DJ George Lee

I've been hooked on Galcher Lustwerk since I heard Tape 22 in Eli Vervine's incredible mix for Beatport Live and his phenomenal Blowing Up The Workshop mix. His recent EP for Tsuba Limited was half amazing, half crushingly dull, but this new self-released EP under his new pseudonym, Road Hog, is a huge relief. I'm not sure if any of these could function on a dance floor (maybe during a nice warm-up), which is fine by me -- he says he wrote this record for playing in the car, and that sounds great. It's meditative and engaging and melancholic and exciting all at once. It's something I have enjoyed nodding off to, in the best way possible.

This month's episode features some music that I had on repeat on a recent trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which featured lots of driving with the wind in the windows and lovely, vibrant house on the stereo. Enjoy some of the tracks that kept that feeling, as well as some brand new tracks from Oscar Schubaq, Traumprinz, Sakro, and Alix Alvarez.

The House of Vynehall - a tribute, mixed by George Lee by Dj George Lee on Mixcloud

I know it’s dating my fixation on house music, but after a lifetime of enjoying electronic and dance music in the periphery of my musical experience, Leon Vynehall and Christian Sibthorpe's "Gave Up" is the first tune that really snared me into House Music as a centering, commanding love. It’s one of the first four tracks I bought on random blog suggestions and spent time mixing back and forth in and out of on some iPad app, seeing possibilities expand before me. 

The track is insanely good.

I don't mean to totally discredit half of Laszlo Dancehall by giving Vynehall all the credit for this, as I've truly liked quite a few of Sibthorpe's tracks as A1 Bassline. But after Gave Up, I tracked down the Vynehall releases that had come before and everything that came after, and found myself wholly entranced by his sound.

In an interview with XLR8R, Sibthorpe mentioned that Vynehall is "really good at picking out great samples of drum loops and weird obscure stuff," and it's evident in his music. He brings textures that sound completely alien to house music from most eras, particularly in his percussion (ESPECIALLY in his hi-hats, from which you can practically hear dust fly), and he can do some truly mesmerizing things with the layering and interplay of little, subtle rhythm parts, pushing things to the boundaries of polymeter without ever deviating from the movement, the relentless flow of house music. 

Most impactful, though, is how drenched his songs are with emotion. This is especially evident in his new Mini-LP, Music For The Uninvited.

An album laudable for its brevity and Vynehall's keen awareness of dynamics, of ebb and flow and build and scrape, for his sense of what he wants to say and what he needs to say; but more still for the feeling, the inward, jumbled feelings it portrays. He's said that the album was inspired by his mom's mix tapes that he listened to on the way to school as a youth. Indeed, just seeing the title "Be Brave, Clench Fists" was transportive, taking me to teenage bike rides soundtracked by delicate, failure-prone hard-drive based MP3 players that were always one curb away from leaving you in silence, teleported by Mike Skinner's otherworldly beats into a London that still exists only in my imagination. Almost every track here is exploding with that feeling, and other feelings that no matter how insistent and powerful are not always so in-your-face as that, because some feelings can't be; that's something that I think his songs encapsulate better than almost anyone else's.

Down In It Podcast - April 17 by Dj George Lee on Mixcloud

U.K. producer's hiss-kissed new record offers an unusually cozy take on house music

I haven't posted in a while, as I've been playing at The Woods pretty recently, and that's been occupying a lot of my attention. Since getting a turntable last month, I've started accumulating a lot of short-run white label releases, and have found some really lovely stuff. I've included a few such tracks in this mix. This mix starts out with some deep, dubby melodic techno, and bleeds into spacey deep house before ending up in organic, groovy deep house. It's possibly my favorite mix to date, so I hope you enjoy it.

Tracklist:

I came into Midland a bit late, as I imagine many others did, with the unforgettable Trace. It's a favorite of mine for home listening and dancefloor purposes alike, as its unintelligible-until-you-hear-what-it's-sampled-from vocal hook has always had a way of wriggling around inside my ear. Not to mention that the beat is so catchy that it's almost always a guaranteed people-mover on the dance floor. His follow-up singles have definitely been catchy, but find him seemingly distancing himself even further from the repeatable spoken word, as his Archive01 featured a voice with its words smoothed into almost pure, asyllabic sound, and now Drumtrak takes it even further. It's almost more fun than words you can understand and sing along with, because in the case of Drumtrak you can just sort of hum/moan along and really get in the vibe.