So now you've heard the original.... Take a moment to ask yourself what stood out? An the reason I say this is because.... No two people will hear the same thing, in that sense we all interpret records differently!
First off let me be the one to tell you the tracklist:
Atjazz & Jullian Gomes - Overshadowed (ARC - 38)
1.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes
2.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes (Atjazz Galaxy Aart Dub)
3.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes (Jullian Gomes Perspective)
PURCHASE HERE
Yes that's right..... I can assure you that you will be receiving one of the best vinyls I have heard in a while (No Bullshit) this is a hot joint. It's hard to review tracks for me as I see sound and that effects in turn how I feel and interpret a record but here goes anyway. Usually with records I would see landscapes, different forms of impacts, various colours and or stories. Yeah you guessed it, with this record I see a short story. (It's possibly best to have the original track on in the background as you read this first review)
Track by track, whats the crack?
1.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes
First point to make is the kick drum just screams at you with a ferocious force that will drive deep in the heart of any clubs sound system, I would liken it visually to the moment when chubby rain impacts on a puddle. Immediately as the kick is thrust in you are hearing these haunting yet melodic keys, which has all the eeriness of your average haunted house but makes you feel more mellow than a 1970's hippy.
So now picture this groove building with some well mixed tape noise in the background and now you have the point in the visual story in-which the young girl is looking out the window, as the rain beats down on the windowsill she puts her hand to the window and a single tear falls down her face. (At this point your unsure whether this is a review, a badly written script or if im crazy...... Answer is probably the later)
Moving on.... You remember you have the constant chant of the clav, driving the groove and a minute in the track breaks into a deep dark and dubby groove that has a consuming presence, which is quickly followed up by a deep driving bassline that makes the hairs on your neck raise, so close your eyes and we can really do some work on the dancefloor here!!!! You have the claps and snares flowing throughout the mix with the enchanting keys building and building. At this point you notice that the girl at the window has seen a ghostly figure motioning up the garden path toward her, the tension is building and the arrival of this ghost is imminent. Then you realise the girl at the window is not scared or sad, it's someone special coming home and the hi-hats are motioning waves of excitement and the changing hi-hats are expressing beaconing the need to hurry inside as they build. All the while the haunting chants are just echoes of memories this girl has of that special someone, it all becomes clear. (At One has lost the plot!)
As the track brakes for an aptly timed interval the door to the house is blown open by the wind and the girl turns from the windowsill to face her door slightly ajar. Everything calms slowly as the anticipation for the impending crescendo of sound and that special some one to re-enter as the girl peers toward the door. At this point the crescendo comes and the track comes back in just as it stopped, not what you expected right? Neither did the girl, the chants an dubby beats continue to drive you through. The girl smiles, just as i suspect you will and she embraces the thought that....... The special someone was never going to come through the door or inside, it was just to let her know she was being watched over, cared for, loved still from a distance. Overshadowed......
Quick note: I just wrote this with the track on a loop, the story ends abruptly for me but how will you perceive the track? How will you hear it? What will you hear? How will you feel? (this was wednesday night 11pm, after having missed the apprentice). I know one thing though...... Tomorrow I will probably see something totally diferent...
For the next two tracks, there will be no story thats the joy in buying the record.....
2.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes (Atjazz Galaxy Aart Dub)
This is typical Atjazz fuckeries, he takes a track and puts into a completely different zone!! With a dope deep soulful house work out of dubby beats, percussion and a serious musical journey. Opening up with a notable almost reverse melody and progressing with some dope additions to the track musically including the faintest guitar or maybe even harp riff in the background. Now you know when Atjazz does Astro remixes he means business.... yeah well, a Galaxy remix tells the Astro where to go..... please believe.
Even down to the reverse chimes everything is where it should be, the vocal samples are executed to perfection, the layers of keys upon keys are worked well and the end product is a force to be reckoned with. All in all a dope work out and fitting dedication.
3.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes (Jullian Gomes Perspective)
Yeah yeah Mr Gomes, we know you got the juice. This 'perspective' is a straight four to the floor killer, deep, moody, dub groove. You have this almost minimal version of the track with a deep dark bassline driving the whole way through, with crazy background noises, synths and fx being positioned in & along the way, as well as the original key riff. Until you come the break when we almost fade to black and this deep dark chugging bassline comes right back in with the drums, hitting you with nothing but solid building grooves as the track builds back into the motion. For me this track really kicks at this break and does a wonderful job of making you screw up your face! With samples and sounds being positioned to perfection to kill you with ambience. Mr. Gomes definitely brings that late night heat.
For me this package is a solid (9/10) and just all round niceness.....
For all you vinyl junkies Overshadowed will be out on 22nd May, no digital option is available as yet.
PURCHASE HERE
Do you remember the Casio VL-Tone series of mini-keyboards from the '80s? Still considered by many to be an achievement in engineering, what it lacked in functionality it made up for in portability, design and fun. A couple of years back, a peculiar group of Swedes who called themselves "Teenage Engineering" started showing up at the big music gear trade shows with a prototype of a new synth called the "OP-1" that appeared to be a modern rework of the VL-Tone. The physical design was deeply rooted in the original, but it had a distinctly 21st century industrial feel, as if Jony Ives himself had gone to work for Casio. Despite the slick exterior, it was hard to take the TE boys very seriously at the time, because for a while the demos didn't make any sound.
But as more and more people started seeing this new synth—and the big gadget blogs start catching on—a nearly unprecedented level of anticipation started building. Eventually, an enigmatic website was launched, heralding the beginning of a long and exhaustive beta testing phase in which the subjects were sworn to secrecy—which served only to fan the flames of hype. Finally now in 2011, the unit is officially in production with the first two runs quickly selling out to anxious users across the globe. We got our hands on one and gave it a thorough work over to see if the hype was justified. Could 21st century tech make this thing a truly useful musical instrument or will it be relegated to the category of "expensive toy"?
To answer that question, you have to start out with what it does. It's a synth, a sampler, a four-track recorder, an effects unit, an FM radio, a microphone, a MIDI keyboard / sequencer, and it wraps it all up in a portable unit with an OLED display. If that sounds like a lot…well it kind of is. I like to think of the four-track tape-style recorder as the core unit of the OP-1. On it you can record almost anything—internal synth or sampler lines, or external signals via line-in, mic or FM radio. On their way to the tape decks, each of these sound sources can be run through a choice of four effect styles ranging from delays and reverbs to a lo-fi phone simulator. The speed of the tape can be adjusted while recording (or during playback) using one of the four knobs—you can even record while manually scrubbing the tape from a dead stop, which can yield some wild results.
Once you have some audio recorded (up to six minutes total record time available) you can then copy and paste sections of your composition from any or all of the four tracks to different parts of the arrangement, or into one of the sampler instrument slots. Each of the four tracks is single channel, mono only—which stays true to the classic four track recorders but is a slightly off-putting limitation for such a modern device. That negative is quickly overlooked when you start discovering the tricks that Teenage Engineering built into the tape recorder function and the fact that you can overdub to your heart's content with virtually no signal degradation.
Even though the tape recorder holds the central spot in the functional flow, you could easily ignore it and utilize the OP-1 as a standalone instrument because of the useful synth and sampler engines. On the synth side, there are 7 different engines to choose from, each of which employs its own unique UI layout with parameters controlled by the OP-1's four color-coded knobs. The synth UIs, along with the rest of the unique interface elements crafted by the Swedish designers, favor intuition and fun rather than the standard oscillator/envelope/filter paradigm found on most synthesizers. This in combination with the rather Spartan manual encourages users to experiment with the synth engines in order to get accustomed to what they can do. If you're the kind of person that needs to be able to dial exactly into the sound you have in your head, the OP-1 is probably not for you. If you're up for a little exploring though, the range of sounds you can achieve with the OP-1 and the immediate quality of the OLED screen and its UI is an experience to behold.
The synth and sampler sounds can be played with the keyboard, sequenced via MIDI over USB, or controlled by one of the three internal sequencer engines available on the OP-1. The first of these is called an "infinity" sequencer, which is sort of like an arpeggiator in that you can record a sequence of notes while holding the shift button. Then, when you hit any key, the sequence is triggered, transposed from that point on the keyboard. There is also a standard grid-based "pattern" sequencer which is useful for building drum patterns that can be played forward, backward and looped within themselves. (There is currently no way to synchronize it with the tape recorder's clock, however.) Finally, the quirkiest sequencer of the bunch is the "tombola," which captures notes as physical objects as you play them, dropping them into a rotating hexagon that retriggers the note each time it hits one of its walls. Kooky but fiercely unique and useful, a common theme for the OP-1.
Once you've had your fun with the OP-1 and have come out on the other end with something useful that you want to export to a DAW or share with others, things start to get rough though. (This is where the relative youth of the product rears its head.) While connected to USB the OP-1 can be switched into disk mode, giving access to each of the four tracks independently—without the EQ, effects or mixer settings applied. Alternatively, you can record your composition as you hear it in the master output to two sides of an "album" (the UI even shows a little vinyl record on a turntable), and these files can also be accessed in disk mode. The OP-1 does not yet sync to MIDI clock (although that feature is rumored to be on the horizon) and you can't easily mute or solo tracks—features that would have been helpful in recording the individual channels to a DAW. Even saving presets is a bit wonky, as it requires disk mode and a computer to save, rename and organize them.
So, is the OP-1 for everybody? There are certainly reasons to argue against it: the unorthodox sound design process, the early technical limitations preventing it from integrating easily with existing studio gear, the limited production numbers and the relatively high price. However, as evidenced by sales thus far, the OP-1's demographic is larger than anyone expected. I would be willing to bet that if you talked to a customer who snuck into the first handful of limited batches you would have a hard time convincing them to let theirs go. There is just something unique about it, visually and sonically. Most importantly, though, it's an instrument. You can take it with you, make some music on it and, in the process, you might catch yourself having some fun.
Ratings
Cost: 4/5
Versatility: 4.5/5
Sound: 5/5
Ease of use: 4.5/5
