Skip to main content

Throwing Snow in the Boiler Room - Ambient Bassy Trip Hop Music and Video





While I'm in my ambient dance trip hop mood, here's a truly beautiful set by British DJ Throwing Snow (Ross Tones) on video Live in the Boiler Room in London (courtesy of YouTube).

Tones is fascinating to watch as he works with a quiet concentration on the wholly original, fabulously bassy and enveloping sounds that he creates with a mix of samples, tracks, keyboards and iPad. 

He's one of the few DJs I've seen who doesn't use headphones, and whose focus on his work is such that he creates an almost tangible private space around him. 

His music combines elements of two of my all time favorite artists, DJ Shadow and DJ Cam, with its mellow, dancey beats, intriguing ambient samples and totally seductive bass lines.



Throwing Snow from his Facebook page.

Born in Bristol (the city that produced Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and Roni Size to name a few), Tones is also one half of the duo, Snow Ghosts, featuring singer Augustus Ghost (Hannah Cartwright) - who performs at the end of Snow's set Live in the Boiler Room (video above).

Snow Ghosts' debut album, A Small Murmuration, was released earlier this year and can be streamed on SoundCloud and purchased from iTunes. The song Ghost performs in the Boiler Room set is Murder Cries (below).






There's also a hugely powerful track from Throwing Snow in the Maribou State Boiler Room video (see my earlier post). It's called Lingerwell, and its irresistible dance beat appeals just as much to our young children as to me. Check it out:






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye

Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film plays with references to Old Hollywood and opens and closes with the song, Hooray For Hollywood ), the building has another direct connection to Raymond Chandler. It was apparently the inspiration for Chandler in his book, The High Window (the first Chandler novel I ever read), in which Chandler describes the residence of Philip Marlowe as being on the cliffs above High Tower Drive in a building with a fancy elevator tower. (Thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians Southern...

The Story Behind the Immortal Bass Line of Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side (VIDEO)

Of all the tributes to, and stories about, Lou Reed over the past week, this is one of the most fascinating - even though it doesn't directly concern Reed himself, but rather Herbie Flowers , the legendary British bass player who created the immortal bass line that opens Reed's massive solo hit, Walk On The Wild Side. When I first heard Walk On The Wild Side, it seemed the ultimate late night New York song: a transgender story (which apparently radio stations in the 1970s and since didn't even pick up on, despite the line, " Shaved his legs and then he was a she ") featuring characters from Andy Warhol's Factory , which sounded as if it had been recorded at about 1 am in some smoky lowdown basement hangout in the East Village. The video above reveals the immense influence of Herbie Flowers - who had worked with David Bowie , who produced Walk On The Wild Side and the Lou Reed album it came from, Transformer , on Bowie's own classic breakout s...

Timeless

I haven't written on this blog since 2021, soon after Joe Biden became President and the horrors of the OG Thug passed. I'm still here, I'm still enjoying life, but I have to say that this November worries me greatly. The better part of me cannot believe that America will return a criminal insurgent to the White House...but a tiny part of me wonders if such insanity is possible. I no longer have the faith in humanity I once had; I have most of it but the Fetid Pumpkin took the rest. We'll see come November. Do whatever you can to make it not so.