A brotherly duo dedicated to championing an emotive sound encompassing elements of house and techno, UK-based DJ/producers Austen/Scott have presented the world with their splendid debut album, Hypnagogia.
The full-length was released at the end of November on their five-year-old Danse Club imprint. It features 11 sublime tracks, ranging from the brooding tech-house “Somewhere In His Heart” to the woozy splendor of “Man’s Word.” It’s also their label’s 50th release.
As the Smart brothers wind up an excellent year, we asked them to share five tracks currently dominating their DJ sets.
A. Brehme – Tzotzil (Form and Function)
A new super tool for us. Kick, bass and hi-hat. You will most likely hear this on a four-bar loop with different dub delayed chords over the top in our sets for many sets/years to come.
Nobody Home – Remains of Earlier Temples (Skudge Remix) (Danse Club)
It was truly an honor to collaborate with Marcus Henriksson from Minilogue under his Nobody Home alias. He’s a true gentleman in this industry. To then having Skudge then do a vinyl-only remix was a total coup for us. We had so many DJs write to us asking us if we could send them this version.
Alden Tyrell – Sherman Paradox (Clone Basement Series)
This was the last vinyl we bought. We’re big fan of Alden Tyrell, and his records just work. As soon as the first chord played, it was in the cart. Such an essential kind of record for us. 909 vibes.
Ada Kaleh – Ada Kaleh edit of Minus & Ion (Ada Kaleh Romania)
We are great fans of Ada Kaleh’s music and have been playing his unreleased stuff for quite some time now. There is this one track he sent us; we dropped in room 1 fabric, and it just lit the place up, people began smiling. We actually worked together with Ada on one of the tracks from our new album, Hypnagogia (for future reference, it is the one with the Eastern influences, massive bass sound and 808 kick drum).
Loski – Money & Beef (Since93)
A total curveball, a guilty pleasure? We have been working in schools up and down the country with our FutureDJs project for the last year, particularly in London. We were opened up to drill by some of the students and the entire culture surrounding it — which could easily make for a whole article in itself — but from a purely musical perspective this song is bang on for us. The raw production, the sampling, the hooks, lyrical flow, groove, sub bass, what is not to love? We haven’t heard [rap] music like this since late ’90s to be honest. We love sampling, we love lo-fi music and to paraphrase our good friend Deepchild/Acharné, there are some notable parallels between the lo-fi House scene and the trap/drill scene, both of which exist well outside Beatport/SoundCloud culture. It is fascinating. It is a scene in which a lot of beats are made and distributed using YouTube … and sampling YouTube sources. We for one (two) love it. Big.