Excision 'X Rated' Review 17:07

It’s been a good year for mau5trap recordings. It seems that every time this label drops a new major release, it takes hold of Beatport’s Top 10. Last October, Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites’ was released, heralding the start of a new era in dubstep, namely one where ‘traditional’ dubstep aficionados and Skrillex fans argue it out on internet message boards and on video comments as to whether this new breed of dubstep, electro house, or whatever you want to call it is a move in the right direction in the field of EDM. Like most things on the internet, of course, these discussions tend to deteriorate into mudslinging and name calling in just a few posts. Clearly if something’s this contentious, Skrillex is doing it right. Since then, the founder of the label himself, deadmau5, dropped 4x4=12 in early December, after all but a couple of the tracks had been released as singles, and soon after, Feed Me (the dubstep alias of Spor) unveiled his debut EP, which again dominated the Beatport charts after its release. Along with releases by Moguai, Chris Lake and DJ Aero, to name a few, mau5trap are proving themselves to be a force to be reckoned with.

Now, their latest release has been unleashed – Excision’s debut album ‘X-Rated’. After showcasing his track ‘Deviance’ on the recent ‘Meowingtons Hax Tour Trax’ compilations, the ominously-named Canadian is poised to smash dancefloors worldwide. Even from its cover, X-Rated looks to be an album with grandiose intentions.  The artwork depicts what Transformers might well look like if Blizzard Studios got their hands on the licence – an angry-looking demonic creation wreathed in lightning and leaking blue light. And the opening track certainly sounds befitting of this. Opening with bass-loaded growling and crashing, before deep vocals by Messinian kick in, over a chopped-up, stuttering bass-monster of a track. Unfortunately, Messinian’s lyrics are limited to the yawningly-obviously ‘X’ related puns, which, among others, have been done to death by Xzibit, DMX and the X-Executioners. This aside, ‘X Rated’ is a serious tune – clearly Excision means business with this album.

X Rated thunders along during ‘The Underground’, which uses a bouncy dubstep backing and scattered samples to guarantee dancefloor destruction, occasionally veering off into sinister synth sounds, before launching back into the unrelenting beats of the main rhythm. The album also offers some electro house, in the form of the manic ‘Ohhh Nooo’, loaded with acid synths over a thunderous four on the floor beat, as well as the similarly-frantic ‘Swerve’. Excision blurs genres even further with ‘8-Bit Superhero’, another collaboration with Datsik, sampling the Megaman 2 theme over a drum-step backing and a catchy as hell lead riff.

However, Excision also proves to us that he is also capable of slowing things down a bit, for example on the album’s closing track, ‘Jaguar’. Already this one seems to be dividing opinion, with Mr. Hudson’s auto-tuned vocals upsetting some listeners. But these seem to set the tone well for the track, a moody, plaintive respite from the onslaught of the rest of the album. But Excision’s collaboration with Savvy, ‘Sleepless’ is where this album perhaps shines brightest of all. A complete change in mood, this track brings in deep piano, and echoing, almost hauntingly-beautiful vocals,  gradually building to melodic dubstep. If nothing else, you should give this track a try – this is like deadmau5’s ‘Strobe’, a track to end the night, exhilarating, simultaneously dark and euphoric. This is a late-night track  if ever there was one – kill the lights, crack open a beer, sit back and let this one wash over you. You won’t regret it. 

So, is Excision’s album a worthwhile listen? Well, it certainly isn’t for everyone. Even among fans of electronic dance music, this one will have fairly limited appeal. Fans of the grimy side of electronica will definitely enjoy it – Excision shares a lot of common ground with the likes of Noisia, Skrillex, 16-bit, Magnetic Man, Feed Me & Nero. But this really is an extremely grimy album, veering off into what sounds more like agricultural machinery at times. Certainly, minimal fans should probably steer well clear of this one. There are enough quality tunes on show here to recommend the album – while it loses direction a bit on tracks 7-9, there’s a lot to enjoy among the rest of it. Excision has delivered on form here, and this album shows great promise for the future. He’s rumoured to be working with deadmau5 soon on some new releases – definitely worth keeping an eye on that. Time to sign off, and find out what Porter Robinson’s been up to on the newly-launched Owsla Records…

Rating – 4/5

Example ‘Playing In The Shadows’ Review 15:57

In the past few years, Example has made quite a name for himself in the rap/electronica scene. Certainly, his style isn’t anything we haven’t seen before – a singer/producer dabbling in radio-friendly rave tracks over catchy four on the floor backings. This description could just as easily be applied to Calvin Harris, and the similarities don’t stop there – both Harris and Example’s singing abilities are at best debatable, and they both seem to bring in a lot of girls at their live performances. But, unlike Calvin Harris, who this summer has pushed out the undeniably catchy ‘Bounce’ and ‘Feel So Close’, Example is taking a rather different direction. A glance at the cover of the ominously-titled ‘Playing In The Shadows’ indicates this is a rather different album to 2010’s ‘Won’t Go Quietly’. Example clearly wants to show us his darker side vocally, which has only ever been hinted at before. This album also marks Example’s movement deeper into electronica – having worked with Calvin Harris and Sub Focus previously, this Londoner now brings in an all-star cast of production talent, including, among others, mau5trap’s Michael Woods and Feed Me, Dutch house legend Laidback Luke, Magnetic Man’s dubstep fiend Skream, and the undisputed kings of the UK scene, Nero and Chase & Status. With support like this, Example has given himself the best chance possible of delivering us a monster the likes of which hasn’t been heard since Magnetic Man’s self-titled album, or ‘No More Idols’ which, even 8 months down the line, occupies fully half of iTunes top ten electronic tracks. Even so, Example’s chart performance this year isn’t to be sniffed at – Zane Lowe’s ‘Hottest Record In The World’ back in April, ‘Changed The Way You Kiss Me’, produced by Michael Woods, has received tremendous radio play, and has been in the iTunes top ten ever since its release. Having shot straight to the top of the charts with ‘Stay Awake’ (notably another recipient of ‘the hottest record in the world’ label), Example looks poised to smash the charts once again.

The album opens with ‘Skies Don’t Lie’, and from the offset we can hear that Example is taking a much darker direction this time around. The track is unrelenting, as Funkagenda provide a grimy backing peppered with string samples, and Example delivers an anthemic performance with a gorgeous vocal mod in the closing third of the track. Next up, the album’s lead singles follow back to back. ‘Stay Awake’ is a cocaine-themed cautionary tale, but it’s a heavyweight tune, kept thundering along by Nero – this could be the new ‘Kickstarts’, and goes to show that Example means business, in the form of delivering big-room bass-heavy tracks. After the equally-energetic ‘Changed The Way You Kiss Me’, the album opens out into the soulful ‘The Way’, produced by Faithless (of ‘God is a DJ’ fame), we’re presented with edgy, minor-key piano on the opening of ‘Natural Disaster’. It builds to a towering crescendo with Example’s urgent “need some air, need some space” lyric, before launching into a storming house breakdown – exactly what Laidback Luke does best. 

The album then takes an unfortunate detour into mediocrity, with ‘Never Had a Day’ and ‘Microphone’ – while neither is a disaster, these two fail to hold the listener’s attention, and neither do they showcase the talent of Example or the producers involved, instead feeling stifled by an unwillingness to break out into anything more ambitious. However, the album’s title track, ‘Playing In The Shadows’ changes the mood up considerably. With dark acoustic guitar and minimalistic hi-hats, the echoing vocals feel a good deal like Chase & Status’ own track ‘Embrace’ – but the ominous bass wobble hints at things to come. This track is clear testament that this album is indeed dedicated to the darker side of Example, and Chase & Status shine in the last minute or so, bursting into full-fledged dubstep, replete with growling synths and sliced-up vocals, the likes of which haven’t been heard since Bar 9 remixed ‘Kickstarts’. 

Next up is ‘Midnight Run’, produced by Feed Me (the electro house/dubstep alias of Hertfordshire drum and bass producer Spor). At a peculiar pace of 135bpm, this track lets the album open out a little, more reminiscent of tracks like ‘Last Ones Standing’. But the backing is jammed with the buzzing electro complexity so typical of Feed Me – his fans will certainly be reminded of his solo dubstep track ‘Blood Red’, as ‘Midnight Run’ moves into the breakdown, and Example tells us about the skeletons in his closet. The album’s next track, ‘Under The Influence’ is produced by Croydon legend Skream, but Example’s lyrics are predictable this time around. The track builds to become a techy dubstep monster, before lapsing back into the rather cheesy chorus, lending the whole thing a rather bipolar feel. While Example’s final drawling rap part is reminiscent of Drake on Eminem’s track ‘Forever’, the overall package is not one of the album’s high points. While ‘Wrong in the Head’ is an undisputed grimy big-room anthem,  ‘Playing In The Shadows’ closes with the more gentle ‘Anything’, produced by serial remixer Dirty South. While ‘Anything’ is a story we’ve all heard before of a relationship falling apart, the combination of acoustic guitar and piano with Example’s heartfelt vocals make this a strong closing track which rounds the album off nicely. 

In summary – Example has demonstrated his versatility as an artist, still producing chart smash hits, but with a dark twist. Backed up by some of the most talented names in electronic music, Example has once again delivered a very solid album, let down by only a couple of lacklustre tracks. If only he'd used the alternative cover Feed Me proposed...

Rating – 4/5

Numark Mixtrack Pro Review 17:02

A few weeks ago, I visited London’s WestendDJ, just off Tottenham Court Road, with the intention of purchasing a full-featured MIDI-over-USB DJ software controller. After some deliberation, I eventually opted for Numark’s Mixtrack Pro, and, having now spent a few weeks using it, thought I would put together a few words about what it does well and annoyances I’ve encountered. Let me first say a few things about the type of music I’m DJing. I usually work with house and dubstep, occasionally trance or drum and bass, and I’m basing my review on working with these genres. I’m also not a turntablist as such, so my comments on these features are based more on my own knowledge than personal experience. I also do not use the bundled software (Traktor 2 LE). I’ve tried Traktor previously and don’t get on that well with it, so I prefer using Virtual DJ 7 Pro (even though the VDJ support team are some of the most tyrannical I’ve ever encountered – check out the forums and you’ll see soon enough). 

So, the unit itself is an all-plastic construction, weighing in at about 650g, with a footprint of about 18”x12”. Don’t be put off by the materials – even though this is marketed as a low-end product, the build quality is rock-solid, and Numark has included top-notch components. The volume sliders move slowly and smoothly, reminiscent of a far more expensive product, while the various effect/EQ knobs are also a pleasure to use. The unit is fairly portable, if a little large for your average laptop bag – bespoke flight cases are available, but these, while often beautiful, are eye-wateringly expensive. For example, Swanflight.com produce a dedicated custom flight case for the unit, priced around the £100 mark, which feels pretty steep for a £170 controller. You’d probably be better off finding a generic case or bag, which are readily available online. 

In terms of connectivity, the back of the unit has a USB type-B connector, which hooks up to your PC using the bundled cable, along with two pairs of RCA sockets. The first of these is designed to hook up to your PA system or to any further sound processing, while the second appears to be a pre-fade listening output, which is slightly mysterious, as the unit has a dedicated PFL headphone-out on the front. In my current set-up, I’m using Bose QC15s for PFL, and hence need an adaptor, as the socket on the front is for a quarter-inch jack plug. Alongside it is another quarter-inch socket for a microphone, with its own gain dial. However, even at full gain, the microphone throughput is shockingly quiet – I’ll come back to this later. 

The centre of the Mixtrack is occupied by a mixer, flanked by two identical decks. The top section of the mixer has a separate bass/mid/treble EQ  and  cue mix/cue gain dials. Cue mix appears to route the PFL signal to either the front headphone jack or the rear phono plugs in whichever proportion you so desire. Cue gain adjusts the headphone volume – a warning is that with low-impedance headphones like the QC15s, if you have the dial set any higher than about 5%, the volume is sufficient to blow your head off. This may prove to be no longer a problem when I get my Behringer headphones in, and it’s certainly not a bad thing – better than not being able to hear it. The mixer has a pretty clever file browser and options to load up to deck A or B. I personally favour using the mouse or touchpad to select my tracks, but the Mixtrack’s file browser works well. Each deck has a cue button (prefader listening) – works fine, but it’s a shame that you can’t switch on PFL in both decks, it’s either one or the other. This may be more of a software issue than the fault of the mixtrack however. There’s also a keylock for each deck, which is extremely handy. At the base of the unit, the deck A, B and master volume faders are wonderful – the amount of resistance makes them smooth, but fast enough to bring up a channel almost instantaneously. The crossfader is a lot faster, and should be responsive enough for turntablists – a nice addition would have been if the fader ‘clicked’ at the midpoint of its travel, but again this is a luxury rather than a necessity. 

Each deck is dominated by a touch-sensitive platter, which has a ‘scratch’ button next to it. With scratch switched off, the platter is not touch sensitive, and acts as a jog wheel whether the top is touched or not. With scratch enabled, the platter becomes a virtual vinyl, offering many of the features that a true vinyl deck would. The platter does not have multiple levels of pressure sensitivity – touching it will stop the music outright, and releasing it will start the music at full speed once more, so brake effects an BPM tweaking can’t be achieved directly by touching the deck. Below the platter, there are buttons for sync/cue/play/stutter. Pressing sync matches the BPM of the other deck, and immediately pitch bends the track to align the beats, assuming the other track is within BPM range – in VirtualDJ Pro, the BPM range can be adjusted up to +/- 100%, but I believe this is not available in the VDJ LE software bundled with the American version of the Mixtrack. The only button here which rarely gets any use is the stutter function, which jumps the track back or forward to the last place where you pressed play – again, this may be more useful for others who use this as part of their mix.

The top of each deck contains effect, loop and EQ kill functionality, as well as a pitch slider and pitch bend keys. The loop keys have manual or auto settings – in manual loops, you can specify the in/out points, while auto loops set up a loop between 1/16 and 32 bars, which you can easily tweak and drop out of. The effect panel has an on/off button, an effect selector and two effect parameters. For my purposes, I found the second parameter to be a bit superfluous, as most of the effects I use don’t need it – instead, I mapped it to the resonant filter in VDJ, which doesn’t have a dedicated dial on the Mixtrack. For reference, the VDJ Script for this is on the key FX_PARAM_2 on the mapper, and the action reads “param_multiply 1% & filter”, which has proven extremely handy. Another alternative mapping I’m using is the default mapping for the EQ kills, which maps hot cue 1/2/3 to each EQ kill, and the view/tick buttons map to ‘shift’, which, under VDJ allows you to cue/uncue each of the hot cues. I’d recommend this mapping – for my purposes, it’s very helpful for remixing on the fly, and I’ve never needed to EQ kill as such – I’ll usually tweak the EQ on the mixer. The pitch slider is one of the worst parts of the controller, however. Although Numark have included another high quality slider, the travel is very short, meaning that, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to within .10 of a BPM of where you want to be. There is an LED to indicate when you’re in the middle of the slider’s travel, but this is a bit haphazard – you can be several BPM off-centre and it’ll still illuminate. There’s also no locking-up of the slider at the midpoint. 

In terms of actually using the Mixtrack Pro, I’ve mostly been extremely happy with it. It’s pretty intuitive, and in the most part, it just works. Set-up isn’t the easiest thing, especially under Traktor 2 LE. I’m no expert on MIDI controllers, but for Traktor, a rather primitive subsidiary program, ASIO4ALL v2 has to be used – this is a WDM ASIO program, which has variable latency settings – however, regardless of the ASIO buffer size, even maxed out at 2048 samples I still got unpleasant audio issues, which made the whole thing unpleasant to work with. VirtualDJ has worked its wizardry such that the configuration is a lot easier – once everything is going to the right channels, it’s easy enough from there. I’ve had very few issues with audio latency – the platters are fast enough for virtually zero latency, even when scratch is optimised for quality in VDJ, and I’d imagine this is good enough for most turntablists. The only issue I’ve encountered is that the few program crashes I’ve had have all been due to scratching – this is probably more the fault of my laptop, rather than the Mixtrack, and indicates a buffer issue of some sort – either that or Windows can’t do the job properly which would be no surprise. All you Mac DJs out there probably won’t ever have this problem.  The Numark has a professional-standard audio I/O on board, which I have had no issue with – I’m sure the sound card would do you proud on a proper club system too. My only gripes linked to audio are both gain-related. Although the deck A/B volume sliders are described as A/B gain, they are mapped as volume sliders, which is a fairly fundamental part of any mixer. Thus, the Mixtrack lacks a dedicated gain dial for each deck, which could be put in alongside the EQ settings. Fortunately, VirtualDJ pretty much handles all its own gain anyway, normalising each track to maximise gain without clipping. I’m not sure if Traktor LE has automatic gain correction, but it could be a problem if it’s a missing feature. As I mentioned earlier, the microphone gain is also pretty weak. I experienced this when I was trying to use a sampler on the iPad, the ‘iDaft 2’, which I thought would be useful for the mix when doing an on-the-fly remix of ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’. However, having hooked up the iPad with 3.5mm cabling to the microphone through socket, and turned gain up to full, the output was very quiet – certainly far too quiet to use. I’ve read that other DJs have encountered similar problems – the easiest solution appears to be to pre-amp the microphone, which can be done quite cheaply – it’s just something to be aware of.

Overall, the Mixtrack Pro is a very well-specified piece of kit for the price point, and I’m sure works just as well as many more expensive controllers. The majority of my complaints about the unit have been minor – the only other major oversight is the lack of any sampling capacity – samples can’t be recorded or triggered from the unit directly. However, this should be quite easily remedied – I can see a couple of options. For the iPad user, there’s TouchOSC, which uses MidiYoke and PureData, and can be configured as a sampler – however, it’s horrendously complex to set up, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Alternatively, there’s the Akai Pro LPD8 pad controller, which can be obtained for about £40 – I can’t vouch for how good it really is, but it looks like a useful MIDI pad controller which could be mapped to a sampler. Certainly there are videos online of people using VirtualDJ with both the LPD8 and the Mixtrack Pro, and I will probably be looking into this set-up in the future. 

So, to conclude – if you’re looking for a comparatively high-specified MIDI-over-USB controller in the sub-£200 bracket, this is as good a choice as any. With a sturdy build, high quality audio I/O and a feature set similar to far more expensive products, this should be top of your list. If you can live with the minor gripes I’ve listed (and if you can’t, you’ll probably have to spend a good three times as much on something like the NS6 or a Kontrol S4), then I would have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending this controller.