
Allow me to introduce an exceptionally productive producer from Breda (NL), who goes by the name Coco Bryce. Some of you might remember him from sharing a vinyl slab with the likes of Slugabed. He recently released his free to download album called “At the Chopping Mall” on Myor.
When asked to deliver a brief personal statement, Coco declared:
“Uhm, dunno man, I hang around the LowRiders Collective, that kinda stuff. Oh yeah, I spin at Generation Bass and Impakt Festival.
As far as producing is concerned, believe me, I’m a tinkerer with weird ideas and sometimes a bit of luck [aren't we all, ed.].Thomas de Rijk-HALP came over to my place last week to work on a couple of remixes and he showed me some tricks on Ableton Live (r)… stood speechless… suddenly realized again how little I know about the software…
The track ["Comes to Mind", ed.] was more or less built like this: sliced up the original tune in Live, then simply **ed around with the different bits until i found something I liked. Programmed a beat and then severely compressed the chopped slices, side-chaining the compressor to the beat as to gently squeeze the slices and the beats together.
That’s pretty much all there is to it, and then of course, just tinker until it sounds good!”
Here is an interview to one of Rotterdam’s foremost pioneers of IDM/Dubstep: Atiq (Guido Van Den Brink), who has agreed to let us release a peek review of his long-awaited collaboration LP with Enk (Pim Arnoldus).
“I’ve been producing for about 7 years now, after graduating at the SAE [School of Acoustic Engineering - Rottedam, ed.]. Until that time, I’d been playing in metal bands (turntablist/DJ/samples) which is the scene I know Enk from. He used to play guitar with the band Brainshake and, back then, already used his PC to make music – mostly with the old “Fruity Loops” 3.5.6
SW: Would you care to comment on the present-day music scene in Rotterdam?
Right now there is no scene in Rotterdam. As a matter of fact, there isn’t much of a scene for our style antwhere in NL. Sure, there’s a couple of things happening here and there, but nothing reaches a musically competitive level. Unfortunately, Rotterdam lacks many basic aspects of a music scene; especially now the WATT [Rotterdam's largest electronic music venue, ed.] has filed bankrupcy, there is in fact very little going on in town.
I used to organize events for several years – now I’ve had to put an end to that. It was a financial challenge, and it was way too hard to get audiences to respond to unfamiliar styles. People seem to prefer staying at home.
SW: Musically speaking, what are you into right now?
There are definitely a number of interesting styles i’ve got my ears on. Everything from Instra:Mental and pretty much everything that gets aired on the Club-Autonomic podcast. I am somehow attracted by minimal samples and some sort of 80’s Blade Runner atmosphere [8 bit/Aquacrunk/wonky, ed.]. You have to get into that in order to properly appreciate it, and right now i’m totally hooked, buying piles of records of the stuff.
Moreover, I listen to a lot of Synkro who, in my opinion, is proposing that 2-steppy/garage sound in a very innovative manner. I’m also a big fan of Reso – the man produces “party dubstep” with an uncanny finesse and outstanding care for details. His tracks truly are as structured and varied as a song. I would also flag out Marlow, this guy simply comes up with the sickest basslines.
Besides that, I also dig a lot of quiet music, movie soundtracks, stuff like Burial. My musical taste is rather varied.
SW: How do you go about producing a new track?
We [Atiq-Guido and Enk-Pim, ed.] deem it rather important to develop a personal style, instead of just imitating other tracks. Producing is making something you really think is radically innovative and cool, and if it’s unusual or weird, well, so be it! We find it important to stand up for our inventiveness.
When we come up with a musical idea, we have no preconception whatsoever of the result. We just sit in the studio, fidget around with samples or with some fat-ass beat, and the track very much comes together by itself. We first assemble a looping beat, then develop it and articulate it, etc.
We used to work with Logic 5.5 but nowadays we switched to Fruitystudio and it works fine.
When we publish something we always have it mixed down and mastered at the Mokosound studios – they are the only people we ever allow to touch our music after it has phisically left our studio. Mastering should be left to people who truly are specialized engineers – it definitely is a craft apart. Each time we’re at Mokosound we learn something new – besides, when you’ve been working on a track for a while, you’ve heard it so much your ears are not objective any more.
SW: How is your musical production taking shape for the time being?
We’ve been putting our LP together and it now finally looks like we’re getting somewhere. We really tried to develop our own style and make a strong musical statement. That simply takes a lot of time. On average, we spend about 6 weeks on a single track. Since we both have jobs and we’re not neighbors, we can only meet once a week to produce.
The LP is going to be published by Mindtrick Records [Guido-Atiq's Rotterdam label, ed.] on CDs and 12″. We will also release a videoclip and plan a small release party tour – until now we’ve been focusing on the album rather than getting gigs.
In the meantime, Mindtrick Records will release another 2 single tracks, a downtempo LP by The Eerier Child, and i’ll publish my solo album in October. Plenty to keep Rotterdam busy for a while”.
Just found an email by these guys on my soundcloud inbox… my fingers are still shaking with excitement as I frantically post their track onto stripewaves.
“Atomosophobia” by Vengeance of the Undead (Lucas Silverstein and David Wadsworth, New York & Florida, United States). Amazing work guys!!
Swarms operates in Bristol (UK), another european city where music lovers are forced into the underground by the swampy cultural climate.
Lovers of the “deep” sound (Burial, 2562, Myrkur, etc) will enjoy this one: it’s called “Function212″ (which somewhat reminds me of G.M.Koenig’s titles back in the ol’ days).
Updates from m-b-glitchcore