We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

SND​.​PE VOL​.​02: Crossover Series [compilation]

by Sound Pellegrino

/
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

about

Following a first volume giving their tour of European club music, Teki Latex & Orgasmic assemble a new cast for the label’s second concept album made by 10 new team-ups for 10 tracks, drawing talent from the most esteemed stables and fresh names.

SND.PE VOL.02 is us doing our best to act as a musical collider, a particle accelerator we’ve built with the hope of seeing new phenomena in the audio landscape.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS ALBUM
by Teki Latex

In the mid 2000’s came the era of genre-mashing and bootlegs. The proverbial “nowadays kids have iPods and they skip from Britney to obscure techno they found on blogs” pre-digested discourse everyone used to go on about in interviews. It was MySpace’s glory days and it surely had tons of qualities but it was also an utopia of sorts. The main problem was that it opened doors for a general feeling of anything goes—even the ingredients that didn’t mix harmoniously or contextually AT ALL seemed like they absolutely HAD to be mashed together and/or remixed by every DJ in the World for the sake of so called open-mindedness—dangerous eclecticism causing uniformity. Naturally a few years later—as a reaction in opposition to it—this lead to the current atmosphere of musical communitarianism.

In the 2010’s the championed attitude for listeners within electronic music is now to stick to a genre as small as possible and specialise in it in order to show your belonging to a group that’s in the know— eventually sometimes loving the occasional mainstream pop song semi-ironically on the side to show you have a sense of humor. People still hop between genres, they’ll just spend two years loving ‘tropical House’ to death and then totally dismiss it from one day to another in favor a more ‘serious’ subgenre they will invest 100% of their energy into, absolutely voluntarily ignoring what goes on in the rest of the electronic music world. As a result, micro-genres remain micro-genres and everything stays pure. That’s fine, but at the end of the day, this new generation of chin-stroking 14-year-old YouTube-bred musical intellectuals tends to be jaded, easily bored… and boring.

We at Sound Pellegrino, believe that great music comes from dialog. Dialog between groove and repetitiveness, melody and rhythm, different places, different aesthetics, different generations, unexpected encounters. This is why we created the CROSSOVER SERIES. We take two different producers or artists we are immense fans of, and we bring them together to create music. At times they know and secretly admire each other without ever having had the opportunity to collaborate. On other times they have no clue someone in a totally different scene and continent was making like-minded music with different means but common goals. Finally, some just want to be challenged and confronted to sounds or artists that go in a totally different direction as theirs in order to create something truly new together. We, as a label, dream of undreamt-of collaborations that make sense in one twisted way or another, introduce artists to each other, try to make the process as easy as possible for them, and then just let the magic happen.

After releasing 3 critically-acclaimed EPs from Bok Bok & Tom Trago, Joakim & Bambounou, and Surkin & Todd Edwards, we dedicate this second volume of our SND.PE concept-albums to the art of the Crossover Series. We have nothing against keeping micro-genres pure and visions unaltered: we are music lovers and humble specialists, but we also do love mixing things up and finding unexpected common threads between styles because guess what?—that’s what DJs do.

Music CAN be about mixing ingredients together, you just have to leave fine cuisine to the Chefs.

SND.PE VOL.02, TRACK-BY-TRACK
by Teki Latex

01. MATTHIAS ZIMMERMANN & SCNTST — “Tommy”
Since their collaboration on SND.PE VOL.01’s “Rick”, Matthias Zimmermann (Sound Pellegrino) & SCNTST (Boysnoize records) have made their little studio sessions together a fine habit. “Tommy” is the result of another one of these sessions. It starts off quietly as the balearic sun rising in the morning, then goes into the type of unexpected crazy broken-drum screwed-jungle offensive-jazz madness only these two would be capable of.

02. CRYSTAL & IKONIKA — “Dream Incubation”
We had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted this to collaboration to sound like since the beginning and the results didn’t disappoint. Japanese band Crystal’s mixture of YMO-esque Nippon naive Pop and kraftwerkian-influenced beats tends to accidentally give birth to a romantic sound very reminiscent of Latin Freestyle. On the other hand, Latin Freestyle, Pop and that particular brand of ‘80s pre-Miami Bass is an influence more and more present in UK producer Ikonika’s (Hyperdub) work. In other words we saw Freestyle as a common bond, a contextual bridge between two production units from two very different places and scenes. One does it without even paying attention, finding inspiration it its roots, the other flirts with it in a more conscious way while bringing it to the next level. We thought this was a match made in heaven and we wanted to bring these two approaches together. The result is 100% retro-futuro-Italo-piano-shoot’em-up melancholy.

03. EERO JOHANNES & TEKI LATEX — “Things That I Do”
It’s my song and as usual I feel awkward talking about it. Probably my first foray into a ‘song’ format since my ‘Pop’ days, and who else than Eero Johannes (Planet Mu) to back it up with a chunky slice of kindergarten futurist lo-fi phonk? The lyrics are a confession of sorts, and the beat, stuck between Computer Love and the traditional Eero-dney Jerki-hannes vibe make this ‘kind of a cool R’n’B song’. (▰˘◡˘▰) ←Teki blushes.

04. CRACKBOY & JEAN NIPON — ”Ligne Onze”
We’ve been fond of Krikor aka Crackboy (Zone, Tigersushi, I’m A Cliché, Get The Curse…so many labels!) since his early 2000 releases as half of parisian booty/raw classic Electro duo France Copland, little did we know that pairing him with epileptic dance master Jean Nipon (Clekclekboom) would result in such a straightforward, aerial feel-good afterhours house track as “Ligne Onze”!

05. DEXTER & GANT-MAN — “Ur Booty Soft”
We fell in love with Dance music via Ghetto House and its derivatives and Chicago’s very own Godfather Of Juke DJ Gant-Man (Dance Mania) has been a favourite of ours for a long time. We thought pairing him with another favourite of ours, Amsterdam’s legendary drum machine Lord Dexter (Clone, Rush Hour), would make perfect sense. “Ur Booty Soft” re-ignites the flame of classic Electro-rooted Ghettotech via raunchy mischievous lyrics dropped by Gant-Man over Dexter-crafted subtly spacious mechanical hardware action. This is the type of cross-Atlantic exchange and dialog we’ve always wanted to establish with the Crossover Series.

06. L-VIS 1990 & SINJIN HAWKE — “The Pit”
When we found out these two were working together, we just had to have a track from them on the compilation. Night Slugs (and Clone)’s L-Vis 1990 and Pelican Fly’s Sinjin Hawke come together to deliver a grimey swampy deviant beastial track featuring heavy breathing down your neck and a voice saying “Trapped: it’s just me & u now.”. Basically this is the sound of sex with a robot alligator covered with synthetic leather skin.

07. FEADZ & ORGASMIC — “Throw It Up”
A Clash Of The Titans of sorts: Sound Pellegrino co-founder Orgasmic and Ed Banger via Bpitch Ctrl wizard Feadz have known each other forever as semi-veterans of a certain Parisian trademark style of Techno/Rap hybrid DJ sets, but it took the Crossover Series to bring them together on “Throw It Up”. Reconciling their common obsession with the future and their love for Hollerboard-era club music, this action-packed intricately-programmed stomper is built for relentless, urgent DJ sets and highly energetic dance floors.

08. NICOLAS MALINOWSKY & TOMMY KRUISE — “Disstopia”
There’s a lot going on in “Disstopia” but it all comes together coherently. Nicolas Malinowsky’s skate-video-part-sampling “Skateboarder” from SND.PE VOL.01 made a lot of noise in the skateboard community, and when we played it to skate afficionado Tommy Kruise he instantly felt the connection. The two exchanged stems, ideas, bits and pieces back & forth until Malinowsky came up with a draft of a track, which he sent to Kruise who proceeded to screw and chop it using his trademark drowsy menacing space-conscious method.

09. TRUNCATE & TWR72 — “Frame”
This track is a great example of a dream collaboration come true. TWR72 and Truncate are both known in different circles for being specialists in crafting ultimate techno and house tools. We thought “how great would it be to take TWR72’s one-note techno banger approach and pair it with Truncate’s mental moody afterhours tool style?” and they made it happen.

10. HELIX & HRDVSION — “Gmail”
We were talking with Helix (Night Slugs) about who to pair him with, and he mentioned wanting to recreate the kind of energy Bok Bok felt when he did his Crossover Series EP for us and had to collaborate with someone whose style was so different from his as Tom Trago. He wanted to be pushed in a totally different direction. So I thought that Canadian Berlinist Hrdvsion (Gigolo, Rinse)’s brand of anything goes warped melodic House would balance Dirty South divo Helix’s skeletal industrial drum tracky Grime-Tech perfectly. What came out of it is absolutely different from both artists’ usual output: a dreamy ambient sonic landscape with thunderous bursts of loud Atlanta Bass-y drums hopping in and out. Lush.

credits

released January 27, 2014

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Sound Pellegrino Paris, France

Label founded and curated by Teki Latex & Orgasmic in 2009. and run by Emile Shahidi in Paris.

50 EPs, 5 compilations/

We mostly release instrumental music that isn't all that easy to mix and don't do a lot of vinyl. Is it still OK to like us?
... more

contact / help

Contact Sound Pellegrino

Streaming and
Download help

Shipping and returns

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Sound Pellegrino, you may also like: