The live show features some brand new AV work, which is always great to see, but the most interesting part about this live set is the inclusion of a drummer – yes, this is a drum & bass show with a live drummer, Ian Maciak. Velvet Underground (Toronto) does not have the best setup for live instruments but in this context, with these two artists, the music came to life in a very cool manner.

Performed live 3FOR82 is an adventure. From lyrically heavy rap tracks (“RESPEK”) to fast-paced drum & bass songs (“HON3Y,” “U_WANT”) and the melodic stories in between (“HEAL,” “KILL_U”) there was something for everyone. Later in the set Travis even dipped into his older portfolio with “Gunshotta” from the 2013 Vapour City.

The Toronto show was the second time this record was performed live in the world, Travis shared with the room. Having watched, and enjoyed this set, end to end if the tour were to loop back around we would be back in the room in a heartbeat. Go see it. Listen. Dance. Enjoy.

Upcoming tour dates:

Wed 12th Jun – DJ – Bonnaroo Festival – Manchester, TN
Fri 21st Jun – DJ – Wicked West – San Diego CA
Sat 22nd Jun – Live A/V – June Jam (Playa Ponderosa) – Flagstaff, AZ
Thu 27th Jun – Solo Live A/V – Vinyl – Denver, CO
Fri 28th Jun – Live A/V – Lodge Room – Los Angeles, CA
Sat 29th Jun – Live A/V – Soundwell – Salt Lake City, UT
Wed 10th Jul – Live A/V – Holocene – Portland, OR
Thu 11th Jul – Live A/V – Public Works – San Francisco, CA
Fri 12th Jul – DJ – Bass Coast Festival – Merritt, BC
Sun 13 Jul – Live A/V – The High Dive – Seattle, WA
Sun 20 Jul – DJ – Northern Nights Music Festival – Piercy, CA

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Machinedrum takes his brand new live AV show featuring drummer Ian Maciak and visuals by Strangeloop Studios on tour this Spring/Summer. Headline shows kicked off in Australia and NZ (Feb/Mar), followed by North America in (May/Jun) and UK/EU planned for July. 2024 summer festivals include: Electric Forest, Northern Nights, Shambala, Bass Coast, Outlook, Boomtown, NOX On The Beach, Let it Roll, Melt, Dotville, Frequency, Lowlands, Great Festival, as well as Lightning in a Bottle on the 24th May, where Machinedrum will be celebrating the album’s release with a special Do Lab listening party.

“ILIKEU (feat. Duckwrth)” is out now on Ninja Tune, ahead of  3FOR82 out on the 24th May.

Tour dates:

Sat 20th Apr – DJ – Unts Unts Unts – San Andrés Cholula, Puebla, MX
Sat 4th May – DJ – Sol Fest B2B IMANU – Ponce De Leon, FL
Fri 24th May – Live A/V – Lightning in a Bottle Festival – Bakersfield, CA
Wed 29th May – Live A/V – Velvet Underground – Toronto, ON
Thu 30th May – Live A/V – Bar Le Ritz – Montreal, QB
Fri 31st May – Live A/V – The Office – Nashville, TN
Sat 1st June – Live A/V – Aisle 5 – Atlanta, GA
Thu 6th June – Live A/V – Chop Shop – Chicago, IL
Fri 7th June – Live A/V – Market Hotel – Brooklyn, NY
Sat 8th June – DJ – Flash Rooftop – Washington, DC
Wed 12th June – DJ – Bonnaroo Festival – Manchester, TN
Fri 21st June – DJ – Wicked West – San Diego CA
Sat 22nd June – Live A/V – June Jam (Playa Ponderosa) – Flagstaff, AZ
Thu 27th June – Live A/V – Vinyl – Denver, CO
Fri 28th June – Live A/V – Lodge Room – Los Angeles, CA
Sat 29th June – Live A/V – Soundwell – Salt Lake City, UT
Wed 10th July – Live A/V – Holocene – Portland, OR
Thu 11th July – Live A/V – Public Works – San Francisco, CA
Fri 12th July – DJ – Bass Coast Festival – Merritt, BC
Sun 13 July – Live A/V – The High Dive – Seattle, WA

Cover image by James King (Media Pollution)

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Stewart is known for his technical ability to blend unexpected sounds across a wide variety of genres into tracks that surprise and amaze all at the same time. His most recent release, Human Energy, is in some ways progressive but lighter, warmer, and features a variety of guests.

While it may have disappointed some of the harsher critics, Human Energy offers unique insight into Stewart’s personal life and is likely to gain mainstream attention.

“The album reflects a period of great change in my life,” Stewart said of Human Energy. “I moved across the country to a new city, I proposed to the girl of my dreams, I moved into a new house, bought a brand new computer, and set off to write a new album.”

But I digress. If you’ve ever seen Machinedrum live, you know he carries and shares a lot of positive energy. Stewart is visibly, genuinely excited while playing music, which makes being a part of his live show somewhat special.

Set in front of a video screen made to look like a home, Machinedrum played out tracks from Human Energy mixed in with some of his older productions. The visual accompaniment was reflective of the album art – light, bright, pink – “come in through my door, peek into my window, dance on my front lawn.”

Stewart’s set started fairly late and took the crowd into last call, but no one complained. There were head bops, nods, and dance moves of all sorts, with eyes permanently aimed at the man on the stage.

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Perhaps it’s unfair to generalize, but there are a lot — A LOT — of electronic acts out there doing roughly the same thing in roughly the same way. Like any genre in music popular enough to spawn a scene, electronic dance has blown up to the point that unless you have a distinct sound or visual gimmick, you’ll blend in rather than stick out.

North Carolina’s Travis Stewart, better known as Machinedrum, lives in a bubble between the genre’s major acts and the periphery. This offbeat collection adds to his mystique, but doesn’t cement his rep either in or outside of the top tier of producers.

Machinedrum played a raucous set at What The Festival 2015 with Vapor City Live. And given the variety of work on Human Energy, he has a solid sense of how to craft interesting soundscapes.

The album is uneven: overly familiar in some spots, but completely thrilling in others. Guest vocals help differentiate some tracks —“Dos Puertas”, for example, fluctuates between buildups and gently vocally inflected beats before settling into a near-breathless rap from Kevin Hussein. It’s a series of teases, building toward drops that only half-arrive.

Likewise, “Morphozine” chimes and churns under Ruckazoid’s simple vocal, but really works best during the brief drum-n-bass inspired bits punctuated by quick synth chirps. Both tracks are good, but don’t quite elevate the collection beyond much of what you’d hear elsewhere.

“Ocean of Thought” recalls the ‘80s/‘90s heyday of Art of Noise, its sampled vocal from an old movie drifting in and out of center. It never quite gets where it’s trying to go.

Machinedrum fares much better with tracks like “Spectrum Sequence”, splitting the difference between Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor”, Ken Nordine’s spoken-word jazz stylings, and old-school Kraftwerk. The track feels throwaway at first but sticks with you, especially as it segues into “White Crown” (featuring Tosin Abasi). The track’s stunted arpeggios harken back to Frank Zappa’s Synclavier work on Jazz From Hell, but have a dancefloor snap that wouldn’t have occurred to FZ. It’s still not something you’d hear at a club, but it’s got a distinct sound. Likewise, “Colour Communicator” works best when it eschews big beats and goes its own way into more avant-garde, Zappa-esque territory.

When electronic music producers release albums — collections of songs rather than mixtapes — the results are often misunderstood. To this reviewer’s ear, many of those collections serve as samplers for what’s to come at live sets — snippets of a much larger, more inclusive whole. Taken as such, Machinedrum’s Human Energy has a lot to offer and suggests sets with variety and unusual flavor. But if you listen to the album looking for a suite of songs that coalesce into a larger whole, your mileage may vary.

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Independent hip-hop label, Big Dada, have recently released a new collaborative project to help warm our souls this coming winter – the Maskya EP. In a nutshell, the Maskya EP is a short remix project with reggae/electronic sound, a hard-hitting base and Caribbean riddim that combines the skills of three talented musicians: SK Simeon, Yaw Faso, and the producer Machinedrum (real name Travis Stewart).

Machinedrum is the true star of the project, which seems to serve more as a showcase of the producer’s talents than that of a cohesive album. Machinedrum has produced and remixed many songs over this past year and is emerging as a premier instrumentalist on the Ninja Tune roster. Stewart contributes to the EP with his inventive future bass sound: a heavy dose of fast-paced, often erratic percussion within intricate electronic instrumentals, with a touch of hip-hop flavor, and incorporates the reggae stylings of his contemporaries to create an impressive set of dancehall-type tracks.

SK Simeon and Yaw Faso are Melbourne based MC’s with strong Afro-reggae-hip-hop influence, not to insinuate that their music is in anyway similar. Their interpretations on this EP are exponentially different to the other thanks to Machinedrum’s individualistic approach that I believe adds a well-needed element to each song. SK Simeon’s “Doper Than Dope” and “Ram Dancehall” are stylized purely as dancehall bangers, raunchy tunes with repetitive lyrics and insanely hard base that you would imagine hearing in a nightclub.

Yaw Faso’s tracks “All of Mi Life” and “Memories,” on the other hand, are both bombastic, upbeat reggae melodies centered on his rhythm and prominent lyrics that Machinedrum highlights with considerably less base and a slower tempo, night and day in comparison to the tracks of his counterpart. Stewart does an excellent job on these remixes by successfully integrating his trademark sound to the theme of reggae/dancehall all while demonstrating his tremendous ability and range. 

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But What The Festival isn’t just another fest. It’s acres of land, featuring 8 stages, some huge and some intimate. One’s in front of a pair of huge wading pools so hundreds of people can splash, dance and hurl inflatable toys into the air. Another, accessible only by trekking through the Illuminated Forest art exhibit pathway, is shaped like a massive Chinese dragon with a pagoda structure on its back so the DJ stands 10 meters above the dance floor (which is grass), surrounded by trees on all sides.

Other, more intimate, stages are nestled into smaller areas, like the Shinto A Go Go just off the main drag. The Shinto area has a small torii entrance with traditional noren to walk through and features multiple miniature open-air tea houses brewing matcha and herbal blends; Luz Elena Mendoza of Y La Bamba fame played a set there Friday night and sounded fantastic. Just down the forest path is the LOL Stage, where decidedly un-techno acts like the LoveBomb Go-Go Marching Band or The Saloon Ensemble might play a half-gypsy, half-flamenco version of Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight”. It could happen. And after midnight, when the two main stages shut down, the Silent Disco starts up midfield, underneath the massive disco ball. There are few sights as surreal as seeing 200 people swaying in total silence, their wireless headsets glowing blue or red depending on which one of the two DJs they’ve chosen.

As you’d expect the two big stages are where the bigger acts play to crowds of thousands. Visiting the major stages is a breeze, you can pick one and dance nonstop for hours or ping-pong back and forth between the Effin’ Stage and the Main Stage.  Friday night’s duelling stages began to heat up at 8 when StéLouse was on the Effin’ Stage opposite duo Sabota on the Main Stage. Members of Camp Waldo – one of the more visible camp tribes, definitely a thing at WTF – must have been delighted by half of Sabota wearing nautical horizontal stripes and a red woollen beanie, but none could be reached for comment.

Friday night’s Effin’ Stage lineup peaked with twins Kendrick and Sherwin Nicholls’ Two Fresh. StéLouse handed them a good groove and they ran with it, their vocal-heavy, hip-hop-infused, dance music sounding different enough from what had come before to be novel. It helps that both Nicholls are born performers who use every inch of the stage and fire up the crowd, but credit where due: those were some amazing beats. The only quibble with their music might be their frequent use of “bitch” and “ho”, tired tropes that are deeply ingrained into the fabric of old-school hip-hop. But yeah, that’s a quibble. Two Fresh was a top-10 set of the weekend, easy.

When Daktyl played Portland last year, supporting Slow Magic, he was solid, but somehow unremarkable. Perhaps being on tour empowered him? Less than a year later at the WTF Splash Stage his set was unexpectedly bold, featuring an unusual number of tempo changes, as if he was daring the crowd to keep up with him. It worked. He walked a rhythm tightrope, keeping the party going while flirting with less and less traditional beats, giving himself multiple opportunities to drop (and re-drop) the bass. He read the roaring crowd perfectly and delivered one of the most musically memorable sets of the festival, in the sun, at 5 p.m. – no small feat. He had a solid lead-in by Ambassadeurs and made the most of it, upping the ante on the crowd minute by minute.

At a typical rock show there may be a 15 to 30 minute gap between performers to allow breakdown and setup of gear, but at most EDM events these transitions happen organically, as DJs seamlessly blend sets to keep the momentum going. It’s unspoken, but understood that if another DJ or producer is plugging in during the end of your set, it is incumbent upon you to pass it off to them as gracefully as possible. So it was shocking to see a performer pull the musical equivalent of dumping water on a campfire at the end of his set. QUARRY had a challenging time slot; 7 to 8 p.m. is between the poolside Splash Stage closing and the 8 p.m. headliners coming on, when the plurality of attendees get food, rest, and change clothes for the evening festivities. His crowd was not massive, but he had a solid few dozen people dancing when he seemed to have technical difficulties. A hard crackling stop mid-beat, some dialog, then a final track of synth washes, which seemed beatless, capped off by a dead stop, silence, then him saying “That’s it.” Uncool, and enough to dissipate the crowd.

By the time Ellie Herring started her set a moment later, a scant 8 people stood a good way back from the stage. Understand, this isn’t starting from scratch – it’s way harder. This was earning back spurned attention and having to overcome the lure of a very effective Little People set in progress just across the great lawn. You can see both stages, so it’s obvious when one scene is happening and one isn’t. Laurent Clerc a.k.a. Little People had a 15 minute head start and was banging, his trademark electronic sound effects punctuating solid beats that had attracted a large, and growing, crowd.

Some know Ellie Herring from her hooky, minimalist tracks like “Always Just OK,” but her 2015 work has been more muscular and driving – insistent without being aggressive and without the whisper-passive vocals featured on most of Kite Day. It’s a near-complete stylistic reinvention, different and good. Her WTF set picked up where her May tour with Dot left off, lots of percussive beats and short vocal samples that insinuate themselves into your earholes and demand body movement, at times sounding like next generation Jose “Chep” Nuñez or Tuta Aquino’s mid-’80s mixes.  As people poured back onto the festival grounds, heads turned and trajectories were altered as Herring soldiered on. A few minutes in she said “Hi, I’m Ellie, come dance with me.” and they did: 8 became 40 became 120 became 300 and upward, and the music soared. By the end of her hour long set she was handing Sweater Beats a hot crowd in a great mood. It was the biggest turnaround of the weekend and the talk at one of the campfires at 2 a.m. “Did you see Ellie Herring?” “Holy shit, YEAH.”

On paper, the Main Stage has a bit more firepower, lining up artists like GRiZ, Keys N Krates, Machinedrum Vapor City Live, Slow Magic, and Big Gigantic. The latter 3 artists, in particular, benefit from using analog instruments in performance. Watching someone thrash a drum kit or play sax can be a good visual break from the DJ hunched over the controls, not to mention a sonic differentiator. The Main Stage also has LED display screens built in to several vertical surfaces, allowing most of the stage to luminesce.

The first of the headliners to close the stage was GRiZ, who took the opportunity to stretch out his trademark funk; the vocal samples were there as well as slinky Chic-esque guitar snippets and occasional blasts of horns. GRiZ is one of the few artists at WTF whose sound could translate almost identically to a really tight live band, but he did it all himself. Imagine the sound of excellent tracks like “Funk Party” and “Get Down” writ large, with a thousand people stomping along in the dust. His music plays better live than most, he pushed the crowd hard, and might have singlehandedly convinced hundreds of people to consider a move to his hometown of Detroit. His work has always had an earthy, party vibe and that was ideal for the festival setting. Great, great set.

Machinedrum Vapor City Live’s work is less bombastic and more subtle and inspires a more mellow, groovy response. Like the crafting of a good mixtape, WTF organizers were cautious to mix things up from set to set, and Machinedrum’s near-downtempo washes of synth and voice over not-quite-but-almost drum & bass percussion was a kind of hourlong exhalation for the crowd after Hustle and Drone and Little People. Not that the set wasn’t exciting – it was, magnetic even, and an ideal crowd prep lead-in for Big Gigantic’s saxophone driven dance funk.

In scientific terms, people went ape shit for Big Gigantic. The duo – Dominic Lalli and Jeremy Salken – are veterans of Bonnaroo, Coachella, Lollapalooza, and seemingly every other festival and it shows. Their set started sick and got progressively more insane as it went. Their set also marked the first sighting of one of a pair of massive, luminescent squid puppets, 5 meters high and requiring a minimum of 3 puppeteers. More than most, WTF inspires attendees to want to glow and present their tribes with costumes, signs, and pike-mounted objects that can be seen above the crowd. The massive squids were overkill of the best kind, dancing their way back and forth through the crowd, as Big Gigantic pounded their way through one of the best-received sets of the weekend. Big Gigantic’s set offered strong visuals on the LED screens as well – was that dancing Honda ASIMO robots as well as Apollo astronauts?

As for the other squid, he was undulating his way through the huge mob STWO handed off to TOKiMONSTA. Jennifer Lee’s work can be aurally challenging at times, demanding a careful ear, much like the rest of the Brainfeeder crew. But the set she played at WTF avoided her (at times) dissonant aspects and more experimental time signatures in favor of sleek beats and clever transitions. Fair enough – TOKiMONSTA’s style seems to change up from record to record anyway, and only the most churlish fan would expect her to step on the vibe by breaking out the more avant of her garde. More importantly, TOKi was beside herself, grinning, clearly enjoying the sight of a thousand or so people throbbing up and down to her music.

More than most events of its size, What The Festival places a premium on the variety of experiences offered to the guests. In addition to the stages of various sizes and the silent disco, the Illuminated Forest offers an interactive and beautiful break from the sun and sounds. Take a right at the outdoor hookah lounge and you’ll almost immediately be struck by the otherworldly beauty of the various art installations peppered through the woods.

One retro/futuristic device had hundreds of vintage slides being pulled along several belts which passed backlighting and magnifying glasses. Aside from being visually arresting as an object of curiosity, the feeling of sitting at its base and gazing into those lenses as the images passed by was like a steam-powered View-Master. Directly across the path is a wooden sculpture facing a screen and a Microsoft Kinect: like a giant multitrack theremin, it reads your gestures in conjunction with your selections and allows you to create music by waving your hands in different directions. Further down the path is a queen-bed-sized fiber-optic garden which encouraged tactile interaction.

Turn back toward the main lawn and you’re met with several fantasy forest guardians woven from branches and twigs, each with a luminous heart at its center, as well as a sculpted metal luminous pegasus whose every surface was open for personal messages to be written in the chalk provided. Other installations were less experimental, but just as welcome, such as the huge cushions inside a neon clamshell labeled “We Need New Friends”, the three-animal totem on which line art was projected, and a Mario Kart station. Artists were working on some installations all weekend long, often inviting input or help from attendees.

Cliché as it sounds, the best part of WTF is the people. Tribes representing themselves with costumes, wigs, and standards on 3-meter lengths of PVC; dancers and hoopchicks lighting up the night with luminous hula hoops, whips, and fur collars; yoga practitioners striking precarious poses at the edge of the Splash Stage pool; goths and punks and B-boys and heshers and vape geeks all gearing up and cruising the grounds to see who’s who and what’s what. (That guy with the dreds who flips a stick between two other sticks showed up too, but he goes to every festival – he hasn’t changed his poncho in years.) In most cities they avoid one another, but at WTF they all somehow mesh and become the friendliest crowd imaginable. Maybe the common denominator is loving Big Gigantic.

More photos can be found here.

The post What The Festival 2015: sound and vision appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Playful, dreamlike, and sentient to the extreme, the sonic vapours emanate like they came from the mouth of a dragon floating through the streets on the Chinese New Year. “Vapor City is an album inspired by a dream city,” explains Stewart. “It’s become such a recurring dream of mine throughout the past few years that I began creating music to it, a collection of different songs each representing different districts in the city.”

Opening with “Gunshotta,” wispy voices against hammering dream beats light the canals. It’s safe here amidst the crammed stimulation of a city built on the psyche’s myths and dreams. Construction never ends in this place, where electronica meets architecture.

Hold in your breath for as long as humanly possible and let it out as slowly as humanly possible while listening to “U Still Lie” to experience the adrenaline produced alongside this malaise wave. Finishing with “Eyesdontlie,” you’re thrown back into reality, left with a sense of abandonment. Did that just happen? You’ll need to listen again to be sure.

Vapor City is reminiscent of New York’s ongoing show Fuerza Bruta, the album foams a fluorescent bubble sensory bath. Like the show, it poses a scenario hard to separate from the spectator. This one’s for the night people. Industrial scenes splatter against juggling urban imagery – close encounters of some kind.

Set to release September 30, 2013, on Ninja Tune.

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Now based in Berlin, the North Carolina native is infamous for his ever-shifting identity and electronic music powerhouse title.  Here he uses a special blend of knowledge, experience and technique to deliver his hand-crafted sound.

The first single, “Eyesdontlie,” is a hard and trippy first look at dreamland. After an overly cacophonous preamble, the track progresses with what might be a bit too much jarring repetition, but let’s face it, that’s the effect he’s going for; a modern take on early 90s synth-y electronica. What’s to love about this track is the breakdown halfway through – ethereal acid house replaces robotic vocals in a moment of clarity, a la Underworld. It’s both varied and lush, metallic and old school.

B-side “Body Touch” is at first understated and yet is perhaps the better track of the two after a few listens. A slightly more laid back version of “Eyesdontlie”, not without a dash of hip hop and sleazy vocals, it seeps into your very being, willing you to dance the night away in Stewart’s haunting dream world.

Both songs feature outstanding production quality, distinctly Ninja Tune, and a sound which still manages to seem fresh and relevant among the millions of electronic tracks found in the universe.

While it seems Machinedrum has been merely playing with different mixes and sounds since his last full-length album, it’s obvious that his experiments have finally come to fruition. If this is any indication of what’s to come, we can’t wait to hear the rest.

Release date: July 29, 2013

The post EP Review: Machinedrum “Eyesdontlie” appeared first on Quip Magazine.