Myth: a sacred story, a set of beliefs, a way to make sense of the world, to connect the dots. A notion that is also the name of one of the first tracks made by BeatMyth (in 2007). It was one of many pieces in that raw and forward-thinking style, characteristic for the next half decade. But, the mythical narrative can be said to have started in Novo mesto, that town just halfway between Ljubljana and Zagreb. Exchanging the guitar and the amp with two turntables was the best deal ever. And there we also have the beginnings of the praised jazz-funk-rock group Moveknowledgment, and PlankTon’s turntables and records were part of it. Dance parties soon ensued at the local pub and the locals were going bat-shit-crazy, driven by the fast jump-up breakbeat science from the UK. It was all LTJ Bukem’s fault. And perhaps Fatboy Slim’s too.
After a few years in the urban setting of Ljubljana, there was more and more electronic music knowledge on the table. Igor and his flatmate Mitja Pritržnik were dabbling in writing and production, laying down some charged breakbeat tracks, inviting N’toko – PlankTon’s partner MC at many drum’n’bass gigs – for an ad-hoc recording session. And Mitja’s sister giveth the project the name. At the backdrop of that time were musical influences such as Adam Freeland and Hyper, gigs with the “Illegal crew”, a drum’n’bass crew on the rise, and production discussions with its chief MarkoMan. Lots of hours of tedious work behind the computer resulted in BeatMyth’s debut: “Your Own Two Heads”, an industrial electro-punk collection of bangers.
In the poetics of this work, one can sense the history of personal musical growth: the beginnings in doom metal and the sense of immediacy of jump-up and harder strains of drum’n’bass. Active as a DJ in the last decade, PlankTon moved exceedingly firmly into the contemporary breakbeat scene, very much in line with what can be found on BeatMyth’s first two albums. However, proper appreciation of this project is not possible without taking into account the live performance of PlankTon and N’toko, who have until now always presented BeatMyth in an outgoing onslaught of beats, basslines, synth-stabs, and fast vocal ranting, animating many a sleepy auditorium into something akin to a small riot. And to furthermore bring the tentacles of this project’s context to light, it must be said that at the core of the project stands a multiskilled producer and audio engineer, whose areas of work go beyond mere clicking around his DAW: robotics workshops for kids, technical support for art installations, analogue synthesizer repairs, audio studio building, mastering and mixing a variety of different projects, and live sound.
And finally, this, the third album maturely brings up musical material created through a different approach, a different attitude, and mixes it up with that signature outgoing electro-punk vibe of the previous two albums. This attitude is purposefully playful. It’s a move away from the dance floor, away from the dictate of the live spectacle into an exploration of sound-based sample-heavy trickery. Still, it by no means represents an abandonment of the basic, ever-present principle, the pillar of this sound: firm musical decisiveness and a never-ending search for dynamics in balance.
Credits
produced, recorded, arranged, mixed and mastered by Igor Vuk a.k.a. BeatMyth
co-produced by Boštjan Pirnar (2, 7, 11)
vocals by N’toko (1, 8, 10) and Nova deViator (4)
liner notes by Luka Prinčič
design by Tina Ivezić
cover photo by www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/
photos by (p.1, p.4) www.pixabay.com, (p.2) www.flickr.com/photos/derpoly/, Nejc Ketiš (p.11), Sebastijan Iskra (p.13), Simon Šturm (p.15)
booklet hand-made by Maruša ‘MARUJI’ Hren
printed by Janja Baznik, ‘Pri Tiskarskem Škratu’
BeatMyth would like to thank: Miha Blažič aka N’toko, Boštjan Pirnar, Luka Prinčič, Simon Šturm, Gregor Zemljič, Mitja Pritržnik, Petra Pritržnik, Izak Cunta, Ana Marija Prelogar
Availability
Free streaming, download (name your price) and limited edition USB-booklet is available through kamizdat.bandcamp.com
Some rights reserved under the licence Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike NonCommercial (BY-SA-NC CC)
cat: KAM024 | 2017 Emanat production | released May 4, 2017
Also available through your nearest digital outlet: iTunes | Juno | AppleMusic | Spotify | Google | Amazon | Deezer | Tidal | Microsoft Groove
Press
“And it is precisely the details that are plentiful in BeatMyth’s new album – and this is what makes it so different from the rest of the breakbeat offer currently out there. There’s an enormous amount of barely audible rhythmical miniatures and various technical tricks and wacky ideas that thoroughly shake up the whole. If the starting point is a fairly rigid genre that hasn’t gone through too many changes over the past fifteen years, Vuk, as expected, succeeds in overcoming the curse of the form (he is after all a skilled mastering and sound engineer) with an enviable amount of ingenuity and know-how as well as ideas not necessarily bound to the club podium. Don’t be mistaken, One Hand Clap is primarily a dance album, an album that sounds best on a club sound system, and should be danced to as it is so full of explicit floor-fillers. However, Vuk’s ideas are not slaves to the rhythm, and the question “will this work at the dance floor” not a paradigm or a rigid guiding principle blindly followed. One Hand Clap is, in its foundation, a distinctly breakbeat, genre album. Energetic and at the same time playful enough not to be seen as dull or pragmatic, or as a functional collection of dance tracks, intended solely for club spinning. Nor is it a calculating assemblage of piled-up club singles. We should give the album One Hand Clap a hand, using both hands actually, as it brings to the category of dance albums a much needed deviation from the norm. It by no means hesitates introducing less common ideas, taking unexpected turns or excursions into less familiar places. And we get all this in a technically flawless package.” 15.05.2017, ODZVEN, Enoročno ploskanje beatov, Borja Močnik
“Considering the wider quality of the album, we can say that it should be appreciated for its clear tackling of generic genre and sound implications (the album’s title could also be read along these lines – One Hand Clap), grabbing them by the spine and loosening the succession of vertebrae, which is then utilized as the starting point for a less formulaic, a sound- rather than genre-based recontextualization, which at the same time retains the dynamics and flexibility of the characteristic all-important drum and bass structure of electro-breaks, at the same time constituting a sound-arrangement field of intrigue and exploration, which undoubtedly presents BeatMyth to its best advantage ever. The new album can thus meet the approval of connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs alike, which is rather atypical for this kind of soundscapes. The result is a collection of compelling unpredictabilities and an incessant refocusing of attention within a linear genre-generic sound narrative that can take rather large steps away from the comfort of formulaics, constituting altogether new perspectives for perceiving breakbeats…” 03.05.2017, Radio Študent, Tolpa bumov: BeatMyth: One Hand Clap, Žiga Pucelj
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