Picks Of The Week (27.01.24

1. Venjent - Blink EP [Chilli Tribe Records]

Recommended if you like: Crash Comet, LQ, Air.K & Cephei

Usually, my selection on here skews towards the lesser-known artists of the scene - those that haven't had their moment in the spotlight yet. Venjent is, lik, the opposite of that. Sure, he isn't headlining festivals all over the world or anything yet, so there's still some way to go, but chances are, you've all heard about him, or at least seen a video of his. However, when you only focus on the admittedly amazing snoring goat baddaddan and general animal sound shenanigans, you might miss all the other incredible music and a ton of fascinating tidbits about the man behind the memes. So let's unravel this chin-presenting, small-sunglasses-wearing persona of his a bit. Let's talk about Vincent Welch!

Unsurprisingly, the Cobham-based British lad has spent basically his whole life pursuing music in one way or another. Inspired by his dad's tenure at the London Symphony Orchestra playing the Violin, teenage Vince started messing around with all sorts of instruments himself, joining many, sadly unfindable, bands in the process. His passion for crossover electronic sounds à la The Prodigy soon landed 18-year-old him a gig in Beijing of all places, playing drums and co-producing for Dubstep-Punk-Metal fusion band Subsource from 2012 on. Fun fact, the band Skindred took such a liking to his mashup productions, that they regularly played the Subsource remix of Slipknot's Duality at their shows for a while! Lots of touring, producing and writing later, Vincent and band mate Paul Frazer spun off with their own two-piece music outlet, the "Anarchic Electro Psych Punk Noise" duo Black Futures.

Before any of their own productions could even come out, however, they fulfilled a frankly insane life dream of theirs in 2015, when none other than The Prodigy's Liam Howlett asked them to produce a couple tracks (Rok-Weiler and Rebel Radio) for their newest album The Day is my Enemy. No biggie, you know. Just like that 3 album deal they struck with Sony soon after. Just normal things innit. With all of that under their belt, plus their tune Trance earning the coveted Track of the Week label from BBC1 Radio's Annie Mac, Black Futures were quickly becoming a household name, but even then Vince probably couldn't have predicated what the next couple years all had in store for him. Not only did he lock himself away a remote barn in a Temperate Rainforest in Dartmoor to produce his first feature film soundtrack, for 2020's The Owners, he also founded his very own label Chilli Tribe Records for him and his mates Morty, Jax, Octae, LusiD and Rokkr, started his Alternative Pop project Lifus Wonderful, changed his band's name to Never Not Nothing out of respect for the Black Futures Month during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, got his music featured in a couple NHL games, worked on the soundtrack of F1 Manager 2022, wrote, leased, mixed & mastered all sorts of things...

Oh yeah, he also started his Venjent project!

Since 2020, Vince has been remixing basically every random sound he could find, from flies to chickens, from someone "sharpening" their snooker cue to interviews from Manchester United players, into straight-up bangers. Until one day, he opened the door to internet stardom, opening the minds of the whole DnB scene in early 2022, immediately catapulting him to legend status. From there on out, Venjent reels have been regularly shattering the million view barrier. With what? Cats sneezing, toilets, pipelines bursting, farts, dogs humping squeaky toys, fragile men revving up their motorcycles, machines shooting out metal beams, weird birds, dogs, chairs, tables, lasers and many, many more surprisingly musical random things! He even does a "Advenjent calendar" every December, where he posts a new sample remix snippet every single day. Between all the actually quite excellently produced memes and covers, however, he's also been putting out all sorts of wonderful punk-infused, heavy-hitting and heartfelt originals, with the newest project, liquid-focused four-tracker Blink, probably being my favourite so far. So let's finally talk about it then!

The EP kicks off with an melancholically upbeat ode to the now™️, a hymn on the fleeting nature of all things, the title track Blink. Together with Casey Lim, better known as Oktae, Venjent takes us on a guitar-filled, modern-UK-DnB-whomp-laden, fast-paced journey through the feelings that come with a relationship that simply isn't meant to last forever. Sure, it's not even close to the first time these two incredible talents have worked together (and hopefully not the last time either), but putting both their wonderful voices together on a tune? In a duet? With both performances being layered on top of each other? And an absolutely lovely lyrical switchup in the finale? I mean, how can I not love that?! Next, we've got a solo Welch performance with Eye to I. Wandering pianos, syncopated drums, warm bass, passionate vocals about a love that's grown distant - I was already enjoying myself quite a bit at that point, but then I reached the second half. Suddenly, gnarly basses start aggressively launching themselves across the auditory room on top of more straight-forward drums, quickly making this one of my favourites of his.

Two songs in, I was growing suspicious of how amazing this EP has been so far. Surely, something I wouldn't like as much would come along soon. Then, Actors with fellow Chilli Tribe member and orchestral-slash-atmospheric master Rokkr came on and any pessimism I had left in my bones just evaporated. Everything from Vince's marvellous vocal performance to Rokkr's breathtaking string arrangements, plus the subdued yet larger-than-life bass and the consistently rolling drums, creates this monumental vibe that you just let yourself fall into. After lulling you into this false sense of security, however, they pull out the rug from underneath you with an honestly ridiculous switchup in the second half, in which anything from the ever-looping synth melody to the already quite large floating bass is injected with an extraordinary amount of pure, controlled distortion, leaving me reeling every single time.

Luckily, there's still one last vibe to repair my fragile emotional state with left: Venjent's remix of Rokkr & Oktae's ambient orchestral journey Till the Night Comes. As if the previous tunes weren't already goosebump-inducing enough, this one effortlessly transforms the heavenly string-led instrumental and ethereally beautiful vocals into a proper crying-in-the-club liquid anthem, wrapping your soul up in only the warmest blankets of basses while heavily tugging at your heart strings.

Venjent once again proves why he is one of the most exciting artists our scene has to offer at the moment.

Other liquid things from this week:

NCT, Genetics - Your Song
Heymac - Cerasus / Tundra
Hiraeth - Lost In Music
BCee, DJ Marky, Makoto, SOLAH - Tell Me
LSB - Give You Up

2. Saka - Your Eyes / Solace [Pilot]

Recommended if you like: Rueben, RefraQ, Tom Finster

While I obviously love what our more mainstream European scene brings to the table, there's something truly special about what happens on the fringes of the genre. One such name that fortunately appears more and more often on the DnB releases lists is leftfield bass music producer Saka and since his newest release on none other than UKF's Pilot Records is quite fantastic, I couldn't think of a better second pick for the week!

His roots firmly split between both San Francisco and Hong Kong, Eric Chow aka Saka has been part of the forward-thinking electronic music movement basically ever since he started producing in 2017, with the first leftfield fruits of his labor seeing the light of day in 2018. Inspired by the likes of quickly, quickly, Player Dave, zotti and some names even us filthy DnB simpletons will know like Noisia, Mefjus, Alix Perez and Eprom, Eric had been spreading the gospel of experimental bass/halftime all throughout his home base in San Francisco, which not only garnered the attention of Gud Vibrations, Halcyon, Inspected, Bassrush Records, Deadbeats, among many others, but also landed him sets at both massive festivals like EDC and Ultra and on Ivy Lab's tour. While his first few years as an artist were spent mostly operating out of America, where he also spent a lot of his formative years, he soon grew tired of the scenery and moved back to his home town, Hong Kong, to reconnect with his cultural roots.

Good thing he did, because this gave him a completely new-found sense of artistic purpose and passion for the project, without which we might not have gotten the kind of wonderful tunes we've gotten from him the past couple years! While his "main" sound, if you can even pinpoint that down, is not necessarily something that would usually end up on here, he is always experimenting with all sorts of different genres and styles, so, of course, DnB is also playing a role every now and then. Since 2021, we've had one-offs Let Me Live, Exia and White Lies and even DnB remixes for REAPER and Tom Finster, two names that couldn't be more different, but we've never really had a "full" DnB project from him. Until this week, that is!

Considering the series of masterpieces that Pilot has been putting out lately, one might say that the pressure to deliver as the follow-up is rather high, but even in the face of this kind of competition Saka doesn't flinch once and delivers a frankly stunning two-tracker. First off, we've got the immaculate vibe that is Your Eyes, featuring American singer/songwriter/mood dweller Amethyst. Sublime strings, concentrated distortion sound design gems, a supremely lovely fonky bassline and of course Amethyst's top notch vocals are so meticulously arranged, with so much empty space in mind, that we end up with a rhythm so catchy you can't help but sway your head along to it. A progression that flows from funky to more subdued so smoothly you won't even notice, a treasure trove of cool production details everywhere, I simply love it.

In one of the interviews I read for this, Saka mentions he is fascinated by the concept of duality in music. If you want an example for that, look no further than this release! On the one hand you've got the melancholic, floaty loveliness of Your Eyes, with a lyrical theme of fleeting connections between strangers and looking for love around you, on the other you've got the heavy-hitting Solace, which posits that it's totally fine or even better to be alone sometimes. Out of these two, Solace is definitely also the weirder one: an intro that starts off like lo-fi city foliage from another planet, quickly broken up via sword clashing sound effects and sick guitars, a truly strange-sounding bass explosion lead going through all sorts of different flows, and a fake-out outro that has not once failed to confuse me on a background listen. Delightful!

What can I say, I'm a saka for Saka's dnb.

Other weird stuff from this week:

Maze - The Rocks
Fred V, Danny Connors, Petra - Metronome
Secula - Unruhe
Khronos - Exile EP