Picks Of The Week (09.03.24

1. METHOD - From The Ashes (feat. Houndeye) / Watch Me [Ridmic]

Recommended if you like: Lexurus, Andromedik, Jon Void

Nowadays, there's so many different paths you can take towards recognition and success in music. One that is probably among the rarest ones out there is through YouTube Mixes - I see your confusion, allow me to give an example. Let's talk about man like METHOD.

Obviously, there's a lot more to his musical journey than I let on in the intro there. Straight outta Den Haag, Dutchman Bob Devilee, as he's known to friends, family and me because I googled it, has been building up a community of like-minded DnB enthusiasts for ages now. What you might not know, however, is that his initial plans for YouTube weren't music related at all! 13 years ago, Bob started his now 41k subscribers strong channel off under the name HDCommentary, a place for Starcraft 2 commentaries, Modern Warfare 2 (the original one!) quickscoping, Minecraft, Hearthstone and League of Legends content - truly the most early 2010s sentence I've ever written. From 2017 on, gaming gave way to music, or more specifically, DnB mixes! What didn't change, however, was his closeness to the community he was building. Every mix saw him specifically asking for feedback, with Bob responding to each and every comment, in the early days even promising a response in less than 24 hours. It even became part of his morning routine!

The next few years saw him spreading his DJing wings far and wide, participating in various mix competitions for Viper, Fiber, High and Liquici-Tea, and winning the one organised by Primal Instinct, sharing a lot of his favourite mashups on his socials and, of course, continuing to deliver his hype-inducing full hour mixes. As a big-time fan of the aforementioned Dutch Liquid, both Power- and regular, imprint Liquicity, he eventually started crafting warm-up mixes for their bigger events to spread the hype, cementing himself as an integral part of the larger community. Behind the curtain of all the big mixes with their view counts in the hundreds of thousands, in other words on his publicly available SoundCloud, you could also see how much fun he was having playing around with tunes, from random set openers featuring the right amounts of Mr. Happy to some Dubstep mashups, and if you go far back enough, even a piano-driven cover of Hakuna Matata. In 2019, his loyal SoundCloud followers could even get a glimpse of what's to come in the near future: his first original production!

The ID uploaded back then was an early version of what would eventually become You Started A Fire, one of his two debut songs on High Tea's 2020 Rooibos compilation (the other one being Hefty, or should I say Hef-tea?). Only around a year after crossing off that entry on his bucket list, the next milestone was reached: A release on Liquicity's then-new sub-label Ridmic, complete with an upload on the main channel and an inclusion on the legendary Yearmix! That was merely the beginning though. 2022 saw METHOD releasing on both the Spring and Winter AquaSettlement compilations, plus another anthem on Ridmic, of course leading to plenty more Yearmix inclusions, and, most importantly, a set on the summer festival's Nebula stage! The madness didn't even stop there though, in 2023 Liquicity officially commissioned him to put together mixes celebrating the seasonal compilations, officially uploaded on the main channel! Plus, a slot on the summer festival's Solar stage!

Now, METHOD once again returns to the place his Liquicity producer career began, Ridmic, with a Dancefloor one-two-punch so well-crafted, so anthemic and just so all-around sick I just want to hear it blasted out at all the summer festivals. Especially From The Ashes, with his fellow literally game-changing game industry colleague, DnB craftsman and simply too amazing vocalist Houndeye delivering yet another stunning and entirely too catchy vocal performance, captures that spirit of the Liquicity anthem so well I had to do a double-take on the artist name the first time I heard it. Synths so large they make any home setup feel like the main stage, melodies so sing-alongable you won't get them out of your head anytime soon and chugging basses so fat, you can't help but break out into skanking. The flipside of the project, Watch Me, takes all these qualities and flips them on their head: Hypnotic vocals, relentless 4x4 beats, bunker vibes out the wazoo! Get you a METHOD man that can do both.

Methodically crafted for both the big outdoor stages and the more intimate venues, supremely catchy, straight-up anthems.

Other Dancefloor releases from this week:

Polygon - Echoes Of Yesterday
Wilkinson, NORTH - Balance
Dirtyphonics, Circadian - You Want Me
Culture Shock - Breathe

2. Malley - Distance / Convergence 💎 [Stellar Audio]

Recommended if you like: Skylark, Misanthrop, Secula

Now for something a bit more out-there. Let's talk about up-and-comer, and this week's Hidden Gem Of The Week™️, Malley!

There's not a whole lot to be said about Oliver "Malley" O'Malley's backstory up until now, but that kind of makes the level of sound design he's pushing nowadays even crazier! Born and raised in Norwich, but now residing in York, the 21-year-old has been smashing it as part of the respective local underground scenes for quite some time now, with gigs at Norwich's Basement Session and York'z Breakz, but what really makes him stand out in my eyes is the wild evolution his own productions have made. In just a year or so, he went from the more rave-y, UK sound type tunes in 2020, to the experimental, breaky and techy sides of things in 2021, when he debuted his first proper release, Whisper, on Bad Taste. The techy aspect continued to grow more and more though, each tune sporting an even more intricate level of production than the ones that came before, and by 2023, his SoundCloud had become a real treasure trove of techy smashers (especially Reason!). In other words, a perfect candidate for my favourite Bristol-based label out there, Stellar Audio!

After the conclusion of the interplanetary SOL Series earlier this year, with us having examined the celestial bodies inhabited by Submonitor and Vici, Stellar has now engaged the Phase 3™️ hyperdrive to travel even further across the musical galaxy, with Malley being our captain for this maiden voyage. While recalibrating the Direction we're all going in, our vessel's engine experiences a bit of a stuttery bumpy start, but our captain luckily manages to work around it. As we pass all sorts of intergalactic bleeps and bloops, the sparse bassy bursts of propulsion keep us aimed towards greatness. Also, the drum action is rather tight, which is something that carries over to the next stop on our interstellar journey, Convergence. As we close in towards our destination, the sheer scale of the planetary system we aim to explore simply overwhelms us - basslines that seem to defy every single one of our known laws of physics, paired with drum action that rapidly evolves in a matter of minutes, going from minimal steppers to metallic companions to the symbiotic distortion underneath, eventually ending up as a fast-paced whirlwind of madness that's making our heads spin.

All metaphors aside, this is absolutely fantastic! Production so out of this world, so cinematic and so maximalley minimal that you can't help but be fascinated by it.

Other techy stuff from this week:

Cuepric, Melanie Ring - Aphel 💎
IMANU, INDI - Reminiscing
The Caracal Project, Camo & Krooked - While you count down.
LYLY - Argue 💎
LYLY - Crashing Down 💎
Liveon - Block Universe