In 1986, Chicago's local TV news discovered the city's pioneering house music scene, featuring the likes of Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and Steve "Silk" Hurley. From this groove came the groove of all grooves.

Below, two classics of the genre:

(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

A new study reveals that the Skrillex track "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" reduces mosquitos' success in foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro, and other nasty diseases. According to the researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and their colleagues, it's all about that bass. From their scientific paper published in the journal Acta Tropica:

Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals. In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts. Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music (Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti. Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on). Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music. Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment. They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition. Females exposed to music attacked hosts much later than their non-exposed peers. The occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played. Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music.

Enjoy Tycho's sunrise DJ set from the Dusty Rhino at Burning Man, August 30, 2018. Track list below the audio embed.

Fila Brazillia - A Zed And Two L's King Of Woolworths - Bakerloo (Main Titles) Squarepusher - Iambic 5 Poetry DJ Krust - Soul In Motion Aphex Twin - IZ-US Tycho - Adrift PFM - One & Only Art Feynman - Slow Down Weval - Thinking Of Glue70 - Til You Say Com Truise - Flightwave Melanie De Biasio - Afro Blue James Holden - 10101 Voyage - Dynamic Weval - It'll Be Just Fine Roman Flügel - 9 Years (DJ Koze Remix) Jon Hopkins - Emerald Rush

Pluko - l o v e Aleksandir - Yamaha Chrome Sparks - Moonraker Kölsch & Tiga - HAL Bicep - Glue Original Mix Chrome Sparks - All There Is Tycho - Awake

Ben Cartwright-Cox observed that he could modulate the bass frequencies in electronic dance music/dubstep in a way that was easy to detect with a signal processor and inaudible to his unaided ears, so he wrote some code to hide messages in the wubwubwub. Read the rest

Alex AKA Yaxu writes, "I co-founded the Algorave movement. Now I'm working on an album of live-coded algorave-style music." Read the rest

You might could also try Gangstagrass. Read the rest

Jarre tapped the whistleblower for vocals on "Exit," a track from Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, a new electronic music album that drops in three weeks. Read the rest

Perhaps the first effective strategy in America's decades long war on drugs, after 2 recent teen deaths, Los Angeles County is considering banning all EDM festivals.

Via MyNewsLA:

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to explore banning raves on county property while examining security and safety measures at the music/dance festivals following the weekend deaths of two women at the HARD Summer music festival at the Pomona fairgrounds, apparently from drug overdoses.

Seriously, they don't come deeper and harder than this. [via r/videos]

Read the rest

Having belatedly discovered the Electro Swing genre, I'm enjoying the hell out of it. My wife brought home a link to Caravan Palace's "Clash" (from their 2012 album Panic), which is pretty much perfect in its ability to hit all my sweet spots: Django/Grapelli-ish picking, megaphone singing, Andrews Sisters harmonies, Herbie Hancock glitch-tunes, and just enough dubstep to be interesting (but not enough to be annoying). Read the rest

Remember early-nineties Belgian techno of the sort that (Mike Shallcross quipped, as quoted on the wikies) was "tough, metallic tracks...with harsh, discordant synth lines that sounded like distressed Hoovers?" If you're having a hard time trying to recreate the sound from that description, try this.

This is Belgium Part Two: Cherry Moon On Valium has discovered a cheap and effective way to breathe new life into those old 12 inches: just slow them down to 115bpm, and voila (gesluierd): the intervening decades telescope down to nothing in an eyeblink. Read the rest