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Review: Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, of Cramps fame, team up to deliver Leather Jackets and Diesel Smoke, a whopping 50-track compilation that documents their utmost personal favourite rock recordings, in the micro-veins of acid folk, rockabilly and psychobilly. We'll doff and eat our hats if both said punk legends' rising signs aren't Scorpio. With madcap performances from Donnie James with the Mighty Joe Houston Orchestra, Tall Tonio And The Mello-Dees, Chris Christian And The Chordaires, Elisabeth Waldo, Fred Katz and John Reedy and His Stone Mountain Trio among many more, this is a cavalcade of no-hit wonders, every last one of them a gem. Amounting to a contemporaneous account of the music that The Cramps heard and loved during their rise to notoriety, not to mention the lesser-known music that would've graced the halls of New York's CBGB club, of which they were favourite performers.

Notes: Entry-level controller for NI's Traktor DJ software. Surprisingly feature-packed for such an affordable price. Two channels with integrated mixer and effects, plus RGB pads for hot cues and loops.

Supplier notes:
Whether it's bass-heavy breakdowns, steppy synths, or peak-time rewinds that define your style, the TRAKTOR KONTROL S2 has everything you need to make your mix happen. Craft sets on two decks and get creative with easy-to-use tools like looping, beat syncing, and club-grade effects.

Turn the music you listen to into the sets you play, with a streamlined interface that makes blending tracks a breeze. Plug in, line up a few of your favourite tracks, and get mixing wherever you are. You can leave the beatmatching to TRAKTOR, so you have more time to pick tunes that fit the vibe, experiment with FX, use looping and remix decks, and to define your own sound. Whether you're at a house party, a bar, or the club, you can create mixes made to make you move.

WHAT'S NEW?

The perfect way to really ramp up your mixing, with eight RGB pads on each deck. Cut straight to a hook everybody knows by setting and triggering cue points, or punch in your own edits with samples on a Remix deck.

Upsized, touch-sensitive jog wheels let you cue, scratch, and nudge tracks much more accurately - not to mention perform bigger backspins. They also mean more fun getting hands-on with your music.

A familiar club-standard layout, wherever you go. Browse tracks, adjust beatgrids, use effects and features like Flux Mode, directly on the TRAKTOR KONTROL S2. Everything you need for creative mixes at your fingertips.

Turn up your track transitions with new Mixer FX: Cut bass with a filter instead of EQ for resonant kicks, or get hi-hats galloping with delay. A choice of eight effects and three filters ensures you always have the right tools to hand.

Scale up your set with Steams and loops. Trigger one-shot sounds and samples to inject new energy into your mix.

Notes: *** NO POWER SUPPLY INCLUDED - USES GENERIC 12VAC ADAPTER ***

Basically, the Ekdahl Moisturizer is a spring reverb where the springs are exposed so they can be played/hit/fiddled with. As well as being capable of creating sound in itself, you can of course also play sound through the springs like a regular spring reverb - this makes for happy-fun-time finger-modulation of the reverb on whatever audio that's going through it. On top of this there's an analog multimode filter that can be used to attenuate or exaggerate certain frequencies in the sound, this is real handy while playing the springs as you can - for instance - cut all the highs and just make thunderous doomy sounds or do the opposite; cut all the lows and make that ear piercing high frequency special love. Also, it incorporates an LFO that's internally routable to the filter and that also has some external routing-stuff. The Ekdahl Moisturizer has tons of CV / Expression pedal options on the back for even more hillarious moments. The Moisturizer is a mono unit.

The Moisturizer was developed with the help of Jason Willett (Half Japanese, Leperchaun Catering), Martin Schmidt (Matmos, Instant Coffee), Joshua Atkins (Polygons, Major Powers), mom & dad and many more.

The Ekdahl Moisturizer contains exactly:
Preamp (up to 10 times gain)
Reverb
Reverb / Preamp wet/dry crossfader (Knob & CV/EP controllable)
State variable filter with
Lowpass/Bandpass/Highpass seamless crossover (Knob, CV/EP & LFO controllable)
Cutoff (Knob, CV/EP & LFO controllable)
Resonance (WITHOUT resonance limiter)
LFO with
Speed control (Knob & CV/EP controllable)
Square / Triangle crossover
External output with output amplitude knob
Filter / No filter wet/dry crossfader (Knob & CV/EP controllable)

The preamp section is designed for a max of 10 times gain, this to accomodate for low level output instruments such as guitars etc. The reverb tank has normal reverb signal gain on it, meaning that if you hit the springs hard they'll distort like crap which is real nice, if you hit them softly the sound won't be distorted.

The filter in the Ekdahl Moisturizer is abrasive, the fact that it doesn't have any resonance limiting makes it possible to get the filter to sound *really* bubbly & metallic (way more then any filter i've ever heard), but it's also of course capable of sounding completely "normal" - it all depends on the amount of resonance and/or gain. The fact that you can seamlessly fade inbetween lowpass, bandpass or highpass filter (or lowpass+bandpass and highpass+bandpass) makes the unit pretty damn versatile and by using the wet/dry filter/no filter crossfader there's some neat shit that can be done too. Now it should be said that due to the fact that there's no resonance limiter, if using very high gain, with high resonance and turning the cutoff frequency very high the filter might cut out - not to worry, just turn the cutoff back a bit and the filter pops in again. This happens because the filter gets overloaded and can be avoided with a resonance limiter, however if i had one of those all the super-awesome bounce would be gone and it'd sound like all the other filter out there.

The Ekdahl moisturizer has six CV/Expression pedal related jacks on the back, one of them is a LFO output so you can control other shit with The Moisturizer's LFO. All the other jacks are inputs and takes either CV or Expression pedal, they are: Reverb Mixture, VCF Cutoff, VCF Filter Mode (LP/BP/HP), Filter Mixture and LFO Speed.

Review: The skittering drums, sweet nihilistic croons and chiming melodies of Dublin three-piece Villagers make it six albums in eight years. It clearly remains, then, that they are sweethearts of the label, and they squeeze everyone's most trusted vital organ once more by romancing our chest plates with numbers like "Again" and "Fool". There are more experimental dream sequences to be heard in tracks like "Love Came With All That It Brings" though, but back on track you'll find the more feel good in "Real Go-Getter" and "Ada". But really it's about the gnarly synth jam that is this album's title track.

Review: Return to 2001: Swiss brothers Shakedown drop an iconic house anthem that debunked the standard XXL funk du jour with a much spacier, synth-based 80s boogie sound. Still relevant and heavily played, Defected have commissioned three on-point artists for the 2018 contemporisations: Peggy Gou gets her acid tweaks on, Tiger & Woods pitch down the vocal and dust off the Street Sounds electroid feel and Purple Disco Machine cooks up an unapologetic funked up house jam that wouldn't have gone amiss on Classic back in the day. For good measure Shakedown return with their own signature Galactic Boogie version that pumps with strong Moroder tendencies. Good night.