Viewing Posts Tagged ‘Cassius’
Philippe Zdar on the Yamaha CS-80
Philippe Zdar on the Yamaha CS80 from will seelig on Vimeo.
I’ve wanted to post something about Zdar for a while, so when I stumbled upon this video it seemed like the perfect pretext.
Philippe Zdar is 1/2 of Cassius (who in the 90s were known as La Funk Mob and used to produce hip hop tracks for MC Solaar) and he’s also my favorite mixing engineer. One of the true wizards of sound. He mixed down Chromeo’s Fancy Footwork album, which is how I came to hearing endless stories about the man and the myth, through my brother. Sometimes I mix Chromeo’s live backing tracks and I try to match Zdar’s work. It’s impossible. His tracks sound like they’re straight from the late 70′s, they’ve got more warmth and attitude than anything else out there today. He’s done a good part of Phoenix’s music as well.
In this particular clip however, he shows the good folks at Future Music his CS-80 synth and it’s just fun to listen to his accent.
Trizzy Does Europe
Time for one of my long-winded tour novelas. I recently wrapped up a European tour that spanned the whole month of May, one which I arbitrarily named the Upper Crust Tour at the last minute, in honor of that beloved chain of sandwich shops found in almost all train stations. After doing a whole bunch of tours with other people — the Fool’s Gold fam, Mehdi, Kanye, etc — I felt like going off to clubland (Europe) and back to raw DJing practically every night for 4 weeks. Of course I wasn’t literally by myself the whole month. In most cities I was sharing bills with friends from either continent. But it did feel like a pilgrimage to the land of the DJ, and on off-days I would often link up with other producers and work on music. I loved it. I started a Flickr page towards the beginning of my trip so you can catch my full set of pics here. Let’s dive into it.

