Gaslamp Killer - Resident Advisor Mix (download, tracklist)

Here are a couple of very good professional mixes for free dowload that GLK has done for respected outlets like Resident Advisor Podcast (download) and another good one (download)  for BBC's Mary Anne Hobbs.  It's nice to hear a more sedate if you like, methodical run through of the kind of tracklist GLK's playing post-Breakthrough his phenomenal release of this year.

The Resident Advisor Podcast  has many of the familiar charms of a GLK set.  GLK drops oddball genre hopping sounds from contemporary producers: Elan (2 in 5 four), Coki (Lower Octave), Samiyam (Cushion), Adrian Younge (Turn Down The Sound) splicing into the middle of the set a full rendition of a very cosmic cosmic folk slab (Shira Small's - Eternal Life).  Eternal Life originally appeared on a record called Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies Of The Canyon and sounds like it.

 

There's something comedic about The Gaslamp Killer, a product of LA's fertile beat making scene, wedging some Laurel Canyon folk from the so-called second folk renaissance of the 70's into a set that also emblematically includes Jay Z (and Kanye West's) pensive Primetime as well as Dr. Dre's Nigga Witta Gun.  The humour is GLK's but also something of the cosmic joke which he seems to be in on.

What could be called a sort of sufi or mystical bent oozes out of his new album Breakthrough which plays out as a coda at the end of the mix.  Born William Benjamin Bensussen, The Gaslamp Killer, often tips his hand heavily to his love of Turkish pop and various traditional instruments.  On his brilliant Nissim, which featuring Daedalus on bass and Yagmar Aghmai on yiali tambur and guitar, he tries to recreate (his version of) a brilliant Turkish Pop record he found one day naming the new version after his grandfather Nissim.  He seems to often play a transition from Nissim into Apparitions (with Gonjasufi on vocals) devotional lyrics over a very long sample of a late period Mulatu Astatke sample from the Ethio-Jazz pioneer.   This suite is often wrapped up with GLK's brilliant, and much darker, chainsaw audio panning ride through 7 Years Of Bad Luck For Fun (feat. Dimlite) which sounds something like the audio equivalent of Frank Zappa's epitaph.