While the IHeartComix crew may be most renowned for their high quality electro disco house, this month they posted one of the best recent heavy bass mixes around on their blog. Curated by Kanji Kinetic for No Love Lost Records‘ mixtape project, this joint is well worth dealing with a zSHARE file download. It’s one hour of pure dance goodness.

Be forewarned, however, ‘cuz this ish is not for the faint of heart. It’s a caffeine-pill-washed-down-with-Redbull, insert-illicit-drug-here fueled journey. Dude hits Speed Racer tempos for most of the entire hour.

He hits enough of the appropriate notes (selection-wise, if not compositionally) to satisfy the majority of heavy bass fans. No specific genre could claim this mix. But it’s confined to UK style wobbly, electronic bass. While other forms of bass infused sounds exist, this mix is havin’ none of that.

For a British bass dweller, Kanji has got a healthy interest in the scene here in the States. Nearly a third of the names in this remix saturated, 23 cut mixtape hail from the East Coast. Mostly, this role is filled by Trouble & Bass, the bassline kings of New York, and dubstep overlord Starkey, who also reps T&B, but calls Philly home. Since NLLR is based in Brooklyn, this may come as no big surprise.

On a related note, Franki Chan, founder of IHeartComix, dropped a mix for NLLR as well. It’s also worth your expensive time.

Before we even get into this joint, Culture System would just like to apologize for posting a video with dancing iTunes characters and cats with monitors on… That said, today we present to you Wittyboy on production and the Doctor on the mic.

Wittyboy’s bassline mix of Doctor’s "Calm Down," is more than a dance mix - it can stand alone from the original, which was produced by the larger than life Cotti.

His beats shuffle through a variety of sounds and rhtyms, which keeps it interesting. Granted he stays within the comfortable confines of the bassline genre with a standard percussion and basic wonky bass. But it’s top of the game in this respect. And he adds a nice flute which really stands out. One could even make the argument that the flute makes the song remorseful - a fitting touch considering the lyrics - but that would break down once the wobbles kick in.

Doctor comes correct himself, with a smooth delivery and voice, consistent subject matter and a point to be made which he drives home with dense rhymes and numerous similes. It might even be called positive, which is what Cotti says he’s trying to encourage.

Given the quality of the rhymes, it was a good move on Wittyboy’s part to leave them untouched. Unfortunately, he leaves the hook to itself as well, which is dumb repetitive. And he drowns out the lyrics a bit, so if you want to understand them, you might want to listen to the original first. But you’ll be sure to come back to this version.

Not enough emcees include the lyrics to their songs in the artwork for their music. It makes it easier to get over with lazy lyrics. That’s my guess.

It’s too bad from the visual side of things, too. If I dropped a single, the lyrics would look something like the picture to the left. I wrote the rhymes, and 2Grotesk rocked the handstyle and printed it up on my jacket. Not this Grotesk - this one.

For the graf challenged, it says: "In case we only live life once, don’t waste it. Take it seriously. Fill your plate. Hasten your pace. Take the reins, don’t wait. It’s high stakes, face it. Replace any wasted space with a statement."

Click on the flicks below for larger images.

CORRUPTED BASS MIX

I made this over a month ago, but due to reasons I won’t mention, I did nothing with it. Enjoy.

Tracklisting:

"Wearing My Rolex" (Pirate Soundsystem Bassline RMX), Wiley, Wearing My Rolex (Enhanced), Asylum

"Mad Again" (Boy 8-Bit RMX), South Rakkas Crew, Mad Decent

"Wide Awake,"  Equalizers, Revenge/Wide Awake, Pure Filth

"Enjoy," Baracoot

"Penultimate Persian," Clark, Turning Dragons, Warp

"Smoke and Mirrors," JDSY, Adage of Known. Ghostly

"Traffickers," | The Reflecting Skin, Ghostly Swim, Ghostly

"Monday" (Glitch Mob RMX), Nalepa, Flatlands Remix CD, Native State

"Done with the Zine," Pacheko, Flatlands, Murder Channel Compilation, Murder Channel

You gotta love this kind of thing: I just woke up and was still in my boxers at the computer. The first email I decide to check is some MySpace music friend request, and it slaps me in the face outta the box - I got an "undiscovered" gem in my lap while I still got my morning wood on! Shit is hotter than Mims, and I put no effort into finding it at all. Hotter than Mims!

Called "Dark Dancer," the song is made by a French group named Polymik. There’s really no need to go into a detailed review of the song - it’s your basic housey electro-disco revival joint in the vein of IHeartComix or Boys Noize. Granted, this has officially become a style now, but rather than just hopping on a bandwagon, these dudes come correct with it.

Their profile photo had me a little skeptical, though - a mummy face with a stitched-closed mouth - but I like a lot of that industrial stuff, so I gave it a shot. I mean, I’m not exactly carving 666 into my desk or anything, but yeah, give me some musical S&M and I’ll dance to it.

When I say Britsh hip hop, a lot of people are like, "Oh, like The Streets?" Nah. Some of this is new, some not, all of it’s hot.

For all my grafitti writin’ familam out there who care about their brain cells and their appearance, today we got designer gas masks! Say word. Whether you’re tryin’ to keep paint outta your nose, or you think the Raelians are gonna rock a Saren gas bomb on the L train, but you just HAVE to go to that Glasslands show - well here. you. go. Just for you. I bet we see HeartsRevolution rockin’ this ish soon! By Diddo Velema.

<via Core 77>

Steady taking advantage of the new world music has entered, Radiohead is throwing a remix competition for the release of their new single, "Naked." These are Culture System’s top choices.

These two selections were chosen from a review of nearly 200 entries out of the 650 entries currently submitted. (That number grew to 670 by the time CS was finished reviewing them.) Both deserve to make it to an actual "Naked" RMX release. After the jump, listen to some more notable mentions.

the jump » »

Check this live VJ installation by Aaron Sjogren called Fixate, via Create Digital Motion. Fresh. It was apparently a test project that he is perfecting for live performances.

I’m definitely diggin’ the abstract shapes, and can even get down with some of the cityscapes. But when it comes to the water shot and marine life, it loses me. As a general rule, shapes and live footage don’t mix well - unless the footage is rendered difficult to tell what it actually consists of.

I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of getting all pedantic and saying the two never go together, though. Dogmatic rules like that lead to artwork more concerned with process than outcome, which is usually pretty hurt.

(By the way, CDM points out how high quality video sites like Vimeo are going to making an impact on the spread of video art. Mos def.)

"God damn dubstep."

That about sums up how I’ve felt about this British style for a while now. It caused me spasms; teasing me with   its possibilities, but forcing a landfill of trash through my headphones. Maybe it was just ‘cuz I’m in here in New York, not London.

The latest DubWar poster. By Miss Ashes 57. Cop a limited edition print here.

Well, now the DubWar heads are pounding the concrete streets of NYC, and I finally got a real taste of the style with the party they threw last night.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but from some of the mixes I heard on their website, I suspected it might be what’s up.

See, I’ve heard dubstep mixes where I had to suffer through twenty minutes of monotony before I heard a decent dub. Whole sets where I didn’t hear one minute of melody or complexity. I couldn’t even tell whether or not I was listening to different songs because they were all so similar as to be identical. It’s almost as if a lot of the heads in the scene are more concerned with identifying with a genre then they are with making good music - like so many of the purists in the prolific variety of electronic sub-genres.

But it’s a style that appeals to me with its forward looking attitude, as my man Blackdown is fond of saying, who was present last night. Dubstep caught my interest since I first heard some random snippets of its bomb-raid-like bass and rusty metal electronicness. I’ve been eagerly  waiting to find examples of the style that pushed beyond the excessive loopyness and simplicity to attain the title of "music," and DubWar brought that shit.

I’m not sure who I heard - whether it was the Bomb Squad, (the production team behind Public Enemy who performed live last night), Loefah, Dusk & Blackdown, or any number of the resident DJ crew. But I do know that I most definitely came away feelin’ like the music I heard was worth the scraps of cash left in my hole strewn pockets.

DubWar definitely filled the emptiness my fiendin’ for good dubstep caused, but it took more than that to get my sleep deprived ass outta bed and into last night’s  freezing wind. It was also the chance to hear this ish on a good system. I wanted the bass to rumble everything around me like the subway. And dudes did their best to provide.

Unfortunately, the police showed up and made them turn it down.

Killed the whole night.

In fact, the whole club - called Love, of all things - was hurtin’. The place was underground, and after you entered, you descended a flight of stairs that looked like a five year old’s idea of hell, what with its black light toy graffiti, grimy corners and all. They had this lounge that was pretty fly, with two open stories of loft spaces that held beds inside little caves. But the whole area was damp from this waterfall that took up a big part of the room. I couldn’t help but think about how bad the mold looked once you turned the lights on. Besides the water, you couldn’t really hear the music in there either. The only speakers were on the dance floor, and there were none in any of the other rooms.

Six dollars for a Red Bull with no alcohol? Riiiiight.

If this night is going to blow up, they’ll have to find a new spot. But keep your eyes on the DubWar cypher, ‘cuz they just might bring the fifteenth British Invasion.