Four Tet's ten-minute beat challenge

If your laptop is loaded with Ableton or Garageband, the musician’s concept of being “in the studio” is a nonsense. The studio follows you around like a randy dog, constantly rubbing its icon in your face every time you log on.

Which is why Kieran Hebden, known better as Four Tet, seems to be in a corner of his living room in this ten-minute beat challenge (video below). I’m half expecting a hoover to appear screen-right at any moment.

In this challenge, he has to create a passable beat against the clock. He needles his way through fragments of Thriller on a record player he seems to have stolen off a child, then slices and filters the results to create Four Tet’s knife-sharp house music motif.

Here’s the video. I’ll spew out some thoughts beneath.

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THOUGHTS ON FOUR TET'S BEAT CHALLENGE.

1. Although he finds some super sweet sounds, he’s right when he says that lead motif is too much. It’s still better than anything I could do. Obviously. Because he’s mother-flumping Four Tet.

2. I use Ableton too, and it’s good to see he uses similar techniques to me: finding the groove; letting things clash until something clicks; tweaking and tweaking and tweaking.

3. He has a mouse from the 1920s.

4. With such clipped samples, it’s a reminder to all music makers that less is more.

5. Spooling through vinyl like that is an honourable way to make music, as this brilliant documentary on the Amen break will show.

6. Why would you hoover a wooden floor? Stupid Fats.

Now go forth, laptop musicistas, and make beautiful music.

U Can't Touch The UK Charts: an MC Hammer infographic

There are many things you can touch, but you literally cannot touch statistics. Try it. See, it's impossible.

Here are some statistics (above) about MC Hammer's hit singles in the UK compared to anyone else who has ever had a hit single as 'MC-something'.

Two rather pleasing things: firstly, that nicely balanced 'weeks in the UK charts number' and the fact that the joint second most successful MC of all time is Manchester's own MC Tunes.

Oh and the only other person to have a single beginning with "Yo!" is, er, well you can see for yourself.

(Click for a bigger version of the graphic.)

Harder Better Faster Fats: how I want to make 2014 better than 2013

In the spirit of this site being a bit more personal than Fat Roland On Electronica, I wrote a lengthy blog post about how my life is awful and we should all just live in a dungeon gnawing the plaster off the walls and listening to Lionel Blair read out the contents of his own soul.

Instead of bombarding you with the whole thing, and to inject a little entertainment into it, I am going to split it out over a few weeks. I am also going to make you listen to this:



AN INTRODUCTION.

Underworld's Always Loved A Film makes me feel nostalgia mixed with a tickling, bubbling hope that fizzes from foot to groin to noggin. It's in this spirit that I present this week's 'Harder better faster Fats'. Yes, that's what I'm calling it. Shut up.

So then. By way of an introduction: I feel uneasy about 2013.

Despite brilliant high points such as Fat Roland’s Electric Shorts and the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s left me with an uneasy feeling. I joined an amazing writing group, did some really fun video and Twitter work, and some wonderful luck came my way. But I think I let opportunities slip.

These blog posts will be me working out that slip.

AN ANALOGY.

Take the film trilogy Naked Gun.

I love that those films because I am stupid. It was all so slightly off-the-rails and I love deadpan. But every time I watch it, I feel that I could be watching Airplane!, which is even better.

Maybe that's what 2013 was like: Naked Gun when you could have been enjoying Airplane! If you're not familiar with that analogy, replace those film titles respectively with Bradley Walsh and Bradley Cooper, or the current series of Sherlock with any other series of Sherlock.

A PROMISE.

I feel optimistic about 2014. I've made myself some promises. Little targets throughout the year to make the next 12 months more, well, less slippy.

They will involve my writing and my focus and my health and some pretty deep crap. As I blog about it over the next few weeks, I'll accompany it with some of the most hopeful records I can find.

(If this all sounds dangerously like therapy-through-blogging, then welcome to Netloafer...)

If 2014 turns out as well as I hope, I'll be dancing around my hovel to the pulsating glory of Always Loved A Film whilst mentally crash-landing a plane with a blow-up doll, far far away from the wall-gnawing Lionel Blair dungeon.

Now, that's hope...

(Pictured: Underworld.)

Things that are easy and things that are hard (new Fractions video)

I recorded a new Fractions video. Watch it above or see it on the Fractions page. Either way, viewing is recommended with human eyes and not with, say, a fence or a heel or a country. Eyes. They're usually best for looking.

This video is about things that are easy and things that are hard.

TEN THINGS I FIND EASY.

1. Being silly.
2. Making people laugh.
3. Understanding maths.
4. Listening to music.
5. Empathy.
6. Simple punctuation.
7. Reading stories and books.
8. Eating too much food.
9. Typing.
10. Lists.

TEN THINGS I FIND HARD.

1. Window licking.
2. Winning and/or presenting Going For Gold.
3. Going back in time and un-inventing the cigarette.
4. Playing professional football for India.
5. Alchemy.
6. Giving birth to a kestrel.
7. Becoming NASCAR champion with a Meccano car.
8. Reciting the entire track listing of Now That's What I Call Music.
9. Shouting Swedish at Lego ponies.
10. This particular list.

I feel, on this new-look website, that we're really getting to know each other.

Further Fats: Fractions 6 ("Interestag")

Hip hop DIY: Safety instructions with Coolio

When carrying out DIY tasks, please ensure you follow these safety instructions with Coolio. Especially when near walls. You can never be too careful. Right, Coolio? Coolio? Jeez, someone get an ambulance.

Images: Gevmag.com, Cali-market.com, AAP, Popdust.com, screenshot, Artinbase.info, Thefivecount.com, Allhiphop.com, Reuters, screenshot. Please comment for attribution changes.

Further Fats: The world's first and only messenger of exploding lungs(a different kind of DIY)

Live performances in February

I've added a couple of live appearances to this site. Click yourself here if you want to see - in real life - my flesh, my bone, and my ornamental puppy Barry. The live appearances are:

- A talent contest and cabaret night;
- A London-based open mic night visiting Manchester.

I'll keep my gigs updated on that page, just for you, dear netloafer. Come see me. I do a strange mixture of literature and comedy.

By the way, I lied about the puppy. And, if I'm honest, the bone. I do have visible flesh though, I think.

A little Novation motivation for my creation stimulation (ignore the cats)

I bought a new thing. It's a MIDI controller. You plug it into your DAW and, wait, hold on, this reminds me of a Twitter conversation I had with Benjamin Judge.

So I got a thing. It's a Novation LaunchKey Mini and it's super cute. You can see it in the photograph above. Ignore the cats. They were a present off chums in Scotland. The cats, that is. Beautiful, aren't they? They're like real cats but not real.

I've not released anything as Hounds of Hulme since 2012 apart from as backing audio on Fractions. It doesn't mean I'm not constantly banging out mad choons of varying low quality; it's kind of a necessary creative splurge that keeps my brain ticking.

This little beauty (ignore the cats) will make that low-quality banging just that little bit more fun.

Further Fats: Because / a melon / only slightly: birthday thoughts (2012)

Where did dubstep go?

Where did dubstep go?

Not so long ago, it wobbled up from the underground to the broadsheets via that bizarre Britney Spears middle eight on Britney's Hold It Against Me. We stopped calling Burial dubstep and bowed down to our low-end oscillating masters.

Where did it go? Skrillex hasn't had a hit for a year. All people make now is doom-laden ambient music, UK garage, drum ‘n’ bass and fey folk pop pap. Seriously. Physics says nothing disappears: dubstep’s atoms have to be somewhere.

Has it become Lionel Blair? Has it become the latent sexual energy in Chas & Dave’s performances?

If you know where dubstep has gone, please get in touch. Your information will be treated with confidence and given to the one extra Romanian that’s entered the UK. Send a postcard to Big Questions of 2014, Fat Roland Towers, Evil Lair, Lionel Blair Mews, Manchester, UK.

Further Fats: "There is little in the party manifestos about whether dubstep is dead..." (2010)