Picks Of The Week (22.01.22

1. DJ Fresh, Buunshin - Dancing In The Dark [Breakbeat Kaos II]

Recommended if you like: Grey Code, Bad Company UK, Teddy Killerz

Welp, January 2022 has now officially become one of the best release months ever for me.

It wasn't already enough for the universe to slap Best Of The Year worthy releases week after week in my face, it just had to end with the tune everyone was freaking out over last summer. Including me. Anyone who has been lucky enough to be out raving in the last year will know what I mean. If not, just wait until you hear those two kicks.

Let's zoom out a little bit first though. Who are we even talking about here? Who even is DJ Fresh? Okay I hope no one actually thinks that, because he is quite literally one of the most successful DnB artists of all time and has been around for ages. Let's entertain the idea for a paragraph or two though. DJ Fresh, or Daniel Edward Stein, has been smashing up the dancefloors all around the british countrysides and metropolises as far back as the late 1990s. He was already seeing some ridiculous successes alone as Absolute Zero, Mosquito or just Fresh or together with Darren White (dBridge), Jason Maldini, and Michael Wojcicki (Vegas) as Bad Company, but it all leveled up even more for him when he founded the label Breakbeat Kaos with Adam F around 2003. Since its inception, it has been directly responsible for the rise of countless of insanely popular artists, a list starting with Brookes Brothers and ending with the likes of Pendulum, Chase & Status and Sigma. Jheez. While most of his releases came through his own label, he was also a regular on RAM, Viper and Valve, to name a few.

Throughout his impressive career he managed to put out three albums: Escape from Planet Monday in 2006, Kryptonite in 2010 and, last but definitely not least, Nextlevelism in 2012. Kryptonite was the album that kicked the Freshman's success levels into yet another dimension, with one of its tracks reaching up to #24 on the british charts, even earning him a Platinum certification! Yes, I'm of course talking about the happiest, most upbeat DnB track ever, Gold Dust. However, that was just the start. Two tracks from the aptly-titled Nextlevelism managed to shoot right to the top of the list, making Louder and Hot Right Now his second and third Platinum-certified single. Jheez. After this impressive peak however it got a little quieter around him, aside from a single here and there. 2016 was a pretty annoying year for many people, but DJ Fresh will probably always remember it as the year he got a bleak diagnosis: thyroid cancer. To focus on his health, he took a break from music and switched careers to become a Machine Learning Developer. Not quite the topic I expected him to pivot to.

Even when the cancer went more and more into remission over the following years, it was still quite the rarity to see or hear something from DJ Fresh, relatively speaking. Only for the 15th anniversary of Breakbeat Kaos in 2018 did he become more active again, introducing Flite and Macky Gee & DJ Phantasy to the label. He didn't spend all this time twiddling his thumbs though, no no, trust me, man's been busy! So busy in fact that he now intends to relaunch the label with a whole slew of new tunes, so make way for: Breakbeat Kaos II!

Mr. Fresh kicks the relaunch of this absolutely legendary label off with a collaboration with pretty much one of the best newcomers this scene has seen in the last few years: Buunshin! How the hell have I never talked about him here?! Anyway, the TL;DR: Ferry Mellegers, a young dutch producer that debuted out of nowhere on DIVIDID with an amazing debut EP, went on to drop another ridiculously good EP on NËU, followed by releases on VISION, mau5trap, Inspected and Critical. He is basically one third of "new generation Noisia", together with IMANU and The Caracal Project. His remix game is also unbelievably good, I stand firmly by my opinion that his Apashe remix should have won best remix at the DnB Arena Awards last year. So what did these two masters of their craft cook up together? Absolute carnage.

No really, that's just the best way to put it. It may start off harmless enough with the vocal sample that seems to be taken from Schwarzkopf & Stacey Charles' 2008 hit "Dancing In The Dark" and the lush piano strutting along, but this peace doesn't last long. At all. The vocal begins to stutter, before we're rewind-switched into the drop. A deeply rumbling growling bass on top of a wild flurry of breaks leads into an equally heavy, simply menacing wall of bass. Another rewind launches us straight towards the two biggest kicks you'll have ever heard, which will promptly dropkick you across the place. There's really no way to hide from these BOM BOMs, they will get you. This short but sweet cut also acts as the connecting piece to the response of this call and response rhythm, a room-filling face-contorting drawn-out note that I don't know how else to describe, while the breaks just keep going crazy. It really is the perfect combination of DJ Fresh's oldschool sound and Buunshin's modern production skills.

I cannot stress this enough: This is utterly insane stuff. Tune of the year, calling it now.

Other great menacing and heavy stuff from this week:

Grey Code - Renewal LP (listen to this from front-to-back please)
Junk Mail - Send It / Radiogram
Teddy Killerz - Night Train
Caster - Shadowblade
Kung - Aegis
Raid:Zero - Fragments EP 💎
Deformaty - Annihilation EP 💎
Nebulate, YAANO - Nazca 💎

2. flowanastasia - Face Yourself EP [Deviant Audio]

Recommended if you like: Sydney, Charlotte Haining, Riya

Let me offer a little glimmer of positivity in this week's onslaught of deep and dark bangers. Let me talk a bit about flowanastasia.

Anastasia Klyushin has been involved with music pretty much her whole life. She was born in Ukraine, but she and her family relatively quickly moved to Toronto, Canada, where she enrolled in the The Royal Conservatory of Music to study Classical Piano and Music Theory. She participated in school choirs, went to elementary arts programs, but while music was obviously a big part of her life, she was always urged to also focus on more business-related studies. Gotta be able to buy food and all that. Cutting music out completely was never an option though. During her degree in Business Administration (with Special Honours!) she started hanging out with other hobby musicians, getting together regularly for jam sessions. Still a little bit unsure about her vocals and just her place in the music world in general, she started uploading a few of her own productions to SoundCloud, a few of them featuring a verse or two, but more as a placeholder than anything. However, people soon started reaching out to her to ask if she maybe wants to sing something on their production, which then lead to her debuting on the likes of Fokuz, Soul Deep and Liquicity sister label Galacy. Fun fact: Galacy were the first label directly reaching out to her (instead of her sending tunes to the label) for a topline!

Under her then-alias Anastasia she managed to march through the whole DnB scene in just a few years, with releases on Liquicity, RAM, Pilot, Viper, Technique, Elevate, Critical, and more. After recently being let go from her work (thanks to a good ol' merger), she decided to use this opportunity to try out doing this music thing full-time. It's Can-ada, not can't-ada, you know. Along with this didn't just come a name change to flowanastasia, but also a whole new wave of excellent content from her, most notably her new podcast Flow With The Show about life and all that comes along with it, with guests like Mefjus (big recommendation for this episode), PRFCT Mandem and Winslow, and her Recording DnB Vocals series, in which she and her partner in crime Tyr Kohout give the audience a detailed look behind the scene of some of her biggest recent tunes. She's also very open about her journey through mental issues, addictions and the likes, and just seems like a pretty cool person in general. Under this theme of facing yourself, warts and all, now comes her very own debut EP/album/7-tracker, Face Yourself, released on Canadian label Deviant Audio, the label of the one and only STRANJAH.

This personal journey begins with the wonderful River Flows, produced by Nymfo. On a lush piano-driven instrumental effortlessly flowing along the river that is the set of continuously rolling breaks flowanastasia sits us down for one of the more unique vocal performances in DnB. Not only is she showcasing her soulful voice to great effect, as you'd expect from her, she also takes one big creativity leap forward by interspersing some deeply personal spoken word verses into the mix, written at the height of the first lockdown, i.e. May 2020. This vocal was originally meant for a different track, but the label rejected the idea at the time. Since she was quite happy with it, she kept the vocal to herself for a future project, which then came to fruition when she started collaborating with dutch legend Nymfo. I think we can feel lucky that it worked out like it did, because this way we got an honestly really wonderful tune with a uniquely long staying power out of it. Further down the tracklist we're also treated to a live acoustic version of the tracks she performed with a jazz band, which wasn't just a personal dream of hers, but is also a beautifully vulnerable rendition of the track that I'd love to see more of!

Next up we've got the first of two (technically three) collaborations with Tyr Kohout, the first single of the release: Sending Signals. While this one goes for a completely different vibe than River Flows, it's safe to say the creativity levels are kept high, with Tyr showing off his talent for production on this uniquely techy instrumental that's just oozing funk, and flowanastasia living up to her name and flexing her flow left and right. Obviously it has been meticulously written and engineered, but in a way it also feels reminiscent of a circle of people jamming together and her improvising along with it. For further variations of this interesting idea, be sure to check out the entries in the accompanying remix competition, the winners of which are set to be released in the near-ish future!

We continue our journey through the various styles with the dancefloor vibe that is Higher Forces, featuring a synth-heavy production by RAM and Viper regular Loko, who you might remember from the original Bassline Secrets. After this energetic dancefloor number, we take another break. This time however, flowanastasia takes a break from DnB altogether. For this debut EP she wanted to challenge herself to use that aforementioned piano expertise and compose a whole song for it, which became this piano interlude For Jana. Dedicated to her late grandmother and written completely in Russian, this short but sweet excursion is probably the most personal track on here.

Last but not least we've got two versions of the title track Face Yourself ahead of us: One DnB, one Halftime, both featuring STRANJAH and Tyr Kohout. Due to the drums' unconvential flow and the vocal back and forth between flowanastasia and Tyr Kohout himself (who knew he had those kinds of pipes!), the DnB version is immediately giving me this lovely improvisational, jazzy jam circle feeling again, just like Sending Signals before it. For the Halftime mix the group transforms this loungy DnB vibe into a minimalistic, synthy rhythm that might not be my usual tempo, but works really well in this context.

All in all, it's safe to say that this debut EP isn't just a great musical journey through all the different subgenres that flowanastasia likes to dabble in, it's also a deeply personal one, both in its lyrical themes and in the heavily jazz-inspired vibes that can be found throughout. Great stuff!

Other liquidy and vocal-focused things from this week:

Bru-C, Wilkinson - Paradise
Logistics - Love Letters EP
QZB, Sydney Bryce - Ashes & Bones
Alpha Rhythm - Within Eternity EP
Low:r - Dance All Night / All Of You (w/ Aleya Mae)
FooR, Mollie Collins, Emma Cannon - Too Bad
Dynamite MC, Voltage - Legacy
Alcemist, Coco - Stan Smith
LMNOP - Dream Jungle EP