Grey Sky Listening, Downtempo Delight

This is the second post in an occasional series called Late to the Party that looks at music I have missed for what could have been a myriad of reasons.

For the last seven years, Tatsu has been curating the incredible magnificent netlabel Bump Foot as well as releasing album after album of his own music. Hailing from Japan, Tatsu has quietly set the definition of what a netlabel is and how it should be run. Also, all 300+ Bump Foot albums are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license which means any Joe or Jane can remix these releases. This is really cool and totally in the spirit of the netlabel movement. It should be of no surprise that I have reviewed 7 albums from Bump Foot over the last year.

As I mentioned earlier, Tatsu releases quite a bit of his own music on his own label but on several others such as Deep-X, Monotik, Shift, Stratagem, Tropic, and many others. Though I am not a huge fan of beat music (techno, house, etc.), I’ve always found Tatsu’s albums to be not only technically proficient, but more importantly they display a cinematic feel to them.*  Over the last three years, Tatsu has released several singles on Evgenij V. Kharitonov’s superb netlabel 45RPM Records. Back in July of 2010, Tatsu’s single Grey Sky was released. These are two lovely  tracks that show the possibilities of the complexity of downtempo music, meaning it just can’t play canned beats from your library and throw some cheesy synths over them. Even in its brevity, Grey Sky lays down some gorgeous grooves and melodies that truly sets the bar on what the downtempo genre should be.

Tatsu’s “Grey Sky (Rainy)” (

*Hey, I can enjoy techno, but I believe it is a deficiency on my part that I could not tell a techno track apart from a house track even if you held a gun to my head. I’m still learning.