The Pender Street Stepper turns in a 75 minute selection of Jazz, Electronics and leftfield sounds.
Over the last 12 months, Vancouver’s Mood Hut collective has subtly begun to shift its musical focus. Famously, the label’s runaway was built on delivering dusty, undeniably baked music that drew influence from early analogue deep house, vintage new age music, and the morning after pulse of early ‘90s ambient house. It was a refreshing approach, but rather unsurprisingly has inspired a raft of imitators.Their answer was to widen their approach.
The whole Vancouver gang contribute to the seventh release from the Library music-themed label from Tokyo.
An album from the unheralded production units forms the first release of 2016 from the much-loved Vancouver collective.
The man also known as Local Artist is next on the Vancouver label with some “real music for real spaces”.
Starcave is only the second full release from Layne Brown’s House Of Doors project, but it reinforces both the artist and label’s reputation at the forefront of modern deep house. At a time when that term has been hijacked and brought kicking and screaming to the stadium and festival main stage – let’s be honest, calling an act like Disclosure deep house is about as accurate as saying that Kanye West has a somewhat modest opinion of himself – Mood Hut and their constituent producers bring the form back to its roots.
Every summer, a handful of records are so ubiquitous that they quickly become part of our shared musical memories. It’s long been an established part of dance music, though the boom in sun-baked European festivals and clubbing focused holiday resorts has certainly exaggerated the trend. While some more commercially-minded record labels – Defected, as an example – actively seek out these kinds of tracks and promote them in the run-up to the Ibiza season, predicting which records will strike a chord with a wide range of DJs is notoriously hard to predict. Few would have marked out Storm Queen’s “Look Right Through” – however good it was – as an Ibiza anthem, but that’s what it became in the years following its’ initial 2010 release. That eventually topped the UK singles charts, of course, albeit in a radically remixed form.
Mood Hut ended 2014 with critical praise ringing in their proverbial ears and the simple delights of their last release, Jack Jutson’s breezy “Something (On My Mind)”, finding the label new fans with each day. Mood Hut’s eighth release feels like an attempt to temper this growing attention, as Jutson teams up with fellow Pender Street Stepper Liam Butler for two quietly unassuming tracks. Both “The Glass City” and “Golden Garden” are described quite aptly as Lo-NRG by Mood Hut, and you should ignore the 12” centre label’s suggestion you play this record at 45rpm.
The Mood Hut affiliate will grace the fourth release from Bradley Zero’s Rhythm Section International label later this month.
The Hashman Deejay, Pender Street Steppers and DJ Sotofett combine for almost four hours of music on the latest Trushmix.
This mini-LP follow up to Aquarian Foundation’s 2013 debut 12” for Going Good has been a long time coming. A 30-minute portion of Mind Miniatures was in fact trailed by the label when announcing Silent Teaching, offering up a curiously dusty, otherworldly snippet taken from a recording of a rare live show at an “undisclosed location”. According to the story circulated by Going Good at the time, this live recording was rediscovered on a “discarded cassette”, to be readied for future release. Other details were, and remain still, thin on the ground.
Our review of 2014 continues, as Tony Poland, Scott Wilson and James Manning run down our 15 best record labels of the year.
It would be foolish for an outsider sat at a desk across the Atlantic to proclaim any sort of movement happening in Vancouver right now, but it’s clear there is a certain vibrancy among the Canadian city’s underground resulting in some excellent music. Pacific Rhythm is the latest label to highlight this strain of talent, borrowing artists affiliated with both Mood Hut and 1080p for a fine debut 12” in Rhythms Of The Pacific Vol 1, the first of several planned split releases.
A growing obsession is on full display as our editor raids his collection of tapes for a 90-minute mix of ambient, crunched electronics and noise.
The Mood Hut artist will issue the Sandopolis “special DJ double pack” through the DC label next month.
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The new Vancouver label calls on Cloudface, Lnrdcroy and Hashman Deejay to inaugurate proceedings.