Montreal duo The Gulf Stream takes hip-hop templates and feeds them into the hungry mouth of international bass music. Composed of Kodok (Ivann Uruena) and Archibald Singleton (Jérôme Guilleaume), when they first geared up to jam the pair were a ways off from knowing that they would have such fun playing together. As they grew musically, they forged their sound around a mid-tempo hip-hop, full of subtle samples, melodic synths and powerful basses. Anything goes when it comes to samples. The live set they play is always evolving, full of glitches and as they never stopped jamming, new compositions keep emerging each time they play. 

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The latest talent to emerge from James Holden’s Border Community imprint, Norfolk’s Luke Abbott has been producing warped analog-grade progressive house in its many variants since 2006, when he first began releasing singles on labels such as the now-defunct Output and Trash Aesthetics. In 2008, he made the move over to the Bedroom Community, where he settled into the label’s sound easily with a series of singles and the 2010 album, Holkham Drones. Yet no matter how strange the textures of Abbott’s productions may become, their core is still warm, melodious and often nostalgic.

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With five singles under the Floating Points alias since 2009, Londoner Samuel T. Shepherd is a classically trained 24 year-old with talent to burn.  The surface facade of his sonic landscape are not unlike recent deep-house revivalists such as Motor City Drum Ensemble, but underneath the richly textured grooves of Shepherd’s productions lies an appreciation for jazz and the fusionist club tendencies of an ever-mutating bass culture. 

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That he got his start in the German techno underground of the late-80s is not the kind of background from a man who calls himself Terry Lee Brown Jr. The driving, soulful template that centers his almost 60 releases since the mid-90s is more readily reminiscent of Chicago house or, alternately, the forceful slam of Frankie Bones. All considered, Norman Feller – the man behind Terry – is versatile is design and approach; his tracks and albums can sound quite different from one another, incorporating aspects of jazz, house, downtempo, funk, techno and more. His 11 full-length albums and collections, as well as his nearly two-dozen singles and EPs, have been released almost exclusively through Germany’s Plastic City Records. 

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Up until 2008 Dave Pezzner was virtually unknown to the electronic dance music community, aside from his works in the duo Jacob London (Classic Music, Doubledown, U-Freqs). For 16 years he cut his chops with partner Bob Hansen, creating eccentric house and break beat rhythms often crossing the lines between bad-ass, funky and hilarious. In the winter of 2008, Pezzner took to his own studio to begin work on his first solo output composing songs that are more serious, with an abstract artistic sensibility. Quickly Dave’s catalog began to materialize with a signature sound: lofty percussive themes with intentions to create hypnotic soundscapes for the body as well as the brain.

It wasn’t long before Pezzner found his first 5 songs scooped up by London-based Freerange Records, covering the first two EP’s of his solo career, “Other Lover” and “Almost Here”. These two EPs garnered him massive support from artists as varied as John Digweed, Laurent Garnier, Peter Kruder, Steve Bug and Ben Watt, setting up Pezzner as a producer on the rise. Dave has also got an arsenal of remixes forthcoming for heavyweights including Josh Wink, Mark Farina, and Mike Monday. Its a dizzying number of releases for an emerging artist, but now that Pezzner’s stepped out on his own, he’s definitely got a lot to say.

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Footprintz is the Montreal based duo formed through the dreamy musical decadence of Adam Hunter and Clarian North, channeling hypnotic euphoria from the constellation Pegasus into kaleidoscopic sunrise floors. Adam, a spontaneously inspired composer, organist, harpsichordist, has combined works for choir, orchestra, and deep journeying kpanlogo rhythms. Meanwhile Clarian is an up-and-coming mad-scientist/part-time unemployed counterfeiter, shunned and despised by his fellow peers and professors for his incoherent musical abominations deemed by tabloid journalists as stunningly unprecedented, continues on his quest to compose. 

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Feeding the minimalist monster with soda, salted water, diluted paint & kisses. Recife love free jazz, free form, free funk, and freedom.

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130 bpm, FM synthesis, an unhealthy passion light games that leave streaks like cars on the ceilings of your bedroom, jazz, disco. However you break it down, Simon Called Peter is never disappointing. For MUTEK @ Piknic 2011, Simon Bélair (aka Simon Called Peter) will present mostly the new techno-house material they’ve composed over the last few months. Largely influenced by the Detroit electronic underground, a live performance by Bélair will no doubt invoke dancing, tanning, and ecstasy.

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