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.

The Gaslamp Killer - The Mayan (live set)

When I started this blog 2 years ago, out of a renewed interest in music in general, particularly a renewed appreciation for certain types of - largely Detroit- Hip Hop (the production opus of J Dilla, Black Milk, a young honk named Danny Brown) as well as a handful of Electronic Dance Music producers and DJ's who fascinated me.  The Gaslamp Killer was exactly that cat.  His infectious mixes of everything from Jimi Hendrix to Dilla, to psychedelic pastiches of the Turkish Pop his grandfather cultivated a deep and abiding love in, spoke to types of devotional and psychedelic music I've always been drawn to.  I scoured the internet looking for the best performances of him live, such as this one which I called The Best Backyard Party Ever for obvious reasons.  Another particularly brilliant set in a unique setting I came across was at the Natural History Museum First Fridays (06.05.09). 

William Benjamin Bensussen is a Turkish American (he is in fact the son of a Turkish-Lebanese-Jewish father and Lithnuanian-Jewish mother) visionary who came to prominence in the DJ club culture of San Diego.  The questionable club district was dubbed The Gaslamp District and so arose a counterpoint to that glib surface side of club culture.  In 2005 he relocated to LA and co-founded an experimental party series (Low End Theory) with Daddy Kev and DJ Nobody in the area of Lincoln Heights.  In the eclectic LA beat scene he played frequently alongside Daedalus, Samiyam and Flying Lotus; all of whom he collaborates with on his brand new Breakthrough LP (on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label).  In the interim he seems to have done everything from playing over-inspired sets for under-enthused hip hop fans waiting for headliner MF Doom to take the stage (or someone wearing his mask) to producing the bulk of Gonjasufi's A Sufi And A Killer.

With Electronic Dance Music having become hyper-popular and lionized some very questionable button-pushing barbarians at the gate will The Gaslamp Killer prove to be the refreshing antidote for DJ culture gone wrong?  Or gone right?  Despite his prodigious skills as a producer the Killer is best heard as a DJ such as here in his set the other day at The Mayan in LA. Listen early in his set for his debut of Nissim with Amir Yhagmai (who predictably for LA is a member of a musical duo Jogger with Alan Thicke's son Jonathan) plucking a virtuous line on yiali tambur and guitar.  The track also features Daedalus on bass as the three tried to extend and breakdown a Turkish record the Killer found one day.