My Brother Daniel – Fat Bird
This dude? LOVE this dude. My Brother Daniel is Radio Scotvoid (also half of Small Radio), a Scot who moved to the forever under appreciated Salem, MA and it seems like his sole purpose for doing so was to make this town as awesome as possible. He’s been putting together amazing chiptune shows and spinnin regularly at the Gulu, did a stint at the local university radio station WMWM, and somehow has time to make ridiculously killer electronic records. FOR FREE.
My Brother Daniel originally had it’s roots in “surreal jazz/funk, ambient/acid house and DIY/Bent recording stylings” and was only ever a live project. That is, until Ponky. This album sounds to me more like a blown out chiptune noise fuck than anything else. It’s unbelievably amazing. It reminds me of NHK’s Special earlier this year (which I literally want to make babies with), with similar scratchy anti-beats and a hard on for melting genres. My Brother Daniel is especially apt at turning your traditional 8-bits into something infinitely more interesting while tossing in harsh noise, party pumping techno beats, and wonky skweee funk.
Ponky is kinda hard to peg just for this reason. You can only put this on your “Get Ready To Ignite” playlist if your pals are of similar ilk and are into the whole stuttery noise dance thing. Your electronic noise heads might be turned off by the fact that this actually has some hard hitting grooves and presses your hipster lo-fi electro buttons. So if you’re finding a lack of people to enjoy Ponky with, you can either blast this fucker all by your lonesome or come by my place and we’ll use it as our soundtrack to killin Contra aliens.
This comes out next month on Just Not Normal, a Dutch netlabel, so it’ll be available for free then. I’m not gonna be a dick and steal their thunder by lettin y’all download it now, just make sure your keep a sharp eye on their or Scotvoid’s site so you can revel in the gritty brilliance of Ponky asap.