Danger Syndicate

Alright, so I’ve been talking with a number of acquaintances recently about The Beatles and their artistic merit. Now, let me explain that The Beatles were the first musical group I ever remember listening to and also the first I was ever obsessed with. However, over the years, I seem to have “matured” perhaps, and I lost my love of The Beatles. Its not that I don’t like them anymore, its just that I’ve found so much more music that I think is so much better.

This pretty much sums up my ideas on The Beatles

I really do not like it when people decide to worship the Beatles (or any musical group, really) and I don’t like supporting a group that are, at best, extremely influential and very inconsistent, and at worst are pretentious and boring. I was trying to imagine how I could possibly reconcile my current view of them with my childhood love of the Fabs, and I decided that their biggest problem was the inconsistency and their lack of coherent album visions. If I could somehow take all of the things that seem not to fit on Abbey Road and put them with much more similar songs from other albums, to create a consistently psychedelic (or symphonic, or experimental, or whatever style best fits that song) album I think that it would greatly improve The Beatles’ catalogue and perhaps even rekindle my jaded heart for them.

Son, the Fab Four are disappoint

So, in the following months, I plan to listen to all twelve of the Fab Four’s albums very carefully and rearrange and reassemble them into some as-yet-unknown number of new albums that will provide a more linear, coherent view of John, George, Ringo and Paul as music-makers. I will post up my results on this website when I finish. Please stay tuned!

Oh. Hey. Look who published another post.

I’ve been sick the past two days, which, surprisingly, has given me more time to do things, so I guess it’s a little unfair to get all over the rest of the D-Syn team, but seriously, you guys. Seriously.

Anyway, I have been spending my days of illness working primarily on my DJing skills and amassing from the far corners of the tubes samples galore, and all of it has come to fruition with the release of the following DJ mix. No post production. I recorded it while performing, exported to WAV, didn’t touch a thing. All of it was done with Ableton Live.

Full track list:
0:00 Deep Thought Sample
0:12 I Like Rhythm - Adam K, Soha
3:57 Peep Show - Tall Paul
8:39 Bass It Up - Groovy Cuvy
14:24 What’s The Difference - ** Original Track **
24:25 Charlotte - Booka Shade
27:29 Redemption - Booka Shade
31:11 To Hell With Our Orders - ** Original Track **
35:56 Electro Music Sex - Purple Project
38:35 Hip Rave Anthem - Rico Tubbs
42:05 Precinct - Stanton Warriors
46:40 Sarcacid Part 1 - Squarepusher (just for fun)
52:40 You Wanna Try It Pokey? -No Thanks, I Prefer Grass

Want this mix on your iPod or iTunes? Feel free to download!

Current musical addiction: Electro-house! Its like everything you loved about electro and house combined. There’s not much more to say about it than that. Just lissen’ yo’self reallll good:

Wolfgang Gartner is for sure my new fave. And he’s from Austin, the home-land of D.S.

So I listen to a lot of music. Mostly, that music fits into the genres of R&B, Soul, and Funk. These genres are not the most popular nowadays, as they have been surpassed by the genres of ’sucky teen-pop’ and ‘crappy rap’. So in order to make up for that, here is part one of Zach’s Groovy-Smooth-Funk Explosion. For the moment, I will try to focus on videos that I can find music videos or live performances of, so that you can see their greatness in person. Kinda.

I’ve always had a soft spot for R&B vocal groups. Sure, things like “musical ability” might be important, but in my opinion, the ability to bust a move and look good doing it pretty useful as well. The Whispers definitely had it goin’ on in the dancing department, and they have some of the finest mustaches and afros I’ve ever seen in a band.

God, look at them. So well groomed. Such sharp suits.

Midas Touch is a song off of the album Headlines, which I found in a collection of my parent’s vinyl in their garage one day. I believe that I originally listened to this album with Steven, and I watched the video for this song later that same day. It’s a pretty awesome video, featuring everything you could want in an 80s song: Bitchin’ threads, ridiculous hairdos, keytars, and hordes of children running around with gold spray paint and dancing.

Guys, you really can not get any more 80s than this.

I originally heard this song on KAZI, whilst I was trying to find a lab so I could get some ridiculous diabetes tests done. It took me about 2 hours to find the place, but luckily, this came on the radio and my rocky journey went from a Titanic to a H.M.S. Smooth Lovin. These guys are so smooth, they manage to make powder blue tuxedos work.

So that’s all for part one. Part two will come whenever I can’t think of anything better to post.

So I finished a track in the past two days, called Submission. It’s an ethnic-y, really chill song, with a lot of sounds coming together…electric bass, drums, tabla, strings, weird synthy stuff. Check it out at my SoundCloud profile. Also up on SoundCloud is my remix of “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC. It turned out pretty good, I think.

And if you’re already on SoundCloud, add me.

Is now available online. Check it out, and if you’re in the Austin area and this sounds awesome, please ask us to play for you. We’re pretty loose on some of the recordings, because it was a laid-back show (at J.J. Pickle), and we experimented. For example, that recording of The Ocean is the first time we’ve ever played or even discussed playing The Ocean ever. It’s pretty alright, given the circumstances.

Jeff plays drums on all of the recordings, and I’m playing keyboards, but you can’t really hear me that well.

Also, music-wise, Jeff and I are currently experimenting with the genre of livetronica, so I’ve been trying to collect MIDI controllers to make this easier. Our setup right now is two keyboards, a Korg nanoPAD (which is used as a drum controller among other things), a BCR2000 (basically a box of knobs we use to adjust sound), and my MacBook. We are expanding this, and practically studying the work of Pnuma Trio to see how it is done.

Anyhow, let us know what you think. And if you think we’re fit to play for you (either our livetronica, or our jazzish-funk stuff), please drop us a line.

So I was surfin’ the series of tubes the other day and I found the most awesome of awesome musical genres: nerdcore. The unofficial founder of this subgenre (technically) is Mc Frontalot. A pretty funny song of his is It Is Pitch Dark, and he’s a pretty adept freestyler, in fact better, I think, than most famous rappers, who just yell their name a lot and inform you that they are about to rap. Some other pretty good nerdcore artists are MC Hawking and Optimus Rhyme. Sorry for all the links, but I hope you enjoy the music. Hip-hop songs about moderating forums are awesome :P