Picks Of The Week (27.07.24

1. streetflicker - Strong Enough / At The Disco 💎 [onesevenfour]

Recommended if you like: CHEFF, Sly Chaos, Mylen

Oh boy, I think it's high time for another round of "Who's the newest sick newcomer from Down Under?"! We're all living our best festival lives so without further ado, let's jump right in and see what sort of vegemite sandwiches mister streetflicker, this week's candidate and also Hidden Gem Of The Week™️, has cooked up for us!

But first, brief backstory! What began as an inside joke between friends about their future careers DJing at Chinese Laundry, turned into a way more seriously-considered life journey for the Emerald City lad around 2018: After his first set at The World Bar, arranged by his friends Billy and Chom, Andrew realised just how much fun all of this is and started grinding on that Dancefloor grind. With early mentoring in both DJing and production from his mate Sam, perhaps better known as Blaine Stranger, and often shoulder to shoulder with his trusty back to back partner Gerald SOLDAT Lecaros (we'll get to him at some point), he (an)drew bigger and bigger crowds, and eventually caught the attention of Sydney-based promoters HiveMind. From there on, you could see streetflicker on all sorts of event lineups alongside both Oceanian heavyweights like The Upbeats, Lee Mvtthews, Flowidus and V O E, and world class international fly-ins like Kanine, Delta Heavy, Sub Focus and many, many more. In a massively heated competition, he even won Sydney's "Your Shot" wildcard contest last year, which meant he flew all the way over to Canadian festival Chasing Summer for his first international gig just last weekend!

As if that wasn't enough madness for one weekend, last Friday also saw the release of his debut double single, Strong Enough / At The Disco, on Artsea's wonderful, still all-too-underrated imprint, onesevenfour. With a classic catchy vocal sample, a lovely synth lead dancing around the massively punchy drums, warm basses to push you through even the coldest of Australian summer nights, and extra hectic drum action in the second half, A-side Strong Enough already gives us plenty to dance and vibe to, but it's the smashing flipside, At The Disco, that caused considerable wear and tear on my, and El Hornet's, "play it again" button. Right away, we've got an incredibly fun vocal cut loop leading into a fantastic, firey storm of four to the floor fun, each kick strong enough to cause some serious hearing damage, introducing the main elements of the song one by one. Cheeky synths coming in to give us yet another simple yet stupidly effective earworm to scream along to live, sirens going off in the distance - all plopped onto some heavily bouncy bass plucks and with extra aggressive drums to go along with it. Big boi tune that!

Flicking out such large tunes into the streets for your debut release should be criminal. Cannot wait to hear what else he's gonna have in store for us in the future!

Other Dancefloor bangers from this week:

Sub Focus - Wildfire
Wilkinson, Emily Makis - Break It Down
Fredrick - Bang
Deep Notion, NÜ - Falling For You

2. Neddie - Sleep Deprived EP [Selfreleased]

Recommended if you like: Vorso, False Noise, Boxplot

I know, I know, I'm like a month too late. But first of all, after a very productive Let It Roll weekend, the EP title just speaks to me. And second of all, this release is too amazing not to at least briefly talk about.

While a rather new name to me (aside from some remixes), Oscar Nolden, Neddie, Sir Neddington II, or Spag Heddy's brother from another mother, has actually been around the music production block since the beginning of the decade. Not only has he been clueing in the humble YouTube peasants on how to make INSANE MUSIC!! VERY GOOD!!!!! for years now, he has also put his very own colour bass, riddim, dubstep, goofy complextro to cry your ass off to and house out into the world all this time too! In no time, Neddie went from self-releasing - which he still does regularly, as evidenced by this new one - to jumping on labels like Celldweller's FiXT, Chime's Rushdown, and in my opinion hugely underrated UK-based label Full Flex Audio. Man, I wish I had more brain capacity today to explore any further backstory in a more in-depth way, but today we'll have to make due with surface-level low-IQ Lennart, so let's just jump into the music pool and swim around a little bit, shall we?

Just like any good Sleep Deprived mornings, we start things off rather Moody. I wish mine were as beautifully melancholic as this EP opener though. Lovely piano chords, paired with lo-fi synth vibes and softly rolling drums lead us right into the warm embrace of (Ned-)detuned, (Ned-)distorted and (Ned-)destructive walls of synths, punctuated by uniquely inky-clinky drums. Lo-fi but max-fire. Plus, we've got a wonderful breakdown full of the nicest vibes, and a whole Half-time section in the second half - what more could you need? Well, how about we take some Deep Breaths now? Of course, our head is all shredded up, so even our normal breathing sounds like artifact-filled processed whooshes taking us on a moody journey - until we reach full-manic level and wonderfully weird whoop-stabbies, with the occasional Nokia ring tone bleeps thrown in, start to glitch out all around us, forming a chaotically hectic yet exquisitely beautiful melody.

After enough hours, we of course loop all the way back around to a full-on Snippet Of Clarity - I mean, who needs sleep anyway? You might hear your surprisingly catchy and delightful, but maybe a little busted-up alarm clock tune ringing in your head still, but you of course try to push through the madness. However, the madness pushes back even harder, with larger-than-life swaths of startlingly brain-tickling sound design excellence that simply need to be experienced with good headphones and on the maximum possible volume. Maybe even higher than that. Finally, we become Lucid. Past the point of caring, where existence is a demented rollercoaster unlike anything else. That's at least what I'm feeling while listening to this EP closer, with its forward-driving drum work, massively synthified and enormously processed but guitar-driven melodic work and droves upon droves of highspeed motorway driving escapades vibes.

A truly special kind of EP that doesn't come along all that often. Trust me, I checked. Hopefully the start of more and more (and more) drum and bass from the Neddienator.

Other techy vibes from this week:

Human Theory - Pressure (❤️)
VISLA - Fight Or Flight / Severed
Annix - Weird
Echo Brown - Galvan Place (in a more deep liquid way)
Hyperlynx, Nigel Stolk - Now or Never