This weekend news surfaced that house DJ/producer Romanthony died on May 7 in Austin, Texas. Known for his ’90s underground hits “Let Me Show You Love” and “The Wanderer,” as well as fronting Daft Punk’s “One More Time” and “Too Long,” the cause of the artist’s death has not been yet made public but was confirmed via his sister and several friends and collaborators on social media. With a unique style incorporaingd Prince’s lyricism and Green Velvet’s dance floor grooves, Romanthony was a unique and original voice in house music. He most recently featured on Kris Menace’s Features and was reportedly working on a track with Boys Noize.
“It is so sad,” Boyz Noize tweeted yesterday. “Romanthony and me were working on such an amzing song together. he said it was the best song he had ever written.”
Romanthony, whose real name was Anthony Moore, was only 46.
New York City-based Austrian DJ/producer Peter Rauhofer died on Tuesday, only a few weeks after he was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with a brain tumor. The news was announced by Rauhofer’s manager, Angelo Russo, via the artist’s Facebook page. His passing at only 48 is tragic.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rauhofer early on in his career, just as Club 69’s “Let Me Be Your Underwear” was morphing from underground European sensation into international club hit. Rauhofer was still living in Vienna, and I remember during our phone conversation him enthusiastically laying out his plans to take his music global by moving to New York.
Later on when I was editing MixmagUSA (later Mixer), Rauhofer would occasionally stop by the DMC office on Broadway to pick up DMC remixes before their release. Usually in the midst of various remix projects, he always took a few moments to partake in industry gossip — who is playing this record, who is putting out that record, what’s the record that goes….. His appetite for music seemed insatiable.
When I interviewed Rauhofer after he won his Grammy in 2000 for remixing Cher’s “Believe,” he seemed much like the same guy I had talked to over almost a decade earlier. This time he had even bigger dreams tied into events he was producing. He counterbalanced his good fortune with a glint of self-deprecating humor, a very American thing to do.
During his 48 years Peter Rauhofer created a musical legacy and lived the American Dream. He moved across the Atlantic in search of a better life, worked hard and attained everything he dreamed about when he was a young man living in Vienna.
Peter Rauhofer’s personal story is as inspiring as his many musical accomplishments.
Michael Diamond (a.k.a Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), the surviving members of the Beastie Boys, have signed a deal with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, for a book celebrating the life and times of one of the music world’s most influential and groundbreaking bands. The book is as-yet untitled, but publisher is expected to be release the retrospective in the fall of 2015. Spiegel & Grau’s publisher Julie Grau told the New York Times that the book deal had been discussed with the group in the past but was tabled due to the third Beastie Boy’s Adam Yauch (a.k.a. MCA) diagnosis with cancer of the salivary gland, which sadly resuluted in his death last May.
“After Yauch died, I didn’t push them,” Mr. Janklow said, “but I think that Adam and Mike ended up realizing that it was the right time for them.”
In unrelated news, Mike D has been running a free food truck with friends feeding Hurricane Sandy victims in the Rockaways, serving over 19,000 meals to those affected by the storm six months ago.
When it was announced that Dave Smith (father of MIDI and Sequential Circuits) was to team up with Roger Linn (Linndrum) to create an innovative new instrument, it was rumored to take the analog community by storm. That storm has of course touched down, and ravaged all preconceived notions of what drum machines can do. For starters, this unit isn’t exactly a drum machine. It is a drum synthesizer. Which in short means that when you play sounds, you are not just simply recalling samples from a ROM chip, you are actually creating drums from analog and digital oscillators. How this exclusive style of sound design relates to music production is very crucial. With a unit like this in your studio, you are actually creating drum sounds that have never been heard before, and therefore renders your productions unique from the herd.
The sound engine for this unit starts with four oscillators per drum sound, two analog and two digital. With a wide variety of analog wave shapes and loads of digital samples to choose from, it is easy to get lost crafting the texture for your individual sound. Now multiply this by 32, and you can begin to see how massive this tool truly is. Moving on to envelopes, the Tempest is stocked with five envelopes per voice, that you can switch between AR (attack release) and ADSR (attack decay sustain release) mode, suitable for snappy drums or lush synth tones. Adding two LFOs to the equation, and your modulation possibilities become endless. One of the best implementations to this unit is the well-developed filter section. With a low-pass filter (LP) and a separate high-pass (HP) filter dedicated to each voice, taming and exploiting harmonic becomes the name of the game. The sound of the filter is about as good as it gets. Having years of analog circuit design under their belt, this team of electronic engineers are surely the elder statesmen of the synth world, and this filter is the flagship of their tenure. Once you get a sound going that you like, there are still several features that drive your drums to the next level. Adding a built-in compression, distortion and amplifier circuit, the modern day drum synth becomes a virtual studio in a box.
Don’t be dissuaded by the cost if creating legendary sounds and timeless music is your goal.
If all this drum and synth voicing wasn’t enough fun as it is, then programming your own rhythms will push to towards nirvana. With a powerful step sequencer on board, it is easy to step your grooves in just like you could with all the drum machines from the past. What makes the programming section of this unit so special, is that the 16 pads (2×8) are extremely sensitive to velocity and work very well for finger drumming. You can input rhythms by performing them live, and Tempest automatically quantizes them to the master tempo. There is also a added roll feature, which allow you to program MPC-style effects simply by pressing a pad. All of the expected edit functions are on here as well, so getting your groove right feeling tight just a few buttons away.
Truly living up to the revolutionary machine that it is, the Tempest comes equipped with a USB port on board, making for loads of MIDI and Sysex information to be transferred back and forth between computer and machine quickly and efficiently. Carrying quite the hefty price tag (MSRP: $1999), this monster of a machine may tempt you to look the other way, but don’t be dissuaded by the cost if creating legendary sounds and timeless music is your goal. Dave Smith and Roger Linn often get mistaken for being craftsmen of fine electronic music instruments; however, these prolific designers are actually engineering the future as we know it.
