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Deru
Say Goodbye To Useless Press Release

Deru discusses the recording of his new Mush release Say Goodbye To Useless, as well as other projects that he has been up to as a member of the Track Team.

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Up-Coming Shows
03-22-2010	Lymbyc Systym	Tokyo, JP	Warszawa Records
03-23-2010	Lymbyc Systym	Tokyo, JP	O-Nest Shibuya
03-25-2010	Lymbyc Systym	Tokyo, JP	Haretarasoranimamemalte
04-02-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	Denver, CO, US	Bluebird Theatre
04-03-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	Durango, CO, US	Strater Theatre
04-04-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	Phoenix, AZ, US	Rhythm Room
04-05-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	San Diego, CA, US	Casbah
04-06-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	Los Angeles, CA, US	El Rey
04-07-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	San Francisco, CA, US	The Independent
04-08-2010	Busdriver, Antimc	Eureka, CA, US	Red Fox Tavern
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News
03/2010 - Open Mike Eagle Tours With Hellfyre Club
Open Mike Eagle will be joining fellow Project Blowed MCs Nocando, Intuition, and co-Thirsty Fish rapper Dumbfoundead, along with DJ Zo, on the Hellfyre Club tour this spring. The first leg of the tour has been announced, with dates up the west coast of the United States. Check out the shows page for city and venue info.

03/2010 - Sibling Bands Feature Includes Lymbyc Systym
Lymbyc Systym have been included in a San Francisco Chronicle feature on siblings in bands along with 10 others including CocoRosie, Boards of Canada, The Fiery Furnaces, Why?, and Tegan & Sara.

03/2010 - Open Mike Eagle And Swim Team In Austin
Open Mike Eagle will be joining his crew, Swim Team, in Austin for an unofficial SXSW event called the Underground Hip-Hop Summit. Joined by such indie-hop stalwarts as C-Rayz Walz, Icon The Mic King, Existereo, and many more, the show promises to be epic. Also, if you can catch up with Open Mike this week in Austin, he's carying thousands of free download cards for some of our latest and upcoming releases. We've added info on the event to our shows page.

03/2010 - Thavius Beck On Huskey Radio
Producer/MC Thavius Beck stopped by Los Angeles' Huskey Radio, an online hip-hop radio station and news site. The interview may get a bit controversial, according to the folks at Huskey, so check it out for yourself.

03/2010 - Open Mike Eagle Gets Fresh Daily
Open Mike Eagle has profiled by Impose Magazine's Blake Gillespie in their Fresh Daily section.

03/2010 - Head Like A Kite Featured Burrito Band
Qdoba Mexican Grill has assembled a bunch of music for a free audio player on their site. The project is called Our Sound and also features artists from Peter, Bjorn & John to DJ Shadow. The music will also be available in Qdoba stores.

03/2010 - Busdriver Supporting Rjd2
Busdriver (and trusty right-hand-road-man Antimc) will be hitting the road with Rjd2 once again. Rj is billing this as his final tour, and has tapped Bus to play the 10 west-coast shows with him. Also on the tour will be Rj's friend and band-mate Happy Chichester. For more information, check out the shows page.
03/2010 - Her Space Holiday On Broadway
Her Space Holiday's "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" from The Young Machines can be heard on Broadway this Spring when it will be used as curtain call music for the Elton John produced play Next Fall. The show opens at the Helen Hayes Theatre on March 11.
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Recent Reviews

MH-268
Deru - Say Goodbye To Useless
FWD

I'm disappointed in myself. Literally, I'm writing this review, and I keep sighing. I need to get my act together. I need to be more legit. I need to be more like Deru.

I'm pissed off because I can't figure out the sample he uses in "Fadeaway." He grabs a long section of arpeggiated woodwind counterpoint, like a Philip Glass jazz funeral, frames it with a lopsided oldschool hip-hop beat, and then lets the drum drop out for over a minute of adagio chords. I’ve heard the sample before, but not like this. I need to identify the source because I want to make the point that talking about "influences" on a record like this is pointless. The opener, "I Would Like" takes an entire song from the (self-explanatory) Singing Nun, pitches it down to androgynize it and bring out the vocal's muted-trumpet timbre, and slowly turns up the knob on some beckoning static. Toward the end of the record, the drums on "Cottonmouth Lothatio" sound like a head-nod to the breakdowns in old goth-metal. And so it feels insincere, like a sommelier telling you all about the "sawdust notes" or "mountain-air mouthfeel" in your wine, to try to pull familiar emotions from these songs. Sure, this music sounds like it was made in a world where dubstep exists, but that doesn't say anything about what you'll hear on the record. Sure, the pitch-indecisive leads on "Hello" probably mean that Deru's heard Boards of Canada, but they never taught him to write that song's industrial break. Instead of manipulating sounds that have gradually developed meanings in your mind, Deru takes familiar cues and removes them from their normal associations. He takes sounds that would never be seen together and forces them to sit down for coffee. As a result, you lose track of the genres that gave birth to each cue, and if you ever hear those sounds together again, they will remind you of Deru. There will be people for whom "Basically, Fuck You" is a defining anthem, and I have no idea what their clothes and haircuts will look like. I don't know if everyone will be so enthusiastic. Most of my favorite sounds on the record disappear when I unplug my headphones and listen through Macbook speakers. Open-minded young punks might not have Sennheisers. I'm not satisfied with the sequencing either, since the record seems split into two EPs separated by "Walk," an aurally stressful crawl that might be a Burial homage. But the number of instantly good songs, particularly in the first half, trumps any complaints about cohesion. Imagine somebody ranting about how Thriller doesn’t cohere. It's a little unexpected that "Peanut Butter & Patience" should be the first single, despite its brilliant, sonar-pulse lead, because of the strength of the tracks surrounding it. As long as he puts the others out sooner or later, though, this can be forgiven. And he probably has a grand scheme for the order in which you hear the big songs, so I hesitate to call him out on this kind of thing anyway. There's something admirable about this kind of planning, this attention to detail that far exceeds and exploits the attention-spans of your listeners, and one of the greatest compliments I can give the record is that it has terrible side-effects. When Deru took that woodwind sample out of my memory by putting it into conversation with trip-hop, he made me depressed. If I were as conscious of framing and narrative as him, I wouldn't be in this mess. Thanks for making such a great record, asshole. - FWD

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MH-268
Deru - Say Goodbye To Useless
Boomkat

Having previously released for iconic electronica labels like Neo Ouija, Ghostly International and Merck, Deru now arrives at Mush for the release of his third album. Say Goodbye To Useless captures the producer (real name Benjamin Wynn) at the height of his powers, mixing hip-hop toughness with some eerily evocative sound design atmospherics that lend the album a real sense of depth and emotional grounding. "I Would Like" heralds a great start, opening with a crackly old vocal recording, sung in French and bathed in echo. It's all a bit Caretaker, actually. There are more vocals carried over for companion piece "I Want" whose scratchy, pitched up samples are bound to come with Burial-goes-Galic associations. The beats take shape as a shuffling hip-hop number here though, laying down a sturdy backbeat thud. Further into the record, productions like "Walk" really add to the all-important atmosphere that hangs over the album, supplying melody and mood-setting ambient textures with deft evenhandedness. Outside his work as a solo artist, Wynn has built a career for himself as a composer and sound designer, penning scores for the Paris Opera Ballet Company and earning himself award nominations along the way. Say Goodbye To Useless calls upon this sort of experience and far transcends the album's grounding in popular forms, providing moments of real compositional merit - as exemplified by the stirring use of a wind section during "Fadeaway". Apparently, even Kanye West's a Deru fan, having posted the "Peanut Butter & Patience" video (it's no "Single Ladies" though, is it Kanye?) on his blog recently, and undoubtedly, the kind of expectation-shifting, genre-crossing sounds exhibited here reassert the strength of Deru's talents - hopefully introducing his music to a broader audience along the way. - Boomkat

MH-268
Deru - Say Goodbye To Useless
ISO50

I’ve seen Deru play a few shows with Tycho, he always gets a crowd going with what some people might call IDM but it can’t be you know why because girls dance to Deru and girls don’t dance to IDM. This is definitely for fans of older Lusine but with a bit more noise, damage and darkness. - ISO50

MH-268
Deru - Say Goodbye To Useless
The Milk Factory

Deru is the solo project of Los Angeles-based artist and sound designer Benjamin Wynn. Dealing largely with decaying electronic textures, fuelled by crisp hip-hop beats, his music is characterised by haunting melodies and a dense cinematic feel. His first missive, Pushing Air, came out on Neo Ouija six years ago, and was quickly followed by an EP and a second album, Trying To Remember (Merck), a year later. Since, despite a handful of remixes and compilation appearances, there has been pretty little coming out of Wynn’s den. It has to be said thought that he has been busy with the day job, which consist, amongst other things, in making music, including for animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which aired on Nickelodeon for three seasons.

MH-268
Deru - Say Goodbye To Useless
The Silent Ballet

Deru is one man, Los Angeles-based Benjamin Wynn, and his latest effort, Say Goodbye to Useless, proves to be a focused approach to the genre of electronica. For as sweeping as it is in scope, it remains wholly coherent and concentrated. The songs may range from moody to danceable, organic to digitized, aggressive to soft-spoken, intricate to minimalist, but underscoring it all is an element of consistency. The same voices show up in song after song, the rhythms follow familiar patterns, and the composer's confident presence is felt throughout. Listening to the album beginning to end is akin to going on a long road trip across the heart of a continent: the landscape changes drastically, but the trusty car's comforting familiarity is there to carry us from place to place.

I should admit that for the first few days of listening to the album, only a few moments really stood out. Given that I knew nothing of Deru and I didn't know what I was getting into, I took the thrilling early moments of the album as foretelling of a mood-driven work built around melancholic vocals in foreign tongues. Imagine my disappointment when track three, "Peanut Butter and Patience," rolled around, and melancholy is abandoned for what could easily be the soundtrack a movie about well-dressed gentlemen pulling capers on one another. Concerned that, perhaps, the initial moments were a fluke, I had to restrain myself from skipping hurriedly to the next track, and eventually the brazen rhythms began to demonstrate their appeal. Relieved, I thought to myself, "Damn, this is one solid groove." What really stands out here is Deru's careful employment of effects. It is all too easy when building electronic soundscapes to get lost in the delay and reverb, letting washes of sound do the heavy lifting while the composer does a lazy bit of point-and-click programming. This is not the case here. There is no shortage of long-tailed reverb stretching a single cymbal crash out for a few measures, certainly, but there are also moments where the space between a bass thump and a snare hit is left wide open, and, as only an experienced composer such as Wynn knows, that silence only compounds the power of the next. This concern for detailed work holds true, too, for his overall arrangements. In one track in particular, "Cottonmouth Lothario," a lead synth line is repeated, but with entirely different effects and therefore a contrasting inflection. The first time it hits, it functions predominantly as rhythm, sweeping coolly between staccato notes with a decent amount of portamento. The second time, however, the same line is drenched with delay, and, while the notes remain staccato, the delay runs one note into the next, resulting in a smoother, almost legato approach. It is subtle, but exquisite. As the album rolls along, it manages to strike a balance between the darker moods evoked in the earliest couple tracks and the flashier moments of "Peanut Butter" and beyond. Melancholy is not left behind in the slightest. Rather, it becomes one ingredient in a complex recipe, cutting through at times and lurking in the background at others. While some tracks ("Peanut Butter and Patience," "Hello," "Basically, Fuck You") lean heavily to the groove side of things, others ("I Would Like," "I Will," "Days, Then...") seethe with underlying angst. The aforementioned "Cottonmouth Lothario" oscillates between the two and in doing so functions microcosmically, capturing the entirety of the album within the confines of just over four minutes. In the end, I discovered that Deru's work benefits from certain environments. Listen to it on a bus during a morning commute, say, or at an office desk, and it suffers grey-scale plainness. Listen to it booming in a living room while one downs a few beers with friends, however - or better still, at a party with a dance floor - and it bursts into color, capturing the absurdity of conscious life and celebrating that absurdity through joyous lament. Its paradoxical nature mirrors that of life itself: meaningless, crude, base, and absolutely worth every second. - The Silent Ballet

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MH-267
Lymbyc Systym - Shutter Release
Cavendish Fixed Sterre

Instrumental, innovative and intrepid, sibling duo Lymbyc Systym returns to the airwaves this fall with their latest album, Shutter Release. The Tempe, Arizona, pair introduce fresh concepts that expand far beyond the constraints of genres or comparisons to similar acts. While not exactly electronic, yet not a traditional instrumental band, Jared and Mike Bell seek unadulterated originality on Shutter Release. Connections to bands like Ratatat and Broken Social Scene quickly break down as Lymbyc Systym set their own pace and present their own sound.

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MH-268 Deru Say Goodbye To Useless 03/09/2010	MH-045 Deru Peanut Butter & Patience 01/26/2010	MH-266 Thavius Beck Dialogue 01/26/2010
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