Bass Mekanik: Lowd Slowd

Recording Details
Label: Bass Mekanik Records
Distributor: Bandcamp, iTunes, Tesco Entertainment
Typical Selling price: $9.99 on Bandcamp or £7.49/89p per track on iTunes, Tesco Entertainment
Track Listing
1) Bass Ballin’ (Lo & Slo Remix)
2) Slump Bump (Lo & Slo Remix)
3) Suck My Bass (Lo & Slo Remix)
4) Future Melt (Lo & Slo Remix)
5) Roll Yo Bones (Lo & Slo Remix)
6) I Rok Bass (Lo & Slo Remix)
7) Rollin’ (Lo & Slo Remix)
8) Bass All Day (Lo & Slo Remix)
9) Nightbass 2 (Lo & Slo Remix)
10) Beatz A Rok’n (Lo & Slo Remix)
11) Feel The Noize (Lo & Slo Remix)
12) Slo Rolla (Lo & Slo Remix)

Editor Review : Lowd Slowd
Anyone who has been to car shows where there’s some basshead action will have heard the phenomenon known as the slow down. This is when rather than investing in an AudioControl Epicentre or other bass synthesis device, the car audio basshead has engendered a whole new flavour of music. Perhaps it’s an abuse of what the artists intended (like every remix by every DJ, then?) but it’s all about the mad levels of bass and the length of the bass drops. Ian ‘˜Icemen’ Pinder in particular has made Young Jeezy ‘˜White Girl’ slow down very famous indeed. It’s kind of the opposite of what old people would call the Pinky & Perky effect, nowadays Alvin & The Chipmunks.
Anyway, our man in Miami, Mr. Neil Case, the Clark Kent, the Peter Parker (even the Jim Gentry for BoomZilla fans) to his alter-ego The Bass Mekanik, has come to learn that some if his finest were being slowed down on people’s computers at home for use in cars. As if the world’s leading bass artist and record label magnate’s music was not rich enough in low frequency content in the first place but some of those home-fan efforts were ropey.
Here, once again, is what the Mekanik had to say to me when we conversed by E-Mail: ‘There has been a trend over the past couple years of bass fans altering and manipulating favourite songs with their home computers – usually its to slow them down and/or add bass. After hearing more than a few enthusiastic but shall we say botched? versions of our material, we decided who better to manipulate our audio files than us! After all, we have the high resolution studio files and also some quite expensive plug-ins that perform much better than the semi-pro home versions and result in far fewer nasty artefacts…
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The result is LOWD SLOWD, which kicks off with the most oft abused song of all, BASS BALLIN’ – and then continues to rumble down the road of sub harmonic excess with some of our personal faves from the last few years. Make no mistake, if you ever want to intentionally cook a woofer or broil some steaks over an incandescent power amp in the tailgate of your truck, this IS the Album of choice!
Quite simply the most consistently loud deep bass that we have ever released, we are talking high level 16 Hz in some sections, particularly on SUCK MY BASS, which is it’s own little exercise in bass excess.
All 12 songs are massive, not a wimp in the bunch so enjoy!’
Now, I may brag about being the very first ever UK importer of Bass CD product and now, Talk audio are leading the digital way with promotion of FLAC files (I do have a pure SQ label I am in pursuit of right now, as well as this specialised bass head stuff) but one thing I could never claim to be, is as cool as the Iceman and anything like as qualified as he and a few owners of the most badass systems around, (like Quakeshaker) to act as a judge of these recordings. Yes, I have opinions but when it comes to music as against electronics, it is a good bit more subjective, so while I had an input, the scores and methods used in this, our first ever Talk Audio music review, were heavily influenced by Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder and José Quakeshaker Correia. José has a five kilowatt walled four by fifteen inch Earthquake DBXi subwoofer install in his Astra van and Ian, well he has a project or two up his sleeve right now. His last install ended up as the cover image for the DJ Droppin album Droppin’ Beats

(And he never bothered to make a fuss about it. After all these years, he still refuses to grow an ego!)
Point is, as described in the This Week blog, I went down to the Ace Café to do the review. I was sent a copy by Bass Mekanik Records and transferred it to a USB stick in high res .wav (which in fact neither Alpine, nor Asteroid decks seemed to like) as well as having made an audio CD. The test vehicle was José’s Astra but the SPL is so savage in there that his Alpine CD mechanism cannot cope with the full deflection bass without being punched out of thre groove. Thus we had to use another USB stick playing through the Alpine with the files in MP3 as José was in fact a fan and already owns the album. This we could play, for me and Ian to discuss along with José at full wellie – and created a bit of a stir on the street.

It’s crazy at the Ace on a busy night and people tend to whoosh up and down the tiny bit of tarmac outside. I went and made a video clip of us playing with the tracks of Lowd Slowd. Now, we could have played it at very low levels and let you guys hear the tunes better on the video but there was plenty of background noise and the WHOLE point was to be able to let the Bass Mekanik’s world tear our one apart. (although if you have really good headphones or a deep and potent subwoofer attached to your PC, there is huge bass on the YouTube sound track at the very beginning.) No in-camera microphone (nor even broadcast microphone with every ‘˜pad’ in the man’s accessories collection fitted) can ever cope with over 150dB of bass pressure, so you just get happy people nodding along to PARRRRRPPPP FARRTTTT BRRRAAAPPPP noises on the sound track. Be not afeared, this is due to the tiny wee transducer in the microphone’s capsule being utterly overloaded. The sound was clean from the system.

We needed to rate the stuff more like the way they rate Blu Rays over at Home Cinema Choice. They like to refer to the material’s technical ability to show off systems as well as its entertainment value. In keeping with the number of headings and methodology of other reviews on Talk Audio, we came up with a bunch of parameters. Tune! Is about just that, is it is as catchy as ‘˜Bass All Day’? How Low? Refers to the recording’s ultimate extension, even if for a moment. System Stretcher? is about how good the recording is for showing off all sorts of systems and tunings. Production? is about clarity and craftsmanship in the studio and lastly, the reviewers’ overall affection for the item, before adding it all up, like other stuff to get a TA rating.
The album art matters for iPoddery and more but we have just given our opinion, without adding it in to the overall score as this can disproportionately affect the amalgam score but is moot to the emotional and technical experience of the music.
First, here’s the very ‘˜street’ video from opposite the Ace café. Note the car dump valve noises and wailing distant sirens. Ian is in the passenger seat of José’s Astra


And now, what we thought
Tune! You can see José’s unfeigned delight when he says he loves it in the video. I prefer the tunes at the speed they were made, myself, especially Bass All Day which is a lovely happy little Reggae lilt and feels full of lazy sunshine and the desire to do what you love. Iceman enjoyed it too and said, ‘It’s cool music – the new ‘˜Bass I love You’!’ between us, it scored well for the man who made the music.
How Low? Iceman said at one point, ‘Even José’s box can’t pick THAT up!’ And José went, ‘WhOA! That’s Looow!’ at the same drop on Suck My Bass. This was a good niner.
System Stretcher? Or how well it can show off and challenge systems. Iceman explained, ‘There’s something for everyone on Lowd Slowd. All tunings, there’s parts that’ll wake your system right up’
Production This was easy, Bass Mekanik Records’ studio is the place that other bass artists beat a path to and this is just smooth and rich and detailed. Lovely, full score.
‘˜Like’ rating. Just how much we liked the album overall, let alone any techy issues or individual tunes, just how much did we enjoy it? José summed it up when he heard the super clean CD from the high res WAV file on his Alpine versus the low res MP3 download and said he was going to go back and download again in better resolution from Bandcamp as the edges to synthesiser sounds and percussion and all sorts else were just that much more crisp.
Overall 8.8
Tune! 7
How Low? 9
System Stretcher? 9
Production 10
‘˜Like’ rating 9
(Album Art 4) Side issue while driving, hence not in overall score
In A Nutshell
A real hardcore bass heads’ weapon of system destruction. Kinda loses the bounce by being slowed but for the genre, it is as smooth as silk and as low as a snake’s belly and produced in spandy-fresh clarity unequalled in this world. Buy it and drop one. Recommended as good food for woofers. TOP TIP Buy from Bandcamp via the link and download in high resolution then convert at will.
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