sounding great Toby! Thank you for mixing my song! 🍒 www.ashleighwatsonmusic.com

My mom got me a Casio keyboard when I was 14 and really into Halo CE (circa 2004), so I tried creating my own Halo Suite. And you thought you were a Halo fan.

Brief Halo Suite v00.00 (Casio Keyboard Recording)

Rule The World

Used in the Darkstar skate video "Britannia - Joe Hinson", this is an instrumental skate rock track from the moth audio album, "Sunlit moth 2".

Sunlit 2 - Picking The Grit out of my knees

A song for everyone who has ever worked through Christmas

Winter In Belfast

Ashleigh Watson - Little Love Toilet Tunes mix toby stu notes

Bands are essentially productions these days, demonstrations of the members’ knowledge of pop music, and how well they can represent, distort or contraposition variously sticky sets of ideas past and present. In many cases, the demonstration extends to their ability to coax timely sounds from GarageBand, Ableton, Logic or Final Cut Pro, and the farther an act skews toward this side of the argument, the more academically their music is usually received, recognized as an exercise in exercising software.

From every angle, fiendish new clothes and wild stylistic promiscuity are the order of the day: cf. Animal Collective’s tenaciously refined Maximalism , the cut-and-paste Facebook rock of an act like Attack Attack, mainstream hits massive as “Gee”, from K-Pop phenomenon Girls’ Generation, and Rusko's strobe-light remix of Kelis’ "4th of July". Each exemplifies how many sounds listeners seem eager to process over the course of three minutes. On the youth circuit, these ideas are simplified, their best moments broken out and expanded, as new artists take their first steps. For going on two years, the focus has been chunky mid-‘80s drum machines augmented by new production techniques, and drowned in grainy FM synthesizer pads.

Retro-lust is nothing new, but in the digital era, nostalgia is an increasingly received impulse. Invocations of “The 80s” and “The 90s” in 2010 are soon to be wholly reflexive, as whatever complicated and real meaning these times held for the people who lived through them is stripped away in favor of their corniest, most amusing—read: obvious—excesses. Mr. Dream’s drummer sharply bemoaned the play-nice, find-and-replace excision of “derivative” for “nostalgic” in most recent critiques, but stopped short of the harsher truth: you can’t be nostalgic for something you have never experienced. You can only parrot its echoes.

MDREME

In the early1980s, America’s dalliance with punk rock soured, and the various reasons people did or didn’t gravitate toward punk—freedom of expression, violence, despond, boredom—spawned distinct niches. Hardcore, speed metal, no wave, art rock, avant-garde…but outside these lines, a loose, sardonic, trashy sort of Rock n’ Roll staked out the stomping grounds for people who bailed on punk because of its stringent, simplistic boundaries. 

Many of these bands ended up on a handful of storied (and usually disastrously mismanaged) independent record labels, like Homestead, Amphetamine Reptile, Touch & Go, Twin-Tone, and SST. Some wore plaid, some didn’t; they played loud, talked to the kids at their shows, drank; embarrassed or shunned the assholes into staying away, and carried the torch for everything worthwhile about Rock n’ Roll, everything that inspired them to make music rather than Make It. 

The bands who worried about Making It were willing to make compromises: to let others promote them; to promote themselves; to entertain more marketable musical and stylistic choices. As regards punk-stroke-underground rock, these bands were lambasted for selling out, “Going Metal” (Die Kreuzen, Jerry’s Kids), or “Going U2” (Agent Orange, even Naked Raygun got some stick here). Decades later, thanks to lobbying from bands that lasted them, and guys like Steve Albini (the Cotton Mather of our age) the Dicks and Halo of Flies and Naked Raygun remain, justly, part of the conversation. The downside of this post-Nirvana browbeating, of you-not-you scene policing, was a wave of new bands and fans in the late 90s who’d taken the old guard’s Puritanical do-it-yourself ethic as gospel, and turned so far from glamour, humor and flair that you ended up with June of ’44 and the Album Leaf. Everyone was so uptight and guarded; Slint and the Jesus Lizard were the most important bands in the history of the world. This got old, but slowly, in a creaking tedium. Like Communism. 

What you hear in the best rock records of the ‘80s and early ‘90s is not post-Iggy fuck-all YEARGH-ism. What you hear is insecurity, and fear: that you couldn’t afford another hour in the studio, or another reel; that another mistake would put you over your budget; that you couldn’t pull it off; that the songs weren’t good enough. You knew they weren’t, they label knew, your fans would know. You might not have even liked all of the songs, but one was the bassist’s favorite and the other was the one with the show-off drum breakdown, so you suppressed your ego to placate your friends, and you learned how to work with other people, because you might arrive at a Sound, and an identity borne of those compromises. And if you could hold it, however briefly, that was Making It: you were a Band. 

The boys in M Dreme are aware of all of those things and happy to stare at the bubbles in their beer while I rant and rave. They recognize that in the digital era, it’s impossible to imbue music with the tension and uncertainty of the old days, and that likewise, those tensions will never again infuse music with the same manic fear, pressure, relief, and joy borne of conquering the unknown. In the internet age, confusion is leprosy. There is no longer any place for it, yet confusion informed the best records anyone ever laid down. That is what these messes dream of, but I can’t dream it for them any more than they can dream it for you.

DREMEDRIVE

Cowbell In B Minor

Guitars by Paul Wickham, https://soundcloud.com/los-cajones
Additional synth parts by Chris Ibbetson, https://soundcloud.com/ciremix

Suitcase Killer

Here's my remix of the cool track "Everybody Knows" by @christinaholmesmusic that blends Pop, Hip Hop, and EDM anthem themes. Enjoy the ride! Stems via @produce-like-a-pro Original version here: https://soundcloud.com/produce-like-a-pro/christina-holmes-everybody-knows

Christina Holmes - Everybody Knows (Brian For President Remix)

Mixed & Mastered By Jesper Waller at StonycroplandMusicstudio.
All rights reserved to www.producelikeapro.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/StonycroplandMusicstudio/
Band - Ellery
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/02uMhvSsLAzV316SJ2Yfbw?si=XG5CfqIXRd20T-F6lnaA4w
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ellerymusic/
Bandcamp - https://ellery.bandcamp.com,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellery_(duo)

Ashleigh Watson - Little Love Toilet Tunes mix toby stu notes

Toilet Tunes

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