A Couple of New Gems from Tipper

Here’s a tip.

The Tipping starts early in 2011.

To follow up his dream-like 2010 album Broken Soul Jamboree, UK wizard of wobble Tipper is opening up 2011 with a return to straight-up glitch hop fire with a little EP of intelligent breakbeats called Snake Eyes. The title track rides quick on some funky upstroking guitar before descending into the usual madness, and the second and only other track “Chrome Splat” (hear below), slows down to a Wobble Factor pace. Both tracks have all the intricacy in production that Tipper is known for. The beats may be total headbobbers, but in obsessing over the details, Tipper has ensured that no two bars are exactly the same.

Tipper has dropped a ton of these little releases over the course of his enviable career, often featuring upbeat mix friendly tracks, and they inevitably end up in the crates of glitch DJs, or at least the ones with great taste. Snake Eyes is now available exclusively from Addictech.

Check out Tipper’s Snake Eyes EP

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F8991029 Snake Eyes / Chrome Splat by tippermusic

Bands We Like: The Glitchy Genius of Australia's Spoonbill

Close your eyes and turn it up, and in no time the wonky sounds of Spoonbill will have you in the Australian outback surrounded by impossible creatures. The Melbourne producer combines equal parts wobbly low end and twangy patchwork, peppered with blithe live instrumentation and playful voice samples. Spoonbill is the psychedelic mushroom cap to past collaborator Tipper’s acid sugar cube.

Photo credit: spoonbill.net.au

Spoonbill’s vibe has the intentional cheese of early Wagon Christ, but takes the complexity into a synthetic realm. Sequences of goofy samples are all over the place, tied together with oscillating synth and sequenced percussive rolls. Underneath all the chaos, a trip hop beat carries each track. There’s a lot happening on each song, but if you listen close, you can hear the folk music buried in Spoonbill’s DNA. Hidden, composite melodies are upbeat and energetic, battling to be heard through a steel grate of synthesizer sound.

Compared to his previous releases, Spoonbill’s newest Airborne EP is a touch more friendly to the layman’s ears. It’s the kind of thing you can listen to closely and pick apart, or just throw on and bob your head to. No two bars of a Spoonbill track are the same, yet he executes it sans the abrasive nature of his contemporaries of the same ilk (for instance, Vibe Squad). So, if you or someone you know is still listening to those archaic things called “bands,” and hasn’t crossed over because they can’t stand the heat of serious produced music, Spoonbill is likely an apt bridge.

Check out Airborne and Spoonbill’s other releases on his website. We know it’s tempting, but don’t play that pong game for too long.

Album Review> UK Producer Tipper’s Broken Soul Jamboree

These days, the UK blows through club beat trends like so many pairs of dirty knickers. Yesterdays jungle beats get tossed out for today’s broken beats, and so forth. Transcending the club scene is Tipper, a UK producer who simply puts out what he thinks is good on his own imprint, regardless of what every other DJ is playing. His independence in production and distribution are the two prongs of Tipper’s self-imposed carte blanche, making each album a journey into his methodical yet positively tripping head. His newest release Broken Soul Jamboree is a brand new trip.

Tipper releases another record that will wow production junkies. Photo credit: Tippermusic

Some of the low and farty bass tones from his previous release Wobble Factor are present here, but are not nearly as accentuated. Tipper has traded much of the low end for melodic bell and string sequences similar to those heard on 2003′s Surrounded. The melodies are produced with more maturity this time around, falling in with Tipper’s habit of raising the technical bar for himself with every release. He continues to move toward using varied and sparsely occurring sounds to weave together harmonies, a technique mastered and pioneered by Aphex Twin, as exemplified on 1996′s IDM staple Richard D. James Album.

Every Tipper album has a personality, and this one encompasses deep emotion. In the same way that DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing conveys speechless sadness and hope through sample layering, Broken Soul Jamboree tugs at the heartstrings with synthetically rooted sounds masterfully molded into Tipper’s collection of organic sounding instruments. Sequenced tablas and droning, ambient sitars appear on “Brocken Spectre” and the producer rehashes some of his old orchestral sounds on “Tit for tat”, one of several tracks that gives up classic 4/4 time for 3/4 rhythms. The varied meters begin to slow down toward the end of the record, with jazz beats timidly driving “Reality Harshness Defender” and “Royal Dragon Sir”. For the last two tracks, Tipper descends into unique takes on gamelan drums, each manifesting in a beat that is classically and undeniably his own; down-tempo with some seriously compounded snare sounds.

It’s fun to follow the career of a maturing artist, and most sticklers for technical production would have called Tipper a master four albums ago. That’s what makes it such a pleasure to hear a Tipper album in its entirety for the first time; he’s constantly pulling out new tricks and applying them cleanly to rock solid technique. Broken Soul Jamboree will remain his finest work until his next album comes out.

Broken Soul Jamboree
Tipper
[November 15th, 2011, Tipper Music]
Order from Tippermusic.