We Push Buttons have become the crack dealers of the local electronic music scene. They give you a taste and wait for you to come crawling back for more. In the case of WPB Ecomp V.1, it might be debatable just how much the rock’s been cut, but there’s no denying they give you a good solid week’s supply.
At 19 songs and 77 minutes, the Web forum/community/magazine’s first distributed compilation of electronic/hip-hop music (made locally and not) couldn’t have fit on a CD anyway, but it’s fitting that it should be an online-only endeavor. That act alone begs for thought. It shares many of the conventions of an album — a song order, downloadable liner notes about all of the artists in a handy rich text file, a package you get in a single zip file that serves as a digital sleeve or jewel case — but why? There’s no reason why the songs couldn’t have simply been sitting in alphabetical order on a Web page where they could be downloaded one by one after they’ve been sampled. Isn’t the “album” so 1975?
I think part of this nod to convention stems from the love of music shared by the Web site’s principals — Todd “Rocket” Richard, who writes for this newspaper and has about a million other side projects, including Nantucketastrophe Records; Jason “j.hjort” Hjort, he of Brick.City.Media; and Mike Clouds, who fits my criteria for not needing his “real” name mentioned and should be well-known at least as A-Frame’s DJ — and the conditioning they’ve received over the years as consumers of music produced by the music industry. But it’s also part and parcel of their mission. They don’t want you to just stick with the genre in which you find yourself.
“We all come from varied backgrounds,” says Richard of both the founders and the Web site’s readers/contributors, “but we all make electronic music — hip-hop, drum and bass, techno, whatever — and the scene, scenes, tend to be pretty fractured.” Thus, through www.wepushbuttons.com, the group put out a call for tracks to be collected and disseminated (for free, digitally only), using whatever cachet they might have to promote and introduce them to other site users and the public at large.
“What we’re hoping to do is create awareness of who these people are and how they contribute,” says Richard, “so we can be more familiar with each other and contribute to each other’s success, whether through cross-promoting, collaborations, or just looking to weave things together better.”
Well, that weaving together is something of a technical problem for the compilation, which features some fairly jarring transitions, but, with the enormous spectrum it covers, that’s to be expected. The hip hop runs the full gamut between commercially accessible (“Slaughter Rap,” produced by Mike Clouds, featuring 80proof and Mescalano on the vocals) and Nomar Slevik’s densely underground “How Much Time,” which opens with a sample of Mozart’s “Serenade for Strings in G Major” and features three different Slevik deliveries. The non-hip hop I’ll define as those tunes that are either obviously, say, house music, like j.hjort’s “Make Up,” or which don’t have any vocals or deviation from a 4/4 beat.
