Outside Lands hasn’t had a woman headline in its eleven-year existence, until 2018. They must have felt especially bad because two dominated this year. First with Florence on Saturday and last with Janet closing out Sunday. Over the past few years, Sundays seem to be the day. They’ve stacked it well.
For the last two years, I’ve started off Sunday early. I go the whole day. Doing it all three days is probably a challenge not worth taking, but I recommend going all day at least once. It’s a lot warmer, Golden Gate Park is perpetually cold. There’s less dust flying around, because of the best thing yet, no crowds! There’s nothing better at a festival than going up to the main stage and being able to dance with some space to a great soul band. And boy was there one each year!
Last year’s Sunday opened with two soul singers, Lee Fields and then Jacob Banks, who are growing on me more with time and accumulating songs. This year, all it had to be was Durand Jones & The Indications. Durand Jones’ voice was expectedly powerful, but his drummer’s voice was something else.
When I first heard Aaron Frazer that day, I thought it was just a recording. I couldn’t see anyone singing and it was too good to be true live. It wasn’t, Aaron’s voice was there, live, and took me back farther than any other contemporary soul singer. It felt as classic as anyone ever has. In that falsetto kind of way.
I’ve listened to way too much music this year, probably around 12,000 new tracks (I tried calculating it). Most of the music was.. unfinished, to say the least, but we found a lot more songs worth keeping than any year before it.
A lot of new music emerged or reemerged over the year. Deep house was the big thing, but many discredit it because of the hype. It had its bad with its good. Our favorite new style goes to what doesn’t seem to have an official name yet. I’ve heard many call it kawaii, but I prefer vapor – this naming shit is more important than you’d think.
We’ve got 30 songs to show off, 11 artists and 20 playlists for you, but if that’s not enough… wait ’til next year.
I’ve gone to a handful of EDM shows & festivals over the last year and I just don’t get how people can dance to most of the popular shit these days (says the hipster music blogger). At least not when you’ve got such better music to dance to (also hipster). So obviously we had to put a list together (very hipster).
Our Dance Party mix for 2014 is geared more towards the club or house party rather than the rave. I guess that’s where we differ from the higher BPM, bombastic music dominating EDM right now.
We get into various forms of house music on here, but there’s plenty of other influences as well — I’m being vague because I just spent way too much of my time putting together this list and I don’t have time to articulate it (like always).
Like the iPhone every year, this is our best playlist yet! It really is.
House has been my obsession for the past few years and my favorite kind is the mid-tempo, upbeat summertime jams. Which may or may not turn out to be called Tropical House. Or Summer House. Or Horizontal Disco. It’s up in the air really.
A few tracks do stereotypically incorporate the steel drums, but we did cover more ground than that. We also decided this should be more comprehensive than our usual playlists because we wanted to get all the trop house personas in one place. There are quite a few interesting characters.
I had a good talk with a few of my coworkers yesterday about remixing and they brought up a good point. A lot of remixers just don’t add enough to the original to warrant credit.
So many of the remixes I favorite on SoundCloud turn out to be not all that different from its original. Often times this is because dj’s are adding in simple edits, something as simple as a synth, to make the music more danceable.
The point of a remix is to take something from a song, whether it be a vocal or other memorable part, and update it into a more modern sound or flip it into a completely different style, among others I’m sure.
I actually had to get rid of a few that were originally on here because of that very problem. They brought something new to the song, but it’s really the same tune, just an edit. And maybe producers should start labeling it as such.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/160979106" params="color=000000&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="20" iframe="true" /]
Highlighting singles have long dominated on here. We’re coming up on our thousandth post, this will make 999, and we’re slightly shifting from singles towards playlists. We really just no longer have time or the writing prowess to cover every single track we love.
Pop remixes especially have fallen back from the spotlight, but we’ve collected quite a few over the past few months and a playlist of the best seemed like the perfect way to share. We may not have much to say about every single track, but they all have taken their original and slapped a new style (usually better than the original).
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/143929366" iframe="false" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18" /]
Ever since I started up Silence, I’ve always wanted to discover the next big thing in R&B, mainly because of my disliking for its mainstream counterpart over the past few decades. The problem with finding this underground soul that’s about to reinvent R&B is that they’re not easy to dig up online, but I managed to do it, eventually.
I got my first taste of neo soul, or so I liked to call it, when I heard the super-group out of Minneapolis, Gayngs, play ‘The Gaudy Side of Town.’ The group gained a decent following, but never enough to start a movement, even in light of all the names behind the project. Six months later, however, a duo out of Toronto created one soulful tune that set the spark for soul & R&B’s reunion, their name was The Weekend […]
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/40446926" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18" width="60%"]
Ellie Goulding covering my favorite neo soul singer… this sounds too good to be true. And to top it all off we get Xaphoon of Chiddy Bang on production… yep, these names are building it up to something not even they can live up to. And as much as I love the concept, it’s going to take some time for me to fall for the actual product (if I ever do).
I like the overall production, but I think a dubstep mood like Downpour’s remix of ‘High for This’ might’ve suited Ellie better. As for her roll, she’s as ethereal as ever, but sure doesn’t spark the emotion that The Weeknd’s original does for me… not even close. But who knows, maybe a few weeks of warming up to it will change my mind… usually the first taste is a good indicator, though.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/47992595" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18"]
After he impressed the world with his October’s Very Cold project, mashing up Drake with Coldplay, Chi Duly is back with his latest offering entitled Balloon of Haus. The 11 track offering showcases Chi Duly’s take on some of The Weeknd’s most popular tracks spanning from his three mixtapes.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/36523684" params="auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" width="100%" height="18" iframe="false" /]
I’ve heard many chop & skew The Weeknd’s vocals before, but Madeaux does it a little differently in “The Space Between Us.” He doesn’t try and overemphasize The Weeknd to entice people in, but takes what makes the vocals one of a kind and turns it into an even grander hypnotizer. At first I wasn’t quite sure if some of the vocals were even The Weeknd himself, they were that chopped & skewed, but that’s what makes it so special, he lets you glimpse in & out, seamlessly flowing through electro manipulation.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/35997414" params="player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=292929" height="18"]