We surface from this week’s dive clutching the cosmic soul of London’s Floating Points, Deep Shit‘s sheepish bot dreams and the gruesome absurdity of Toadally Krossed Out‘s true heir to ‘Frog Song’.
Floating Points – Love Me Like This 12” (R2 Records)
Sounds of the Universe / Phonica / Boomkat
After making his presence known with this debut 7", 22-year-old Londoner Sam Sheperd rolls another skittle-killer down the great ten-pin gully in the sky with a new 12", ‘Love Me Like This’ out last week through R2. Smoother for shunning the glimmering bleep fits and loping snare of his previous release, Sheperd takes a Dilla-knife to Eighties funk crew Real 2 Reel’s original and stretches the sample out into something that’s silky and poised and relaxed enough to lounge in the familiarity of late-night smoke, even if its head’s somewhere else completely, stalking the same astral planes as spaced-out forebears Flying Lotus, Theo Parrish and Sun Ra. Those three find sublimity when using the tension between sampled or revived musical pasts and an individual red-eyed vision to propel their own tunes forward into new spaces, a technique that at its most potent can make a producer seem like the only thing standing between the then and the imminent. It’s very, very early doors, but Sheperd is one who at the very least appears aware of that special chemistry. More examples of the Manchester-born 22-year-old’s beat finery can be heard in mixes for BBC pair Gilles Peterson and Mary Anne Hobbs as well as for Rinse FM’s Alex Nut, with whom Sheperd has set up Eglo, home of that first Floating Points 7”.
Deep Shit
via No Pain In Pop / MySpace
Deep Shit is Tom Watson and, to put it incredibly crudely, Deep Shit sounds like This Heat trying to ‘do’ Television Personalities-style diary-punk. But where TVPs aural (and, as it turned out, mental) fragility allowed for Daniel Treacy’s observations to weeble up out of the mix, This Heat are obviously forged of stronger stuff. So, we get the wordless, gap-toothed robo-fi of ‘Zondervan’, which we can only deduce is a track named after a Surinam-born footballer who made 274 appearances for Ipswich Town, alongside the more reflective din of ‘Other People’s Lives’, which, if it had been a real This Heat diary entry, would most probably have been called ‘everything gives you a headache when you live in a disused meat factory’. Making his live debut on June 6th as support to Blank Dogs at London’s Old Blue Last, Deep Shit is gratifyingly narky, in possession of a certain chilly streak that you imagine would delight in stringing hipster mopes up by their checked gonads. A tape is forthcoming through Murrietta, California’s Family Time Records.
Toadally Krossed Out – ‘Toad’s Theme’
Unsure whether to post this or not. On the one hand it’s gimmicky blog-electro that found hype at South By South West, which, as I’m sure you, as a member of our astute readership, are aware, is without doubt the worst thing in the world. It is incredibly fucking odd though. Back when I got summer holidays my sister and I used to take the baby frogs from next-door’s pond and trap them for most of the afternoon in an emptied out sandpit. Then we’d get called in for tea and on our return the frogs would have all disappeared, leaving the sandpit filled with nothing but these black, crispy, frazzled things. "Wierd," we thought. The gruesome realisation didn’t come ’til some years later. Anyway, my dark past in amphibious genocide makes listening to this impossible, so you’d better give it a try. They’re Welsh, apparently.
