Futurists

This morning I was pleased to see that another episode of the Going Quantum Podcast had appeared in my iTunes window.

This podcast is created by a Canadian guy (I think he’s from Toronto, like myself) who shares mixes of a variety of different kinds of electronic music. He focuses on dubstep, electro, glitch hop, and drum and bass, and also invites a bunch of different guest mixers to provide mixes for the show. His shows tend to last about 40 minutes. I find it interesting the variety that he provides on his shows… a lot of producers or DJs tend to stick to a single genre, but this guy is a little bit all over the place (albeit while remaining within the realm of the electronic) – some of his mixes will start off in one genre and then switch to another when the guest mixer starts to spin.

In my opinion, the reason these podcasts are so great is because of the liquid dubstep mixes – dubstep with a melodic edge. Seriously, this stuff is great! The two mixes that I have found are the best of the lot are episodes 50 and 75. If you’re into the melodic and the dubstep like I am, I recommend checking these two out.

In his 20 questions interview, Alex Paterson of The Orb indicated that the song E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching was his favorite piece of music. I hadn’t heard this song before (or at least, I thought I hadn’t) so I checked it out on this YouTube video. You can listen to its six parts from this initial link. Interestingly, the song seems to be named after a series of chess tournaments in the United Kingdom.

It turns out that I had heard this song sampled in several ambient music mixes… one of them, in fact, might have been by Alex Paterson himself. It was also sampled on the song Sueño Latino in 1989, which I remember well – in fact, the main loop comprises most of that song. E2-E4 is a complete classic of course… an extremely chilled piece of music that, while purposefully repetitive, is complicated enough that it does not (at least in my opinion) get boring.

The question I have is… how the heck was this song recorded in 1981? This song was clearly well ahead of its time, and inspired a great many different artists… in fact, some say that it inspired the entire house music and, afterward, techno music genres of the late 1980s.

A true piece of music history!