D.Ramirez news round-up

D.Ramirez news round-up

5 April, 2010 | 3.33AM

• Written by: Christen Reutens
• Filed under: Music News: d.ramirez, slave recordings, toolroom records

Sheffield’s iron, steel, and coal industries declined 30 years before car production in Detroit, but when it comes to electronic music, they have much more synergy.

Perhaps it is the cities’ industrialism itself, the essence of which Adam Smith defined as the specialisation of labour, that sparked its inhabitants’ curiosity in repetitive machine-driven music.

Detroit’s Mathew Hawtin, who is the younger brother of techno DJ Richie Hawtin, may have unknowingly encapsulated the theory in his recent Beatportal interview.

“When I was growing up, a lot of my summer jobs were actually in the automotive industry, in really industrial places,” said Mathew Hawtin.

“I was working in these jobs which were really repetitive, screwing bolts together for four hours on assembly lines. So maybe this had an effect on me. There’s definitely some comfort in repetition for me.”

It cannot be mere coincidence, that both Detroit and Sheffield, two cities with a rich industrial past, punched well above their weight when electronic music first arrived in the 1980s.

Detroit of course, gave us techno. And Sheffield’s electronic music clout belies its relatively small population of just over half a million. The South Yorkshire city has produced a surprising number of synth pop and electronic bands including The Human League, Heaven 17, ABC, and Cabaret Voltaire, as well as give us one of electronic music’s most important labels - Warp Records.

More recently in the late ‘90s, Sheffield kick started the UK’s trance revolution (and to a greater extent, the world’s), via its audacious superclub Gatecrasher, which mysteriously burned to the ground in 2007.

It comes as no great surprise then, that D.Ramirez, Sheffield’s rising dance music star, will launch a new record label in the coming months that pays homage to the city which is rightly proud of its electronic music heritage.

The imprint will be called Made In Sheffield.

Little information has been released about the venture officially, although we heard that top British producers like Matt Tolfrey, Paul Woolford, Jim Rivers, and Darren Emerson will be involved.

Recent D.Ramirez releases

The launch of the label represents D.Ramirez’ continued rise to the top of the new British house tree, where he shares a branch with tech house super producer Funkagenda, and Toolroom boss Mark Knight, who collaborated on D.Ramirez and Underworld’s recent club smash ‘Downpipe’.

The track, which some critics described as a return to form for Underworld, was licensed to a number of top compilations by Defected, Stealth Records, and Ministry of Sound, and is arguably D.Ramirez’ biggest success since his ‘Columbian Soul’ collaboration with Mark Knight in 2007.

On the solo production front, Ramirez has released a series of peak time tracks recently, which are always recognizable from their title - if it has the number ‘8’ in it, it’s a plus eight stormer (although we’re unsure if that was the creator’s intention).

First came ‘Satur8’ last November, which Funkagenda included on his Toolroom Knights mix compilation.

And then just before Miami’s WMC, Ramirez dropped both ‘Nitr8’ and ‘Devi8or’. ‘Nitr8’, a late night and somewhat anxious club track, was a fine slice of modern progressive house with warm female vocals that counteracted the rhythm’s techno meanderings. A percussion driven remix from Paul Woolford, offered a cute take on the original.

‘Devi8or’ ran with the heavy beat theme, twisting layers of beefed up synthesizers and hypnotic bleep lines into a raw mainroom techno tool. Both tracks were huge for Ramirez and his band of proggy-tech house brothers at WMC.

Other D.Ramirez news

On the social media front, D.Ramirez has been a busy boy too. Following an Australian tour, he produced this excellent tour diary video, which depicts the producer’s trip to Perth and Sydney in all its hazy nightclub glory.

After that, he visited Deadmau5 collaborator Steve Duda in his studio in Los Angeles to check out Duda’s new beat making software plug-in Nerve. Both Duda and Deadmau5 have been using the software in their live sets, and Ramirez reckons “it’s the future of drum programming as we know it.”

Video: D.Ramirez & Steve Duda talk Nerve

And finally...

Lastly, we’d like to offer our congratulations to Dean, who recently tied the knot with Sheffield-based singer Leigh de Vries in a marriage ceremony at Las Vegas’ Graceland Chapel. The bride wore black, and Elvis walked her down the aisle. 

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