Tonight's post is in honour of my ever so cool bass playing friend Dom Green whose new band the Penny Orchids I went to see play at the 12 Bar Club tonight - so new in fact that there's not even any web stuff up on them yet but watch this space.  In honour of Dom then these are all about the funky cool rhythm of low slung bass and drums locked in tight together.  See, it's not all about being so complicated it could only have been put together on a computer.  In fact probably it's even more complicated when you play live and intuitive: all those imperfections that make things sound so good.  Like in 'Time' by Ty Segall & White Fence which came up on my cycle home a minute ago, or on Nirvana's 'Milk It', one of my all time favourite tracks, and one the band themselves were especially fond of, pointing in a new direction they might have ended up taking.  Like in the bad-ass bass-playing style of the Clash's Paul Simonon in 'Guns of Brixton', or as ripped off by Norman Cook in Beats International's 'Dub Be Good To Me'.  Or in more modern times the rock icon that is Warpaint's bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg, especially their cool track 'Bees' (<- track starts around 6.15 in).  Ice cool bass and drums heroes tonight I salute you: in the words of the mighty Folk Implosion: you're the ones, 'Natural One's.

So track number three in my initial inspirations and then I'll give it a break for today.  By the way I'm hoping that track by track, along with the blog title (in my mind, by the way, the reference is to Bass-o-matic, not Gershwin) the theme I'm going for here will make itself clear, without me having to get all ponderous and wordy.  At least for now I want to let the music speak for itself.  So, track three is 'Hot Music' by Soho, which I first heard at Tief at Corsica Studios back in April, an amazing dancefloor moment in Medlar's set (<-soundcloud download of a promo version) when the song, crowd, lights and everything totally came together.  In all likelihood it had a lot to do with the back room being chock full of people seeking refuge from the slightly relentless main room Morgan Geist set, but when this came on everyone seemed to be suddenly re-energised and with the coloured lights it felt like being transported to the Dance Energy studio circa 1990! - perfect really, especially when you notice the link between the band Soho (<- their own site, full of loads of music history) and 90s cheese - they're actually the same guys responsible for the classic Smiths-sampling track 'Hippy Chick'...

Here's the other main one, I came across it on Hype Machine yesterday, posted on facebook and it immediately got liked so it can't just be me this time.  The track is 'Follow Birds' (<-Bandcamp) by Robot Koch (<-link to his soundcloud).  Certainly an artist I'll be making time to check out further, from my initial look there's a decent sized back catalogue and plenty of positive critics' comments.

So how else to start this new blog of mine than by posting the couple of songs that have inspired me to do it?  First of all 'Who’ll Pay Reparation On My Soul' by the London-based artist Stubbs (first name Andre according to google) on his Reparation Of My Soul EP (Baalsaal Music, Germany).  I first heard this running around the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park, kicking off hour two of Mr C's epic seven hour Freq 10 mix (<-free to download from Soundcloud) celebrating 10 years of his Superfreq night at Paramount on the 32nd floor of the Centre Point building on Tottenham Court Road.