If you’re like the umpteen million folks who will be traveling over the coming holidays, you might be wondering what to load into your MP3 player for the long trip. Here’s the top five most downloaded URB Podcast of 2012, which should give you ample beats for your travels.

5. Octave One – Live

The Burden brothers have been doing things their own way for 20 years, putting out seminal records on Transmat, Underground Resistance and their own legendary imprint, 430 West. It’s been Detroit love the entire way, naturally, even though the home base of Octave One has now switched over to another rich cultural center, Atlanta.

The premise still hasn’t changed; the Burdens are still putting out inspiring, indelible techno music that cannot be duplicated in the slightest. To celebrate the legacy of their long-standing career, Octave One released Revisited (Here, There, and Beyond), a remix retrospective of their classic tracks, carefully reimagined and revamped by artists from techno’s glory days (Luke Slater, Aril Brikha), to current representations of the genre (Sandwell District).

]]> http://www.urb.com/2012/12/11/urbs-most-downloaded-podcasts-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.urb.com/2012/09/05/robot-koch-exclusive-mix/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=robot-koch-exclusive-mix http://www.urb.com/2012/09/05/robot-koch-exclusive-mix/#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:48:24 +0000 URB.com http://www.urb.com/?p=84098  

Robot Koch

Exclusive Mix

This week’s podcast comes from Berlin-based beat-crooner Robot Koch. He’s been lurking about for a while now with his other projects (Jahcoozi, The Tape) as well as his own work under the robotic alias. Working within the confines of the Project Mooncircle label, Koch has put out consistently scintillating material that borders between hip-hop, IDM, abstract beats and dubstep for a few years now. His newest endeavor on the label is a 2×10″ LP called Cosmic Waves, a collection of solo and collaborative tracks that features the likes of Submerse, Kuhn, Headshotboyz, Pavel Dovgal and Rain Dog. Touching upon the waters of ambient and trip-hop this time around, Koch bears another part of his production prowess by steering his collaborators to a level of trust and technical intervention, letting his producer peers make their presence known on his LP. With Cosmic Waves available this week, Robot Koch graces URB with a mix that goes between ambient, hip-hop, UK bass and dubstep within the only way he can; by melding it into a seamless journey of subconscious dancemania. Check out the mix and tracklist after the jump.

URB Presents Robot Koch

Still, the record’s humanity takes its time showing up. The monstrous, hyper-compressed opener comes across like Clark doing dubstep, a sort of shock-inducing crush of bass thuds matched to big, clipped crashes. By the second track, though, he’s tuned his wonky keyboards to something resembling a melody, with breathy vocals intersticed to the breaks; on the third, woodwinds(!); and by the fifth, a straight-up Doors interpolation that approaches RJD2 levels of earnestness.

In that instance, the sonic merger doesn’t take. “People Are Strange” is hurtfully tacky, and, pinned smack to the center of the runtime, hard not to comment on. It would’ve sounded great on the closing credits of that sequel to The Lost Boys they made, and that is definitely not a good thing. Still, give the track this: it exhibits the thin line Koch is walking (possible counterexample: also RJD2), and it’s followed by two much better ghost hunts within the machine, the piano-led “While” and the mellifluous “Heaven is My Real Estate.” In this moody middle stretch of the record, Koch joins Leila’s noble effort to wrest song-based trip-hop back to good artistic standing from, like, sushi restaurants.

And anyway, if the nougaty, song-writerish middle section is preceded by a gradually mellowing opening section, the record’s three-part structure is rounded out by a final third wherein Koch throws the plan out the window and aims for just bonkers shit, music at once high-minded and corporeal, fusing together the graceful percussive freakouts of the album’s early moments with the moody vocal work of its middle section into a satisfying whole. These final three tracks make the record. Koch exhibits a deft touch with vocal samples, taking from Prefuse 73 an understanding of the human voice as its own sort of melody and cross-breeding it with every percussive trick he can think of. By the end of the album he’s treating guitar plucks as their own sort of percussion, flubbing notes like they were rambunctious breaks, phasing them in and out like he did samples earlier on the record. It’s audacious stuff, made all the more daring for how swift and enjoyably the runtime has passed–barring, of course, that unfortunate Jim Morrison lift. Next time, no classic rock.