The Community

Hi y’all. It’s been ages since I posted an update, and surprisingly for me, I’ve actually been making music and doing things, which goes against the trend of promising things that tend to not turn up on time, if at all – which has been my modus operandi for the last few years.

First things first; I’ve finally released the SUICIDE EP and it’s been in the wild for a couple of months now. There’s been the odd review here and there, and people seem to enjoy it. More importantly, I’m totally 100% happy with where the release as a whole fits within my own world (which is new and exciting).

It’s available digitally on Bandcamp as pay-what-you-want; i.e. free if you like, but you can donate if that is your thing. So far, this approach has worked well. The emails from Bandcamp saying HEY SOMEONE JUST DROPPED $5 ON YOUR SHIT, GREAT JOB are surprisingly super awesome at generating warm, fuzzy feelings towards the seventeen people who have bought it so far. So, thanks y’all. Check it out if you haven’t yet already:

http://dos4gw.com/

The man like Dankcity also put in a mammoth effort and finished a video for You Know Who You Are. Not safe for work:

In other news, I have been back and forth between Melbourne and Perth a fair bit recently to take care of family business, and in terms of playing shows for you on the west coast, have only managed to stand behind a rapper at the 8th Birthday Party. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fun night, but to be honest I’d probably rather have played an instrumental set at some stage during the last six months. My fault for not organising it, but as I mentioned, other things have taken precedence. There’s always next year. The plus side of this is that when I do get back for a DOS4GW show, it’ll all be much fresher.

Speaking of standing behind rappers, when that guy in the chair from the video was in the country, we recorded some music. Here is some of it:

http://soundcloud.com/dos4gw/tiananmen-square

More of that is coming. Here’s an update to my release calendar for this year, which was hinted at in a previous post:

- SUISIDE B – EP followup to SUICIDE, of which I have a draft master version of already, but don’t hold your breath (yeah you know me)
- MR DNA – Hoodrat Shit With My Friends – I’m behind the boards for Big Rimz on his next EP, which is going well so far
- GDP x DOS4GW – EP slated for July
- DOS vs EPPS – happening, but not sure when
- ABORT/RETRY/FAIL – a digi-tri-single is go, constructed using tape loops, a Tascam, and of course a shitload of ????????????? by YES/NO/MAYBE and DOS4GW
- Beats on more L-BURN crew releases, including an album and another mixtape,
- Season 2 of the L-BURN TRILL podcast.
- GLORY HOLE – an unexpected mess
- AOI x DOS4GW .. maybe.

I’m going to predict that I will sell 63 copies in total of all of the above this year. The best thing about being under the radar is that no one cares what you do or what art you create, which is inspiring because it frees you from the constraints of a limited imagination. However the downside is that it can be slow going when no one gives too much of a fuck.

The Community was my start in this whole thing and without all of you I’d be a lesser person. As The Community grows, I feel more and more privileged that I am able to count myself amongst the ranks. So thanks for being the set of people that I can figuratively surround myself with during dark, unproductive patches, and I look forward to celebrating the eventual payoffs (however spurious) with you soon. There’s always a spare room in Hawthorn waiting for anyone who wants to visit and play (and drink). And weep.

<3 dos xxx

http://l-burn.podomatic.com/entry/2012-01-02T23_37_53-08_00

Here it is! The latest L-BURN fam podcast! an epic journey through the last year and into the next – and as always, you heard it here first!

Aoi is back from Japan and brings nothing less than the unexpected; Mr DNA takes the reins and guides our travels as you can ALWAYS rely on him to do, bumping fresh exclusive flavour, and some guy called Weapon Smith has crashed DOS4GW ‘s pad and has been making terrorcore.

If you like what you’re hearing right now, fan up on that L-Burn ILLuminati ish on bookface! We are going to be coming very very hard in 2012 so tell everyone you were on this shit back in ’11! YEAH

LISTEN HERE NOW!!!!

#dildos4gw is here! if you haven’t already guessed, it’s not safe for work.

first up, crazy mad thanks to @therealDANKCITY for making a fucking great vid and being like the easiest dude in the universe to work with.

this video is a prologue to the next dos/dank video. nuff said.

all kinds of new DOS4GW music is coming out in 2012:

SUICIDE
SUISIDE B
DOS VS MR DNA
DOS VS L-BURN
DOS VS AOI
DOS VS !?

you know who you are

<3 dos4gw

http://www.twitter.com/dos4gw

http://www.thecommunity.com.au/dos4gw

http://www.facebook.com/dos4gw

Hey family! Just a quick updaaaaaaaaaate to bump a release that I’m on which dropped around this time last month: http://halloweed.bandcamp.com/album/halloweed : THE HALLOWEED MIXTAPE, featuring such producers as… @xskywlkr , @ohsilkysilky , @ryanhemsworth , @quellechris , @lwhodge , @julianwass , @jrsty , @robmansel (who I am destroying at WordsWithFriends at the moment, haha.. step your game up son!), @i_am_j_u_s , and @dayggs .

There’s a bit of a bump in my tracks but that’s my own fault! I did tracks 4 and 17 – ‘Charm’ and ‘Terrormin’. I am getting better at this game, I promise. Some killer producers in there, you might recognise a few of the names from a couple of really incendiary releases this year, like SKYWLKR who did the beat of the year in my opinion, Danny Brown’s ‘Die Like A Rockstar’. UNNNNNH. Swear I could listen to that tune on repeat forever.

More recently, the L-BURN illUMINATI, a crew I am part of here featuring AOI, Mr DNA, Yes/No/Maybe, Kwasi Bongo and myself at the core, have been doing some podcasting! It’s super fun, we get together on a Wednesday night at my apartment in Richmond, spin a few tunes, talk some shit and press the airhorn button fucking heaps. I’m not a fan of much chitchat in music podcasts so the tracks are all in big blocks of five or six tunes at a time, for your listening pleasure. You can find the two episodes so far right here: http://l-burn.podomatic.com/ , or on iTunes!

Promise I’ll release something soon.

<3 dos

This track started off as a remix of Sultans of Ping FC’s “Where’s Me Jumper?!”. I’m not joking. Sorry for the tardiness, but this tune was in a right state and needed a lot of work. I like where it is now though. Anyway.

September 2009

I’d been on tour with the mighty Tomás Ford around this fair country of ours, and was absolutely fucking knackered after a pretty full on week and a half of shows, booze, and saying the phrase ‘good evening, cunts’ into microphones a lot. Before I left, a good mate of mine asked me if I wanted a slot at the upcoming Earthdance festival that he was helping to organise in country WA. I said, “Fuckin’ beast oath” or words to that effect. I’d landed a 3am slot on the side stage (which was where everything that wasn’t some kind of trance was), which I was fucking happy with. I remember being unsure how my music would go down, considering the crowd and the other acts on during the event. I resolved to just try and make the best of it.

Let me set the scene a little. After leaving school in 2000, I was playing in a rock band (and fucking loving it), but I dreamed of writing drum and bass. The rolling basslines, craftily chopped breaks and unending energy of it all really appealed, especially anything techy or heavy. I went to as many gigs as I could at Drum Club and then Heat, and was always hungover on Friday mornings after hitting Roller pretty heavily for a long time. The first dnb mix that I really connected with was Moving Shadow 01.1, which is still a fucking cracker – hit it up.

My obsession with drum and bass aside, when I heard Cotti & Cluekid’s “The Legacy” really fucking loud at the Rosemount one night, something clicked in my brain – the part of my brain that loved the synth details and heavy flavour of tech dnb so much. I’ve been pretty obsessed with synthesizers for more than half my life. They’ve been one of the only constants in my life over the last fifteen years.. which I suppose is a bit sad really, but also fuck off, they are amazing. At least, this dubstep thing seemed like the perfect fit for me, at least in my head. It was simple enough for me to be able to write, but also it seemed to be all about how crazy you could make a synth act. Dial up a sound and just go for it. I know that’s not where dubstep came from, but I think it’s still the most interesting aspect of the whole genre.

Anyway, Earthdance. I think I was sold/billed as a dubstep artist, because I’d been experimenting with that sort of sound for a few months after becoming enamored with the genre earlier in the year, and it was really taking off at that point too. YLEM was also on the Earthdance bill, so it was going to be a full scale assault on the hippies.

The next part is hazy, as I’d had a few pints, and don’t remember exactly how it went down. We were at the pub maybe a week before the event with a few people, and got chatting about the Sultans of Ping FC’s classic tune “Where’s Me Jumper?!”. I joked that I should do a remix of it for my set at Earthdance. There was enthusiastic agreement from at least one person at the table (you know who you are), so that night I went home, recorded the classic vocal hook off youtube, and wrote a sorta-dubstep tune around the sample. Truth be told, I just used the vocal, and then went back to a couple of old faithfuls. I cut the tune up, dropped it into my live set thinger, and there it was, ready to go.

The evening came, I dropped the tune and it was fucking cool hearing it through the loudest system I’ve played on to date (and that was the small stage – these trance guys do not fuck around). I think there were about seven people watching, but my mates seemed to enjoy it, and I’d had a good part of a bottle of Clan Campbell by that stage, so all was good in the world.

The tune has been in my live mix for a while now (sans Sultans of Ping FC sample – I’ve heard they’re litigious) in a few different forms, but it never really sat very well. I’m very happy with it now though, despite the fact that the mix is still all over the place – it’s that kind of distorted, fucked up, too much acid, too many filters type of tune. I’ve never claimed to be a mad engineer, but I can’t stomach handing tunes over for other people to mix, so you’re all just going to have to fucking deal with it.

Without further ado: HENDRA II – Constant Teen.

The HENDRA EP is a prelude to the SUICIDE EP. I’ve been on quite a journey in the last few years, and I think it’d be a shame to hide the soundtrack to that journey in a forgotten folder on my hard drive. The tracks that make up HENDRA all have their own story or identity, at least to me – and I’ve tried to explain that identity in the notes on each track page – just click the track name to see the extended notes and to download the tracks for free in any format you like.

If you’ve heard a lot of what I’ve done in the past, then you might think “hmm, boring”, but I’ve never had any of these tracks up to scratch before, and I’ve spent a lot of time going over them, doing new mixes and tweaking the arrangements for this release. It’s been therapeutic.

HENDRA will receive more tracks every couple of days in the week leading up to the release of SUICIDE. Find me on Facebook, or sign up to the news email list by downloading a track to stay in the loop. I also tweet a fuckload at @dos4gw , if that is your thing. So, here we go…

Late 2008/early 2009:

After spending 18 months writing, recording and releasing two albums that sort of wander around a sound, that I felt were courting the idea of what I wanted to do, I felt a bit down about the whole experience. The music in my speakers wasn’t sounding like the music in my head. I took some time out from trying to write beats for other people, and instead started concentrating on making instrumentals that were complete without vocals. In reality, it was a throwaway idea after too many stubbies of Tooheys Old with a couple of friends on a Saturday night.

“The Attack” started as a simple scratchpad recording of a synthesizer drone – the same drone that you hear at the start of the track. I had set an empty Old bottle on one of the keys to keep the drone going as I layered different takes on one another on the computer. I can still see the bottle resting there in my mind. In fact, I can still feel the weight of it, resting on my mind. It’s comforting.

It feels like about a hundred years ago now; a different person, in a different place, thinking different thoughts about goals and aspirations that seem totally foreign to me now – but even now, I can find solace in the lazy winding pathways of the filter sweeps that mark the intro to this track.

It was pissing down with rain at the time and I remember looking up from the screen in a haze, the echo of the drone still vibrating the speaker cones, and thinking, for the first time, “hey, this sounds like a DOS4GW track.” This was a milestone; up until that time, DOS4GW was just a moniker, a handle, a label to stick on a CD because I didn’t really have anything else to call what I was doing. DOS4GW had no tangible identity.

“The Attack” is the genesis of that identity. It’s the sound of an empty beer bottle resting on a synthesizer, on a rainy night, in the crevasse of what could hardly be called consciousness.

So, here it is. HENDRA I: “The Attack.”

<3

Got this email last night from Run For Cover, the label putting out the new GDP record:

We ran into some technical issues with the vinyl mastering of Useless Eaters which has unfortunately set us back a bit. The vinyl parts needed to be remade to remove skipping from the song Social Enema due to overwhelming low end in that track that’s not present on the rest of the record. We are shooting to have all pre-orders out by May 14th and apologize for the delay. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Can you guess who made that beat… ? I have no idea who did the vinyl mastering for RFC but it’s clear that they weren’t expecting POUNDING THRUSTS OF TURGID BASS, ALL UP IN YOUR NEEDLE SKIP YO.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to finally having a beat of mine on vinyl. I’ll post a picture once it arrives. You could also order one for yourself, or check out GDP’s Useless Eaters on Bandcamp.