"The most jazzy I've heard electronic music get."

April 17, 2020 10:03 AM

Have you finally reached that age category, where bodily problems start showing up and you can not blindly trust all of your farts anymore? There is no reason to worry, just embrace the ageing. Anyway it's been a while since anyone has heard of me, I have been quietly making new music and over time I ended up with this almost entirely unquantized album which may be the most pretty sounding thing I've done to date. I'm not expecting anyone to read this by the way but it'd be unkind to leave this text box empty. It makes it feel unfinished if I did. This album is best enjoyed in your private aura like playing from your headphones while you're in public or commuting or in a field for no reason other than to listen to this album. Don't let anyone play this in the club, it won't work, none of the tracks sync well just to give djs a hard time. Save the environment, start with yourself. Wonky Vision by Fah, on Bandcamp.

Fah is a bloke from the Netherlands who makes acidic, synthy, breakbeat/ braindance music. He puts a good bit out on his own Bandcamp account, though those recent outtakes are from We Were Cool Ones from Occult Research (also on Bandcamp). He's also active on We Are The Music Makers (WATMM) forums as Fahz0r.

posted by filthy light thief (16 comments total)

This is really nice and all, but c'mon with that title. We've had jazzy ass electronica for well over 20 years.
posted by gnutron at 10:54 AM on April 17, 2020 [4 favorites]

you had me after "farts"
posted by elkevelvet at 11:03 AM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

hey nice! some lovely early IDM vibes here without feeling too stuck in the past or self-consciously pastichey. You could drop most of these on Warp's WAP100 compilation and not notice they're new, and I mean that in a good way.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:34 AM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

The quote is from a review on the album, but I defintely appreciate more examples of jazzy electronic music.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:43 AM on April 17, 2020

filthy light thief - Spotify link

ETA - Screw this, I can't get it work. search Jazztronica in Spotify.
posted by Keith Talent at 12:10 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

🎶To dream the impossible dream...
To fart the untreatable fart....🎶
posted by hippybear at 12:33 PM on April 17, 2020

jokes are only funny if you type them correctly.

"untrustable fart"
posted by hippybear at 12:56 PM on April 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I trust my farts implicitly.
posted by briank at 1:22 PM on April 17, 2020

Well, you haven't reached that age category yet, then.
posted by hippybear at 1:31 PM on April 17, 2020 [3 favorites]

Look forward to checking this out. I hate sounding like a hater as the first comment was my initial impulse, but I do think it's cool to have more jazzy electronic music.

So I'd point out "Acid Jazz" as a genre (not quite "electronica" I know, but can have cross over). (Baby Mammoth, Mark Farina, Funky Porcini)

Downtempo another genre for jazzy electronica (Kruder/Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation)

Some of this may be more "funk" than "jazz" I admit...

But then there's also... I can't think of his name. Craig. Something. Ugh. If I had access to my music rn I'd pull it up. Really nice slow downtempo jazzy stuff.

Finally THE album when I think "Jazzy Electronic" :

Music is Rotted One Note(YT Link)
posted by symbioid at 3:52 PM on April 17, 2020 [5 favorites]

In the Miles Davis documentary that is on Netflix currently, one of the musicologists interviewed makes the point that Davis' early 70's output prefigured house, drum n bass, and other "electronic" genres and I think there is a lot of truth to that.
posted by chaz at 4:59 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

That Squarepusher record is great. The other jazzy looped music that I loved from 20 years ago was Amon Tobin.
posted by umbú at 7:18 PM on April 17, 2020 [2 favorites]

I was going to give this a wide berth, we're still in the same (unending) week where a kid friend of mine said "before there was industrial techno, there was Ancient Methods" (and I had industrial techno tracker mods 25+ years ago) so I'm grumpy about neophytes reinventing genres they missed in history class.

But Umbú said "Amon Tobin" and that's perked my ears up. I'll give this a look. (Umbú, is his work as Two Fingers way too intense for you?)

You've got to play "rock-n-full family trees" about who worked with whom and who influenced whom. A search in my new favourite search engine lmgtfy.com (:-P) points to Wonky as a genre of un-quantised electronic hip-hop (Wikipedia, plus I like records by Rustie and Flying Lotus), influenced by J Dilla, and Dilla was featured (previously) at Vox Earworm for his influential use of his Roland MPC-3000.
posted by k3ninho at 2:35 AM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'll clarify my understanding of the title, based on listening to Fah's music: this is synthesizer music, bleepy, acidic breakbeats and IDM or "braindance" music, not sample-based music, like that by Amon Tobin, or modern wonky producers of electronic hip-hop. But instead of programming rigid patterns, there's some less angular elements to his programming, which is pretty impressive. For comparison, here's the heavier Kingtrips 2 EP from Occult Records labelmate Vytear. Reminiscent of some earlier, bleepier Squarepusher, who wrote about Music Is Rotted One Note, that this album "headed in that direction as opposed to the more computer sequence-type stuff is because I was actually beginning to feel really limited using sequencers and samplers...I was really beginning to yearn for the sort of unpredictability of the randomness of improvising with live instruments." Wonky Vision is still very much computer music, but with a bit more soul and swing. Definitely nowhere near the random improvisation available with live musicians, but not metronome-orderly.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:29 AM on April 18, 2020

The Flashbulb and related projects cover a fairly broad range, but much of the work tends to have some nice jazz elements. Benn Jordan (behind them all) has a YouTube electronic music gear channel called Benn and Gear, which I've enjoyed watching even though I don't really do any of that stuff.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 2:11 PM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Double Fine Zone by Spacetime Continuum (Jonah Sharp) has some of the best of the genre. That came out in 1999.
posted by mikeand1 at 10:10 PM on April 18, 2020 [1 favorite]