Ah, what good the sun can do! After hiding behind rain clouds all week, dampening our moods in the wake of the official departure of our beloved Dr. Joly, the sun is a-blazing on this Friday. And it’s pizza day. Fuck yeah.
Around the corner is March, and that means spring will soon be in the air. But before we enjoy the budding flowers and warmer breezes, winter is not over. It’s not done yet, which is exactly what can be said about the most popular track on Whyd this week, Nicolas Jaar's epic remix of Florence & The Machine's “What Kind Of Man.” For more than 12 minutes the song bounces from Florence’s voice to deep house echoes to the classic mix of odd percussion sounds that has come to characterize Mr. Jaar’s prolific career. It’s a veritable banger of a track from someone so used to exploring the quieter parts of our musical mind.
As the global music revolution powers forward participants are popping up in the most unlikely places. It’s not everyday that we hear about artists from Sudan, but today is one of those days, a chance to relish in the unusual, from the talented artist Edyth, who just released his first EP, “BARE I,” out now on FAKE MUSIC.
Released: February 24, 2015
Genres: Trip hop, UK House
Tracks: 5
Who would like this EP?
Fans of Bonobo’s organic beats, and people who like Nightmares on Wax’s samples.
Our thoughts:
It’s hard to construct an atmosphere with an EP, which are usually too short to implant a lasting sense of provenance. Edyth, through a smart use of intratrack layering, has achieved a sense of unity. His samples could’ve come straight out of an abandoned hangar in London’s Far East End. The first track, “Crystxls,” which feels the most complete out of the five tracks on the album, is something that could be played at get togethers around the world. We hope it will!
Our Playlist of Reference series has seen a wide range of music, and today we’re excited to add to that by tackling one of the oldest genres of music: Blues. Before Electro Swing, before Rock n Roll, before Jazz, there was the Blues, the picked and strummed guitars, the sadness, the beauty of a raspy voice. The simplicity of the sound. Today’s playlist is curated by Milenko, and as usual, let’s get the story behind this amazing playlist.
When did you start listening to Blues?
Since an early age, I was listening to Jazz artists like Duke Ellington, Ray Brown, Count Basie, Herb Ellis, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, etc. As my father was a Jazz listener, I think my ears were trained to this genre from the beginning. During adolescence I switched to more Blues Rock artists like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, The Doors, AC/DC, etc. Then the teenage rebel years, with some Blues-inspired Heavy Rock.
Today, while I still listen to Jazz and Blues Rock, I found myself having a preference for Slow and Traditional Blues with people like B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, John Mayer, Eric Clapton, Joe Bonamassa, ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughan, etc. (There are too many to list!)
Did you ever have a moment when you felt like Blues started speaking to you?
Every time, that’s the main effect of Blues. When you listen to a Blues song, it’s not about the technique (Blues scales are quite simple), it’s all about the phrasing, it’s about the way the artist is telling a story with his instrument. Each Blues track is about storytelling. That’s probably why you have so many standard tunes interpreted by so many players, and they are all unique masterpieces. For example, take a song like “Born Under a Bad Sign”, do a simple search on Whyd, and listen to the different version of Albert king, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Cream, Warren Haynes, etc. They all tell the same story with variations in the phrasing, that’s how the Blues speaks to you.
What are some example situations when you would listen to this playlist yourself?
I listen to this playlist at work essentially. In fact, the main goal of this playlist is to act as a central repository for all the Blues songs I discover while watching movies, listening to concerts, radio etc. When I find something interesting, I just want to share it with other people hoping they will enjoy it as much as I do.
If you had to choose just one track from this playlist, which one would be your favorite?
Being in a start up is like being in a family. In our case a band of brothers united by the common desire to make the internet work for us, fusing it with music in a way that no one had done before. There is adversity, there is achievement, and there are emotions, emotions that we all share together. Just like in a family, losing a family member means sadness. The sadness of knowing that they won’t be there when you arrive in the morning, adding events to their multiple Gmail calendars. The sadness of having one fewer mouth on pizza day. The sadness of knowing that they won’t be back.
Oui mon p’tit gars, c’est comme ça
Today marks the official departure of one of the strands of the DNA of Whyd. The developer responsible for coding and building nearly everything we enjoy today. The rocker responsible for some epic jamming. The friend responsible for endless laughter, mouth trumpeting, and GIFs. The man responsible for the care taken towards each of his teammates and every visitor that came through Whyd. Dr. Adrien Joly is leaving us for the next chapter in his life and career.
Oui mon p’tit gars, c’est comme ça
Adrien was here from the very beginning, coding remotely in cafés and in Whyd’s first incubator. He ventured with Gilles, Jie, and Loick to San Francisco to alternate sleeping in a one bedroom apartment in Chinatown for three months while the young team soaked in the charged atmosphere of California’s legendary tech mecca.
He expertly directed the team through a few pivots before the mission became music, and it was here that Adrien truly excelled. He had already hacked together multiple music apps, like his location-based Foursquare app “Hear I Am” that he built with Loick, and “GigFM,” for creating playlists from upcoming concerts. Whyd was a natural extension of his passions. One that kept him working with us for over four years.
Oui mon p’tit gars, c’est comme ça
As the team expanded both in terms of numbers and in terms of geography, Adrien led the development and release of our 5-star iOS app. He tutored interns. He kept an impossible number of moving parts aligned to ensure that music lovers could listen on Whyd. And, perhaps most importantly, he tempered the team’s expectations to protect the functioning of Whyd - to keep it from becoming too complicated, from becoming too heavy to stay afloat. There could have been no replacement for that potent combination of ability, intelligence, and demeanor. Something that is so perfectly summed up in his classic phrase, said with acceptance that some things are not to be changed, but with the hope that there will be another, better option: “Oui mon p’tit gars, c’est comme ça.”
Adrien is moving to the next challenges that he will face, as he navigates his career helping dreams become reality through technology. We have absolutely no doubt that he will be successful in every problem and opportunity he comes across. We believe that few people on this planet have his methodical ability to break apart obstacles into manageable pieces, then take out each of those pieces with precision. And we will be jealous of each and every person that gets to work with him.
Hello James! How did your classical upbringing influence the music you make today?
Hi! I really didn’t like being forced to play by notation, but maybe some elements of discipline and focus filtered through from those times.
Walk us through the beginning of your songwriting. Where did your first inspirations come from?
In the beginning I covered a lot of stuff and copied everybody’s style, teaching myself to write songs on the side. Now I work a lot on my own stuff and look for cool covers to learn on the side.
Tell us about your upcoming, debut album “Clarity.” How long have you been working on it and who else played an instrumental role in making it a reality?
I worked towards “Clarity” for about one and a half years, though a couple of the songs are older than that. I guess the album wouldn’t exist at all without my manager Gonzalo at Manta Ray, my engineer Thomas at Puresound Recordings, and the entire team at Lichtdicht Records.
Who should listen to your new album? Fans of which other artists?
People with open ears and open minds! I think that fans of Coldplay, Foster The People, Phoenix, John Mayer, and The Police will dig it.
We’ve been busy hooking some new things up this week here at the Whyd studio. There are lots of screwdrivers laying among bits of wire. Something truly awesome is coming, and we can’t wait to tell you about it…
But it is also the cat days of winter, where the cold is damp and the rain gets stuck in the air, giving up its quest for the ground. For those of us who are riding out the end of the winter, a melody has resonated. The delicate voice of Michigan’s own Sufjan Stevens delivers a heartbroken message across his signature strums and hums. “No Shade In The Shadow Of The Cross" is his grief pure, a window into the place where the love for his lost mother is hiding in a corner, knee-deep in tears. He lays is bare and clear:
A brand new artist, one who used Whyd as a tool to help start her career, presents herself after releasing her very first EP, say hello to ZEN@.
Introduce yourself!
I grew up in Shanghai, and went to the States for high school and college. I love wandering around, outdoors, tech and the cosmos. The most interesting thing to me at the moment is “time.” I like to think it as an object and pretending that some things in the scale of time are fixed.
When did you start writing songs? Can you walk us through your songwriting process?
I started last fall when I was in Shanghai and traveling around Europe. I just write whenever I got an idea, and I picked four to make this album. They were all written in different ways. Both “SoundCloud" and "One Of A Million" had the chorus first, then I finished the whole songs weeks after. "Kairos" was written over an instrumental track that the producer Bravin, gave me. When I first heard this track, I had the melody of the song right away, so I just asked the producer if I can write a song over it. "Treasure Island" was fast. I wrote both the lyrics and melody in one morning. It’s not really or only about Pirates, but it’s based on an Oscar-winning documentary film.
I actually used Whyd to communicate ideas and inspirations with my producers. The playlist is the best feature for that!
Which artists have the strongest influence on your music?
Really a lot. I listen to a variety of very international music, from all over the world.
The strongest influence would be Sia. And even everything evolving around her music is so artistic.
Each of the 4 songs of your EP sound very different, what are some of the common themes that link them together?
Yes, they are! I wanted this album to have songs of very different styles initially, so it ended up like that. I worked with producers from three different countries to make them all sound different. I have many international friends and I love traveling. I guess it’s important for me to make music that has very diverse elements and feels like traveling. These four songs are still not enough to be diverse. It’s an experiment. It could be good or bad. A lot of the artists have their very distinctive music style, but I never want to have a specific style. I like changing, as long as the biggest goal is the true emotion with a good melody and lyrics.
One common theme is that they are all adventurous or about adventures.
Tell us about your song “SoundCloud.” What’s it about exactly?
It’s about graduation from college. I met many cool people in college. They have crazy hair, crazy outfit, crazy attitude, crazy dreams, and crazy cool everything. But when it’s their fourth year, everything changes. They cut their hair, start to wear black suits, delete all their social network accounts and hide in dorms to prepare for the next job interviews, mostly in finance or consulting. They said they want to work in those industries for two or three years. And afterwards, they would do whatever they are really passionate about. This is just blowing my mind.
Then I read two really good essays by Marina Keegan that talk about such phenomenon and graduation from college - “Even Artichokes Have Doubts” and “The Opposite Of Loneliness”. There are some references in “SoundCloud” from her essays. She was going to be a writer for The New Yorker, but died in a car accident just five days after her graduation from Yale in 2012. It’s really sad. She’s so talented and so inspirational.
What are your plans to develop and promote yourself in 2015?
I don’t know if I will have time to promote haha
The priority is to write more good music.
I definitely hope more people will hear my music. I am also designing and building some stuff. It is primarily about music, but it will also be some other things about creativity. I will probably share some of my crazy inventions there, too. I have more songs to be released very soon.
We have the pleasure of continuing our awesome series featuring the stories behind some of the best playlists representing genres and subgenres of music on Whyd. Today, something that hits close to home for our Community Manager. Literally.
Detroit is known around the world for the automobile industry. But there is something that Detroit has been producing this whole time as well, an equally international export: music. From the funky days of Motown, to the garage punk epoch, through the rise of electronic and most recently - the advent of Hip Hop, Detroit is in a constant state of creative evolution. Capturing an era that many can point to as its revival, The Backpackerz have put together their latest “Heavy Rotation” playlist around Hip Hop from the 2000s, “Detroit Hustles Harder.”
Can you introduce yourselves? What is the idea behind The BackPackerz and when did you get started?
We are Antoine and Hugo, the two co-founders of The BackPackerz. We met at Toulouse Business School around 2012 and quickly discovered our common passion for Hip-Hop. Longtime rap addicts, we decided to create The BackPackerz while studying in Barcelona in 2013. In fact, we couldn’t find the type of content about Hip-Hop we’d like to read among the existing websites, especially in French, so we decided to create it ourselves!
The BackPackerz is a web-magazine dedicated to celebrating and educating its readers to Hip-Hop culture. Through in-depth analysis on cultural landmarks, interviews and reviews, the 12 members of our team are creating the freshest online resource for anybody interested in Hip-Hop culture. We also curate the best Hip-Hop events (concerts, festivals, exhibits) in France because HIP-HOP LIVES!
Where does your passion of Hip Hop come from?
Antoine: I was introduced to rap music very early, around my second year of middle school, by a friend’s brother who had me listening to NTM, IAM and the whole Hostile posse. At the beginning, I was on French rap mostly because I liked the rebel attitude that came along with it. Then I started to dig into the American rap from the 90s after I got struck by Cut Killer’s mixtape “Party Jam - 1989 1996, The Golden Age.” I was in high school when I first heard Nas’s “Illmatic,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight Marauders” and Wu-Tang Clan - “Enter the 36 Chambers” which are still my all-time favorite albums. At that time, I was spending hours translating lyrics and searching Urban Dictionary (a time before Rap Genius) to get a better understanding of what those cats were saying.
Later with Olivier Cachin’s books and films like “Wild Style,” I discovered Hip-Hop was not only a music genre but also a fascinating culture with other elements like graffiti and dance and tremendous impacts on our modern society. Since then, I kept reading and gathering artifacts (records, films and books) of this sublime culture. A few years ago, I realized this archiving work had to be shared so I decided to launch The BackPackerz with Hugo.
Hugo: My passion for Hip-Hop came later than Antoine’s. In High School, I began to listen to mainstream stuff such as 50 Cent or Eminem and I immediately fell in love with this music because it combined rhythms that made my head bang hard and dope lyrics spit with amazing technicality. Soon I would dig into the history of this genre and couldn’t stop, because every day I would discovered how deep and wide this culture was. At first, I was really into the producers (Preemo, Dilla, Pete Rock, Q-Tip…) and how they chopped samples etc..They were my entry door to real Hip-Hop, more than the MCs.
Tell us about the concept of your Heavy Rotation playlists?
The concept of the Heavy Rotation playlists is to bring to our readers 10 dope tracks every Monday, in order to soften the pain of this particularly hated day of the week. Most of the time you will find a selection of 10 hottest rap songs of the last couple of weeks but sometimes we build playlists around a specific subject: a genre (e.g beatmaking edition) a specific technique (e.g brass edition) or for a special occasion like this “Detroit Hustles Harder” edition for J Dilla month. There is no rule, it just depends on our mood! Now our readers are really looking forward for them to come out, because you know “Fuck it’s Monday…but at least I’m gonna hear dope music!”
What’s special about this Post 2000 Detroit Hip Hop playlist?
Originally, the idea of the post 2000 Detroit rap playlist came up while we were preparing our interview with Detroit superstars Phat Kat, Elzhi and Guilty Simpson (that we will drop in a couple of weeks). As we were deep-digging into our hard drives, we were amazed to see how prolific and brilliant the Detroit scene was in the 2K decade. From Slum Village, to Elzhi, Black Milk or the great Apollo Brown; it seems that Detroit has never stop shining since we changed millennium.
On top of that, releasing a fine selection of the dopest tracks from Detroit rappers was exactly what The BackPackerz is meant for: curate history to educate and entertain. The purpose of this playlist - along our article Detroit State Of Mind - is for our readers and followers to discover / remember the greatness of this scene over the past 20 years.
Curating the playlist, we realized this excellence would not have been the same without a man: James Dewitt Yancey a.k.a J Dilla or Jay Dee, one of the greatest producer of all time. If you look at the playlist, you’ll find Jay Dee’s legacy in almost every single track: as a producer, an influencer or in the lyrics. We decided to release this special Heavy Rotation in February since it is known among his fans as “J Dilla month” (as he was born and died during the month of February).
A heavily bearded technical team sets up instruments on a packed stage while multicolored lights reflect brightly from the walls of the popular French TV Show “C A Vous.” The kitchen of the hidden studio in the 11ème has elegant-looking appliances. Everything gleans in stark contrast to the rainy grey courtyard outside.
The hubbub is all for their latest episode, featuring a true Whyd favorite: The Avener, whose track “Fade Out Lines" has been sitting in the top 10 of the Hot Tracks for months on end. It’s in a small office stocked with Mars bars to the side of the studio that we finally meet Tristan from Nice, the French artist who has just released his album "The Wanderings of The Avener,” and who is about to perform for the French public at large for the very first time.
If he was nervous, it was transmuted into warm friendliness. He sits down, cigarette in hand, ready to answer the Whyd community’s questions. We have 10 minutes. The mic clicks on.
This interview is translated from French. Tony Hymes for Whyd in bold. All photos, (except the selfie!) courtesy The Avener’s Facebook page.
In your new album there are a lot of reworks. When you create a remix do you try to break something down, or do you try to build something on top of what exists?
Tristan: That depends on the song that I use to do my rework. Sometimes I have to do a lot more, to change a lot of the arrangements, and sometimes just adding a bit of salt and pepper is all it takes to season the plate! So it depends, for example sometimes I’ll use a dozen or so tracks, and there are other times where I will use more than 50 tracks!
Let’s use your new remix of Rodriguez as an example.
Tristan: Rodriguez’s (“Hate Street Dialogue”) was a song that was rather easy to create because the heart was already there. All I wanted to do was amplify the rock aspect and make it more appropriate for the club. For that one I used about a dozen tracks to modify it.
How do you choose the songs that you remix?
Tristan: It’s really just music I like from my years as a DJ. With my DJ background I’ve played a lot of music, from funk to soul to house, and there are tracks that I can’t really play sometimes, because if I did it would empty the dance floor! So I tried to modify the tracks that I wanted to play, but wasn’t able to, and that’s how this album was born.
You have a classic music formation, notably the piano, but it’s not something that we take from your latest album. So does that serve something for you?
Tristan: Classical music helps me with music in general, with the notes, understanding, and writing sheet music. For this album it helped from a technical standpoint, and didn’t really serve as a source of inspiration. Having a classical background is a big advantage to make music, but orchestrally speaking it’s difficult to bring that into this type of music.
What do the artists that you remixed think of your remixes? Phoebe Killdeer (“Fade Out Lines”) for example?
Tristan: She was the first test. Phoebe Killdeer loved the track, but at the beginning she didn’t want to have her name attached to it, because it wasn’t in her overall artistic direction. She was, however, really happy with it. For the other artists, some of whom were collaborators, like Rodriguez, they love it, so it’s a huge joy for me.
Who are your influences? Who do you look up to?
Tristan: My music comes from different places. I listen to a lot of music, I’m very eclectic, at home or when I’m DJing. There are a lot of artists that influence me. It’s true that I spent 10 years in classical music so I have a lasting adoration for Beethoven, and Bach, they are THE composers, and no one from today will arrive at their level, they have so much unique musicality. They are still my favorites to this day.
Are there artists that you don’t like? Maybe not artists, that might burn some bridges, but are there styles of music that you don’t like?
Tristan: There are some genres that I appreciate a little bit less. But I am still a student of music, so when there is a style that I don’t like, I try to figure out what the artist was trying to do. I never say “that doesn’t sound good.” There are always good songs in every style of music, you just have to find them.
You’re labelled as being deep house, but on the new album there is a lot more. Are there other styles that you are moving closer towards? A bit of folk maybe?
Tristan: Yes! This album is sort of a voyage between different epochs and different styles. And finally I can re-vindicate my eclecticism because it’s not easy for an artist to be so diverse with their music to say “I make all music.” It’s complicated to say that. This album is about sharing, it’s surrounded by my influences, so it’s a journey among lot of different points.
Would you classify your music as being French?
Tristan: I would like that! I definitely like the “French Touch” period, which had a big influence on me. But now do I bring anything new to this “French Touch” compared to other artists? I hope to have that energy.
Now I have fans that come from all over the world, not just in France, like Germany, Switzerland, Australia, South Korea, there are lots of people that loved the first single, and that makes me happy!
When you are aren’t making music, what do you do for fun?
Tristan: When I don’t make music I play music! :)
I have a second passion, aviation, so I’m in the process of getting my private pilot’s license.
Awesome! At least you’ll have a great soundtrack to fly to!
We’re only at the middle of February, on the historically superstitious day of Friday the 13th, and already one of the year’s biggest releases has reverberated around the globe propelling the single to the top of the Hot Tracks here in Paris. Kendrick Lamar just scooped up a GRAMMY for best rap performance for “i” (for which he also claimed the much more prestigious Whyd Track of the Weekend), and his newest effort “The Blacker The Berry" encapsulates the perilous state of race, spitting his signature verses with anger across reggae calls all summed up with the proud statement: "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice."
A big thanks to Encee x Kalab’s for getting it to Whyd first!