DUBBYstep

The long awaited Sensation America will finally come to life in late October at the brand new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.  We are also lead to believe that Sensation will be touching down in other basketball arenas throughout the US, though we don’t have any other specifics at this time.  The official announcement is set for this Thursday, May 31.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the hype, here is the trailer for the madness to be.

http://youtu.be/L4Lk7ymHJiA

A-Trak, Mark Foster and Kimbra are three of the hottest acts out there right now. The three of them have teamed to combine the funky disco house sound of A-Trak along with the stellar vocals of Foster The People’s Mark Foster and Kimbra (featured in Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know”).

Take a look at the official music video below.

Derek Vincent Smith AKA Pretty Lights is now releasing his weekly radio show on SoundCloud.

The Colorado producer is live every Thursday at 8 PM EST on SiriusXM’s Electric Area.

The first 17 episodes of his show are currently uploaded, and he will continue to add new episodes on a weekly basis.

According to his Facebook page, his hour long show, Hot SH*T, “brings you the the newest sounds in electro organic beats that embrace everything from blues, soul and disco, to hiphop, dubstep and electro.”  Essentially, it is an hour long mix tape featuring his tracks and others from his fellow PLM label artists (Michael Menert, Break Science, Gramatik, Paul Basic, Paper Diamond and Supervision).

Pretty Lights is currently in the studio working hard on his new album, but promised his fans that he will be releasing tour dates, “soon…ish.”

Can’t wait to see him live?  Get in the mood by checking out his show right here. 

All,

Its been a minute since we’ve taken the time to post on DubbyStep, and we’d like to apologize for our absence. But it was not our fault… We blame Snowball music festival. You see, we decided to take a long weekend and head out to Vail for 3 days of what would be one of the best/most intense vacations we have taken since our sophomore trip to Acapulco, Mexico….

Now the thought was to come home from Vail and immediately write a post…naturally…but this didn’t happen. To be honest, we were simply partied out. In fact, the experience of sitting down to write a an article on the experience was equally nostalgic and terrifying… At this point it seems as though too much time has passed to offer anything that could be considered an original or authentic thought on our trip. Rather than fake it, lets just say we had fun; a lot of fun:

We here at DUBBYstep are led to believe that you all may want to stay up past your usual bed time tonight as you could be in store for a VERY nice surprise.  Keep an eye out for GROUPON to sell the first round of tickets starting at midnight tonight.  You heard it here first.  Get ‘em while they’re hot (and cheap).

Cypress Hill and Rusko are collaborating to release an LP in April, according to Rolling Stone.  The blend of hip-hop and dubstep will be called Cypress X Rusko.

DUBBYstep featured a hip-hop/dub song by Wick-It the Instigator a few weeks back and this is further evidence that more genres of music continue to welcome dub with open arms.

Cypress Hill and Rusko will team up for their first live performance at the Smoke Out Festival in San Bernardino, California on March 3rd.

Their first single is called, ‘Roll It, Light It,’ and can be found below.  The energy is definitely there.

The 2012 Grammy Awards spoke volumes to the growth of EDM in the American music scene. Our boy Skrillex, for one, managed to take home three of the five awards he was nominated for including, Best Dance Recording, Best Remixed Recording (Non Classical), and Best Dance/Electronica Record. Not bad. Equally as significant as the recognition Skrillex received was the fact that the Best Dance/Electronica Record category, itself, was dominated by some of electronics biggest names. A category that has been practically reserved for pop icons such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce and J Lo over the past decade, now found its nominee spots filled by Deadmau5, Duck Sauce, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta and Avicii. These awards, amidst live performances by Deadmau5 and Guetta, not only made this years Grammys the most entertaining year in recent memory for us here at DUBBYstep, but it was demonstrative of the progress EDM has made in becoming a recognized genre in the professional music scene.

(Skrillex accepting one of his three awards before the CBS telecast via billboard.com)

Now I’ve arrived at the point of this article where I have to be a bit of a buzz kill and qualify what I have written so far… I have to say that I was surprised EDM didn’t completely steal the show. I mean consider the Deadmau5 performance with Foo Fighters. I saw the iconic mouse heads in the crowd and I could hear the roar of the crowd when the curtain dropped to reveal Deadmau5 standing high in his cube; he stole the show. The audience was there for him.

(Foo Fighters and Deadmau5 share the stage outside the Staples Center via TV.com)

The same, however, did not seem to be true of EDM’s presence at the Grammys as a whole.

Consider for a moment, the fact that David Guetta appeared in just one of the two live performances his music was featured in. This performance, like that of Deadmau5 later in the evening, took place in a tent outside the Staples Center. The other–the one that actually took place on the main stage–had little to do with electronic music beyond the actual track and a gigantic pyramid of LED cubes that served as props for a Chris Brown dance number. The same can be said for Rihanna’s performance of ‘We Found Love’–was Calvin Harris even invited to the Grammys? If I have yet to make my point, think one last time about the number of mentions or amount of face time given to Skrillex over the course of the nearly 4 hour production…the man was nominated for 5 awards, won 3, and if you weren’t looking for him you would have missed him.

The result of all of this on Sunday night was the feeling that while electronic music may gave gained significant traction in the music world, the social world just isn’t ready to accept it.  It will be interesting to see if any of this changes in the months following the release of Re:Generation tomorrow night.

DUBBYstep is gearing up for the Snowball Music Festival in Vail Valley.  It’s only a few weeks away.

One of the artists that I’m most excited to see is Rusko, who will be playing the first night.  I witnessed Rusko during a day set a few years back at Lollapalooza but there’s a 100% chance his show with the mountains as a backdrop will be better than his hour set at Perry’s Stage in Chicago.

The English Dubstep producer and DJ has been on the scene since 2006 and two of his more popular tracks are really catching my attention.

This morning, I’m listening to his 2012 hit, ‘Somebody to Love,’ and the 2010 Sub Focus remix of his track ft. Amber Coffman, ‘Hold On.’

Catch both below and enjoy the beautiful vocals that flow into some smooth dub.

Dave Grohl still isn’t making it exactly clear how he feels about EDM.  As DUBBYstep reported last week, the Foo Fighters played with Deadmau5 in last night’s Grammy Awards.  This was surprising news, especially after he made what sounded like anti-EDM comments at Lollapalooza.  All day I was left wondering if this was Grohl’s choice or if the show’s producer made the two acts collaborate during the electronic portion of the show that was held at a club outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Earlier in the night, Grohl decided to take some jabs at the EDM community in his Best Rock Album acceptance speech.

‘This is a great honour, because this record was a special record for our band. Rather than go to the best studio in the world down the street in Hollywood and rather than use all of the fanciest computers that money can buy, we made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine…

To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do.

“It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].’

The irony is that LMFAO cut off the speech after quite some time.

Around two hours later, Grohl’s Foo Fighters played for the second time in the night.  They went into ‘Rope’ on the left side of the club’s stage as a curtain hid Joel Zimmerman’s cube on the right side.  The juxtaposition of the two acts when the curtain disappeared was odd.  Grohl was headbanging on ground level while Deadmau5 was grooving in his mouse head above the Los Angeles crowd.  Grohl’s stage was ghostly white.  Zimmerman’s a blood red.  And the crowd?  All pro-mau5.  Grohl was being drowned out.  Then, Deadmau5 introduced grungy dub and ‘Raise Your Weapns’ to parents around the country when the Foo Fighters left the stage.  The camera zoomed in on Grohl, who appeared to be having a good time, headbanging and focused in the crowd.

Check it out for yourself at the 7:45 mark of the video below. Does Dave Grohl honestly like this music or did he realize the camera was on him?  EDM continues to make more of a mainstream presence and it will be interesting to see what the biggest night in music does for this genre in the future.

http://youtu.be/qJ9LoQVy40M

Skrillex is on the board.

The American DJ’s take on ‘Cinema’ by Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go just won the Grammy for Best Remixed Recording.

This could be the beginning of a successful night for Skrillex, who was nominated for five Grammy’s.  The biggest nod is his Best New Artist nomination.

DUBBYstep will be sure to keep you updated. For now, enjoy his winning track.